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    NASA’s Perseverance rover found a new potential setting for Martian life

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    WASHINGTON D.C. — The Perseverance Rover on Mars may have stumbled upon the oldest rocks humans have ever seen and, possibly, evidence of a new setting that ancient Martian organisms could have inhabited, if they ever existed.

    “This is really one of the most exciting things that this mission is going to do, is to be looking at rocks that were formed so early in the history of the solar system,” said Caltech geochemist Kenneth Farley during a December 12 news briefing at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union. “Almost the dawn of the solar system.” More

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      Space missions spanned the solar system in 2024

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      From monitoring Mercury to launching a new adventure to an icy moon of Jupiter, spacecraft and astronauts made great strides in 2024. Here are some of the highlights of this year in space.

      New lunar visitors

      The moon has been a hot destination for space agencies and private companies in recent years, and 2024 was no exception.

      In January, the Japanese SLIM spacecraft made a successful but lopsided precision landing on a crater’s rim, marking the country’s first soft landing on the moon. The solar-powered Smart Lander for Investigating the Moon was designed to collect data for one lunar day, or about two weeks on Earth, before night fell and it got too dark and cold to survive. But SLIM surprised everyone by sending signals to Earth for three months.

      China’s Chang’e 6 mission collected the first dirt samples from the moon’s far side and returned them to Earth in June for analysis.CLEP/CNSA

      SLIM was joined by another unintentionally sideways lander in February. Odysseus, a spacecraft built by Houston-based company Intuitive Machines, touched down and toppled over near the lunar south pole. During its six-day mission, the probe sent back data that may be instructive for NASA’s Artemis mission, which aims to land humans on the moon in 2026 (SN: 3/23/24, p. 16).

      Finally, China’s Chang’e 6 spacecraft grabbed the first samples from the farside of the moon in June (SN: 6/29/24, p. 12). The first look at the samples revealed soil that’s fluffier than soil from the nearside. A chemical analysis of the samples, reported in Nature, suggests the farside was volcanically active some 2.8 billion years ago (SN: 11/15/24). More

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      Astronomers detect the first astrosphere around a sunlike star

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      BOSTON — For the first time, astronomers have detected an astrosphere around a star like the sun.

      This bubble of hot gas is blown by a star’s stellar wind, a constant stream of charged particles every star emits. The sun’s version of this bubble, called the heliosphere, marks the edge of our solar system and protects the planets from most of the high-energy cosmic rays that zip about the galaxy (SN: 12/10/18, SN: 10/15/09).

      Astronomers have seen analogous bubbles around hot stars, dying stars and baby stars — but not sunlike stars. More

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      This is the first close-up image of a star beyond our galaxy

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      For the first time, scientists have captured a zoomed-in photo of a star outside of our Milky Way galaxy. The image revealed surprising details about WOH G64, a giant star that is probably dying, researchers report November 21 in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

      The star, which is about 1,500 times the size of our sun, sits 160,000 light-years away from Earth. It lives inside the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small galaxy that orbits the Milky Way. More

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      Mars’ potato-shaped moons could be the remains of a shredded asteroid

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      Mars’ moons could be the remains of an ill-starred asteroid that got too close to the Red Planet.

      A shredded asteroid origin could help explain mysterious features of the small, odd-shaped moons, scientists suggest in the January issue of Icarus.

      Where most moons are big round orbs, Mars’ Phobos and Deimos are small lumpy potatoes.

      There are two main ideas for how the moons formed. One is that the moons actually were asteroids that were caught by Mars’s gravity. But that idea doesn’t explain the moons’ circular, stable orbits around Mars’ equator. More

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      Einstein’s gravity endures despite a dark energy puzzle 

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      Scientists could be wrong about dark energy. But they’re right about gravity, a new study suggests.

      Dark energy, the mysterious phenomenon that causes the expansion of the cosmos to accelerate, is widely thought to have had a constant density throughout the history of the universe. But dark energy may instead be waning, researchers from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, or DESI, collaboration report November 19 in a batch of papers posted to the project’s website and arXiv.org. 

      The finding reaffirms an April report from the same team that had come to a similar conclusion (SN: 4/4/24). Simultaneously, the new analysis — a more thorough look at the same data used in the earlier report — confirms that the DESI data agree with general relativity, Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity, with no evidence for alternative, “modified gravity” theories.  More

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      A first look at rocks from the lunar farside create a volcanic mystery

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      The first samples from the farside of the moon contain signs of surprising volcanic activity near the lunar south pole.

      Two separate analyses of lunar rocks brought to Earth by China’s Chang’e-6 spacecraft show the rocks formed from cooling magma relatively recently, about 2.8 billion years ago, according to papers published November 15 in Science and Nature. The measurements may help solve the mystery of why the moon’s farside is so different from its nearside, but also raise new questions about the history of lunar volcanism. More

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      Uranus may have looked weird when NASA’s Voyager 2 flew by

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      Some of Uranus’ apparent oddities might be due to bad timing.

      In 1986, the Voyager 2 spacecraft flew past the planet, recording mysteries of its magnetic field. Turns out, Uranus may have just been in an unusual state. A solar wind event days before the flyby compressed the giant planet’s magnetosphere, researchers report November 11 in Nature Astronomy. That compression could explain several long-standing puzzles about Uranus and its moons, and could inform planning for future missions (SN: 4/20/22). More

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      A cosmic census triples the known number of black holes in dwarf galaxies

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      A colossal census of the cosmos has more than tripled the number of active black holes known to reside in miniature galaxies and found the biggest haul of middleweight black holes to date.

      The survey turned up about 2,500 dwarf galaxies with actively feeding black holes at their centers, up from about 500 known before, researchers report in a paper submitted October 31 to arXiv.org. The team also found nearly 300 new intermediate-mass black hole candidates, an increase from about 70 previous possible detections (SN: 9/2/20). More