Space

The nearest single star to the sun, Barnard’s star, has a brood of planets all its own. The red dwarf star, about six light-years from Earth, hosts four close-in planets each about two to three times the mass of Mars, astronomers report in the March 20 Astrophysical Journal Letters.

“Barnard’s star has a long history of claimed detections, but none of them could be confirmed for a long time,” says astronomer Ritvik Basant of the University of Chicago. “It’s pretty exciting to know what’s orbiting the nearest stars.” More

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

One of the most compelling potential signs of extraterrestrial communication might have an astrophysical explanation.

Called the “Wow!” signal, the bright burst of radio waves has defied our understanding since its discovery in the 1970s. Now, scientists using archived data from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico suggest a new possible source for the signal: a cosmic hydrogen cloud that emitted light like a laser.

“I think we have probably the best explanation so far,” says astrobiologist Abel Méndez of the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo. Méndez, together with astrophysicist Kevin Ortiz Ceballos of the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., and Jorge Zuluaga of the University of Antioquia, Colombia, submitted this idea to arXiv.org on August 16. More

Researchers may have figured out how a crucial ingredient that cells need to produce energy could form in deep space.

Calculations and lab experiments suggest that glyceric acid can arise from radiation blasting carbon dioxide and ethylene glycol in interstellar clouds, researchers report in the March 15 Science Advances.

The study is “a great start to understand how these molecules are formed in space,” says Anthony Remijan, an astrochemist at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Va., who was not involved in the research. The finding suggests that “if you put the right mixture together, in the right conditions, maybe you can even afford more complex molecules in space,” he says. More

Reports that NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope broke the universe may have been exaggerated.

In its first images, JWST captured what appeared to be gargantuan galaxies in the early universe — ones much too big to be explained by current cosmological theories (SN: 2/22/23). But a new analysis of old data from the Hubble Space Telescope suggests that those alleged behemoths probably have more prosaic explanations fitting in with our standard understanding of the universe, cosmologist Julian Muñoz and colleagues report in the Feb. 9 Physical Review Letters. More

Our MoonRebecca BoyleRandom House, $28.99

Science journalist Rebecca Boyle has an intergenerational connection with the moon. Her grandfather Pfc. John J. Corcoran was involved in the 1943 Battle of Tarawa on the namesake atoll in the Pacific Ocean during World War II. The United States’ narrow victory against Japan came at heavy human cost. One reason: A weak high tide forced American soldiers to wade through the ocean into Japanese gunfire rather than sail their boats to meet their enemies. More

NEW ORLEANS — A mind-bogglingly strong spurt of electromagnetic energy has for the first time been traced back to a cluster of seven merging galaxies. The finding could bolster the hypothesis that such mysterious flareups, known as fast radio bursts, originate from bizarre, highly magnetized dead stars called magnetars.

Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are fleeting explosive events: They last fractions of a second but release as much energy as the sun does in a month. It remains unclear what causes these strange spectacles, first discovered in 2007 (SN: 7/25/14). More

Erin Wayman is the managing editor for print and longform content at Science News. She has a master’s degree in biological anthropology from the University of California, Davis and a master’s degree in science writing from Johns Hopkins University. More