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    A crumbling exoplanet spills its guts

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    NATIONAL HARBOR, MD. — For the first time, astronomers have taken a direct look at an exoplanet’s insides.

    An exoplanet about 800 light-years away is spilling its guts into space, and new observations with the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, have let astronomers read the entrails, astronomers report this week at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

    “If this is true, it’s super cool,” says astronomer Mercedez López-Morales of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, who was not involved in the new work. “For the first time you can study directly what the interior of an exoplanet is made of. That’s exciting.” More

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      Pluto may have captured its moon Charon with a kiss

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      Pluto and Charon’s meet-cute may have started with a kiss. New computer simulations of the dwarf planet and its largest moon suggest that the pair got together in a “kiss-and-capture” collision, where the two bodies briefly joined up before settling into their current positions.

      “It’s a U-Haul situation,” says planetary scientist Adeene Denton of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., who reports the results January 6 in Nature Geoscience. “They kiss and they say, ‘Yeah, this is it. I want to build a system together with you.’ And then they do.” More

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      Scientists are building underwater neutrino telescopes in the Mediterranean

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      Deploying a telescope in space is one thing. Making two of them deep under the sea is a task in a league of its own.

      On a ship bobbing in the Mediterranean Sea, physicists — not typically known for their sea legs — brave weeklong voyages and rough waters, working around the clock to deploy the telescopes’ detectors.

      The telescopes are designed to detect not light, but neutrinos. These subatomic particles are spewed at high energies from mysterious, unidentified realms of space. But such high-energy neutrinos are so rare, and so stealthy, that the detectors that study them must be enormous. So scientists are outfitting a cubic kilometer of the Mediterranean with light-collecting devices designed to snag them. More

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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