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      NASA’s Europa mission is a homecoming for one planetary astronomer

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      Planetary astronomer Bonnie Buratti remembers exactly where she was the first time she heard that Jupiter’s icy moon Europa might host life.

      It was the 1980s, and Buratti was a graduate student at Cornell University studying images of the planet’s moons taken during the Voyager 1 and 2 flybys in 1979. Even in those first low-resolution snapshots, Europa was intriguing.

      “It looked like a cracked egg,” she says.

      Those cracks — in a snow-covered, icy shell — were probably filled with material that had welled up from below, Buratti and colleagues had shown. That meant there had to be something underneath the ice. More

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      Saturn’s first Trojan asteroid has finally been discovered

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      Astronomers have finally found an asteroid keeping pace with Saturn in its orbit around the sun. Such objects, called Trojan asteroids, are already known for the other three giant planets.

      “Saturn was sort of the odd man out, if I can call it that, because even though it’s the second most massive planet in the solar system, it didn’t have any Trojans,” says Paul Wiegert, an astronomer at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada. Like Saturn, the new asteroid takes about 30 years to revolve but lies 60 degrees ahead of the planet in its orbit, Wiegert and colleagues report in work submitted September 29 to arXiv.org. More

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      Runaway stars could influence the cosmos far past their home galaxies

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      Dozens of fugitive stars were caught fleeing a dense star cluster in a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. The swarm of speeding stars could mean that such runaways had a bigger influence on cosmic evolution than previously thought, astronomers report October 9 in Nature.

      Massive stars are born in young clusters, packed so close together that they can jostle each other out of place. Sometimes, encounters between pairs of massive stars or neighboring supernova explosions can send a star zipping out of the cluster altogether, to seek its fortune in the wider galaxy and beyond. More

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      Barnard’s star has at least one planet orbiting it after all

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      A red dwarf star known as Barnard’s star, which lies a mere six light-years from our solar system, has at least one — and possibly a handful — of small rocky planets orbiting it, a new study suggests.

      Barnard’s star, which is about one-sixth the mass of our sun, is the closest individual star to our solar system. Only the three stars in the Alpha Centauri system are closer. Due to its proximity to Earth, Barnard’s star has long been a target of astronomers looking for exoplanets (SN: 12/1/73, SN: 12/7/23). More

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      Betelgeuse has a tiny companion star hidden in plain sight

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      Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse! The red supergiant that marks Orion’s left shoulder may have a tiny, unseen companion.

      Two independent studies found evidence of a star about the same mass as the sun, orbiting Betelgeuse about once every 2,100 days.

      “It was very surprising,” says astrophysicist Morgan MacLeod of the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. If the star is real, “it’s kind of hidden right there in plain sight.”

      MacLeod and colleagues linked a six-year cycle of Betelgeuse brightening and dimming to a companion star tweaking its orbit, in a paper submitted to arXiv.org September 17. MacLeod examined global, historical measurements dating back to 1896. More

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      Starlink satellites’ leaky radio waves obscure the cosmos

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      While SpaceX’s Starlink satellites are enabling internet access and cell phone communications around the globe, they’re also posing a threat to radio astronomy, a new study suggests.

      In some wavelength bands, unintended leakage of electromagnetic radiation from the latest generation of the satellites is more than 30 times brighter than emissions from previous versions, Cees Bassa, a radio astronomer at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy in Dwingeloo and his colleagues report September 18 in Astronomy & Astrophysics. Because the latest generation of Starlink satellites will orbit as many as 100 kilometers lower than earlier satellites, they’ll seem even brighter to ground-based telescopes. Overall, their brightness could easily mask observations of dimmer objects like distant galaxies or stars. More

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      How did dark matter shape the universe? This physicist has ideas

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      At age 12, Tracy Slatyer felt sorry for a book. She read a newspaper article about how lots of people were buying A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. “But then … nobody was actually reading it,” she says. “People were just leaving it on their coffee tables.”

      Determined to rectify this wrong, Slatyer obtained a copy and diligently read each page. The famous physicist’s popular text revealed to her “that math was in some sense an expressive language for describing how things really work,” she says. “That, to me, was exciting.” More

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      A neutrino mass mismatch could shake cosmology’s foundations

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      As the youthful universe congealed under the pull of gravity, matter knotted itself into galaxies, galaxy clusters and filaments, weaving a dazzlingly intricate cosmic web. This web’s structure is thanks, in part, to the handiwork of neutrinos — lightweight, subatomic particles that surge through the cosmos in unimaginable numbers.

      Because they streak about at high speeds and rarely interact with other matter, the particles weren’t easily caught in the gravitational molasses of that latticework. So their presence swept away the cobwebs, hindering the formation of fine details in this cosmic filigree. More