Category: 7. Science

The origin of the differing tilts in the orbits of the planets in our solar system may have been revealed through the discovery of subtle warps spotted in many planet-forming disks around young stars.

A major observing program with ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array), called exoALMA, has surveyed 15 planet-forming, or protoplanetary, disks in detail. In particular, astronomers led by Andrew Winter of Queen Mary University of London measured the Doppler shift of carbon monoxide gas in each of the disks. The Doppler shift can tell us a gas’ velocity and direction of travel, while carbon monoxide is an excellent proxy for other contents of the disks because it has a strong signal at the submillimeter radio wavelengths that ALMA observes at.

A Falcon 9 rocket placed another 28 Starlink satellites into orbit shortly after sunrise on Wednesday and scored the 400th successful drone ship landing for SpaceX’s reusable first stage booster.

The achievement came about eight and a half minutes into the Starlink 10-56 mission, which lifted off from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 7:10 a.m. EDT (1110 UTC).

The B1095 first stage booster, making its second flight, touched down on the drone ship ‘Just Read the Instructions’ (JRTI) stationed in the Atlantic Ocean east of the Carolinas.

The majority of the 400 aquatic landings have occurred on SpaceX’s drone ship, ‘Of Course I Still Love You’ (OCISLY), which along with JRTI entered service in 2015.

The first successful recovery of a Falcon 9 actually occurred on land in December 2015. It wasn’t until the launch of SpaceX’s eighth Commercial Resupply Services (CRS-8) mission to the International Space Station on April 8, 2016, that the company managed to successfully land at sea. The successful landing on OCISLY followed a string of failed attempts, including one that damaged beyond repair the first drone ship to bear the name JRTI.



SpaceX’s fleet of now three drone ships, which include ‘A Shortfall of Gravitas,’ are key to SpaceX’s ability to reuse its orbital rockets. In a mid-August post on X, formerly Twitter, Jon Edwards, SpaceX’s vice president of Falcon and Dragon, touted the economic vitality of booster recovery for the company.

“It’s easy to become complacent in this situation, which is concerning (e.g., the tortoise and the hare), so we must keep challenging ourselves to achieve higher launch rates, greater lift capability, and higher levels of rapid reusability,” Edwards said. “Eventually our competitors will show up, but when they do, we must ensure they are still far behind in our rearview mirror.”

One of those competitors, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, also built its New Glenn rocket to have boosters that perform propulsive landings on a marine vessel. The company tried to land its first booster, dubbed ’So You’re Telling Me There’s A Chance,’ during its first flight in January 2025, but that proved unsuccessful.

Blue Origin will try again during its second launch, using the booster named ‘Never Tell Me the Odds.’ It will launch a pair of Mars-bound satellites for NASA and then aim to land on the vessel named ‘Jacklyn,’ after Bezos’ mother.

Similarly, Rocket Lab also plans to perform propulsive landings with its Neutron rocket using a 400-foot-long landing platform that’s being built out by Bollinger Shipyards. The vessel called ‘Return on Investment’ is expected to debut in early 2026, according to a July 2025 statement from Rocket Lab. The company attempted a parachute recovery of the first stage of its Electron rocket. However plans to catch the descending rocket by helicopter did not work. Although boosters were subsequently fished out of the ocean after splashing down they were not re-flown. A single Rutherford engine was refurbished and reused.

Stoke Space also has plans for reusability with its Nova rocket, but it aims for it to be closer to SpaceX’s Starship rather than the Falcon 9 in that Stoke is aiming for full reusability. It will be launching from Space Launch Complex 14 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and is currently building out the pad with aims to have it operational by early 2026.

Some Chinese companies are also working to incorporate what’s referred to as Vertical Takeoff and Vertical Landing (VTVL). LandSpace performed a 10 km (6.2 m) hop test in 2024 and Space Epoch completed what it called a successful flight recovery test mission, sending its Yuanxingzhe-1 rocket to a hight of about 2.5 km (1.6 m) in altitude before performing a controlled splashdown in the Yellow Sea.

Other companies, like United Launch Alliance are working on different models of reusing rocket parts. ULA is working towards a system that would sever the engine section of its Vulcan rocket and use an inflatable shield to protect it during reentry and allow teams to recover it from the water.

Using the SPHERE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have directly imaged a 4.9-Jupiter-mass protoplanet in a cleared gap of a multi-ringed protoplanetary disk around WISPIT 2 (TYC 5709-354-1), a 5-million-year-old solar analog located 133 parsecs (434 light-years) on the constellation of Aquila.

Protoplanetary disks surround young stars and appear as disk-shaped structures of gas and dust, often with rings.

They are the birthplace of planets, and the rings are thought to indicate the presence of (hungry) planets in the disk.

Initially, little particles in the spinning disk begin to accumulate and grow as gravity takes over, stealing more material from the native disk until they evolve into embryo planets.

“Discovering this planet, WISPIT 2b, was an amazing experience — we were incredibly lucky,” said Dr. Richelle van Capelleveen, an astronomer at Leiden Observatory.

“WISPIT 2, a young version of our Sun, is located in a little-studied group of young stars, and we did not expect to find such a spectacular system.”

“This system will likely be a benchmark for years to come.”

“We used these really short snapshot observations of many young stars — only a few minutes per object — to determine if we could see a little dot of light next to them that is caused by a planet,” said Dr. Christian Ginski, a researcher at the University of Galway.

“However, in the case of this star, we instead detected a completely unexpected and exceptionally beautiful multi-ringed dust disk.”

“When we saw this multi-ringed disk for the first time, we knew we had to try and see if we could detect a planet within it, so we quickly asked for follow-up observations.”

The astronomers captured a spectacular clear image of WISPIT 2b embedded in a disk gap and confirmed that the planet is orbiting its host star.

“WISPIT 2b is the first unambiguous planet detection in a multi-ringed disk, making it the ideal laboratory to study planet-disk interaction and subsequent evolution,” they said.

WISPIT 2b was captured in near infrared light as it is still glowing and hot after its initial formation phase.

The planet was also detected in visible light using the MagAO-X AO system on the 6.5-m Magellan telescope and the LMIRcam instrument on the Large Binocular Telescope Interferometer (LBTI).

This detection at a specific wavelength or color of light indicates that the planet is still actively accreting gas as it is forming its atmosphere.

“WISPIT 2b, with its position within its birth disk, is a beautiful example of a planet that can be used to explore current planet formation models,” said Chloe Lawlor, a Ph.D. student at the University of Galway.

According to the team, the disk around WISPIT 2b has a radius of 380 AU (astronomical units) — about 380 times the distance between Earth and the Sun.

“WISPIT 2b is a remarkable discovery,” said Jake Byrne, a M.Sc. student at the University of Galway.

The results appear in two papers in the Astrophysical Journal Letter.

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Richelle F. van Capelleveen et al. 2025. WIde Separation Planets In Time (WISPIT): A Gap-clearing Planet in a Multi-ringed Disk around the Young Solar-type Star WISPIT 2. ApJL 990, L8; doi: 10.3847/2041-8213/adf721

Laird M. Close et al. 2025. Wide Separation Planets in Time (WISPIT): Discovery of a Gap Hα Protoplanet WISPIT 2b with MagAO-X. ApJL 990, L9; doi: 10.3847/2041-8213/adf7a5

The planetary nebula NGC 6302 is one the most-studied of cosmic entities of its kind, with a familiar shape and dazzling colors that live up to its “Butterfly Nebula” nickname. But thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers are gaining even more insights into the formation located about 3,400 light-years from Earth. Their findings, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, are filling in the gaps in understanding how a rocky planet’s ingredients are born.

“We were able to see both cool gemstones formed in calm, long-lasting zones and fiery grime created in violent, fast-moving parts of space, all within a single object,” Cardiff University lead researcher Mikako Matsuura said in a statement.

Contrary to its name, a planetary nebula isn’t where planets form. The misnomer dates back centuries, when much lower-power telescopes made them appear round to astronomers. More detailed glimpses revealed that these celestial objects take various shapes, and are created when a star between 0.8 and eight times the size of our sun starts shedding its mass near the end of its life, when it ultimately goes nova. Planetary nebulae are rare sights, in part because they only last around 20,000 years.

NGC 6302 is considered a bipolar nebula. It has two sections spreading out in opposite directions in a pattern resembling butterfly wings, with a dark region of gas at the center forming the butterfly’s body. While this mid section is actually tire-shaped, it appears flattened when viewed from here on Earth. This position also obscures NGC 6302’s ancient, stellar core. Blazing at a temperature of around 395,540 degrees Fahrenheit, it’s one of the hottest of any known planetary nebula in the Milky Way galaxy.

All of that energy is responsible for creating the diverse minerals and organic materials detected by JWST’s Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI) as they spew from opposite jetstreams. The latest observations provide a wide wavelength spectrum look at the Butterfly Nebula’s dense band of gas known as a torus. Astronomers confirmed almost 200 spectral lines, each containing information about the nebula’s swirling concoction of atoms and molecules.

“For years, scientists have debated how cosmic dust forms in space. But now, with the help of the powerful James Webb Space Telescope, we may finally have a clearer picture,” said Matsuura.

Most cosmic dust exhibits random atomic structures, and appears like soot. Thanks to NGC 6302’s extreme stellar energy, the nebula’s particles fuse into other materials. These include crystalline silicates like quartz, as well as glimmering metals such as iron and nickel.

The study’s authors were particularly surprised by the discovery of carbon-based molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in the Butterfly Nebula. These honeycomb-shaped chemical components are most often found on Earth in car exhaust, woodsmoke, and burnt toast. The team noted that this find may be the first concrete evidence of PAHs forming inside a planetary nebula, and could help explain where such molecules originate in space.

Planetary nebulae may not create actual planets like Earth, but they do operate like factories that churn out a carbon-rich planet’s components. With more time and data, astronomers including Matsuura hope to gain even greater insights about where our home—and by extension all life—originated.

“This discovery is a big step forward in understanding how the basic materials of planets come together,” he said.

The ambitious mission to retrieve samples from asteroid Bennu and return them to Earth is paying off. Just as scientists had hoped, the asteroid is revealing details about the early days in our Solar System. More than just a simple space rock, research is revealing that Bennu contains not only material from the Solar System, but material from beyond our system.

Bennu follows an orbit that brings it close to Earth every six years. That means it’s classified as a near-Earth asteroid (NEA) and a potentially hazardous object (PHO). When NASA was planning the OSIRIS-REx mission that visited Bennu and returned the sample, it was the result of a vigorous scientific and engineering evaluation of candidate asteroids. Since Bennu is both close to Earth and a primitive carbonaceous asteroid, NASA settled on it as the target. The asteroid is both large enough to orbit and collect a sample from, and spectroscopic analysis of its surface showed it contained things scientists wanted to study, like carbon-rich materials and hydrated minerals.

Now, nearly nine years after OSIRIS-Rex was launched, samples are being studied in laboratories around the world.

Three newly-published papers show that Bennu is formed from materials both within and outside of our Solar System. They also show how some of the asteroid’s material has been altered by exposure to space weather and interactions with water.

Jessica Barnes, associate professor at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory is a co-lead author on one of the publications. “This is work you just can’t do with telescopes,” Barnes said in a press release. “It’s super exciting that we’re finally able to say these things about an asteroid that we’ve been dreaming of going to for so long and eventually brought back samples from.”

Bennu’s parent body is part of the Polana family of asteroids. A history of collisions created Bennu, and its original parent contained material from our Solar System and beyond. As a result, so does Bennu, with material from close to the Sun, from a great distance from the Sun, and even from other stars. The parent body was created out of this mixture of material more than 4 billion years ago, as the Solar System itself came into being. The paper “The variety and origin of materials accreted by Bennu’s parent asteroid” explains this in detail.

“Bennu’s parent asteroid may have formed in the outer parts of the solar system, possibly beyond the giant planets, Jupiter and Saturn,” Barnes said. “We think this parent body was struck by an incoming asteroid and smashed apart. Then the fragments re-assembled and this might have repeated several times.”

“The first bodies to form in the Solar System acquired their materials from stars, the presolar molecular cloud and the protoplanetary disk,” the authors write. “Asteroids that have not undergone planetary differentiation retain evidence of these primary accreted materials.”

The samples from Bennu show that much of the surface material has been altered by hydrothermal interactions that have changed their isotopic compositions, chemistry, and bulk mineralogy. But not of the samples have been altered. “We show that some primary accreted materials escaped the extensive aqueous alteration that occurred on the parent asteroid, including presolar grains from ancient stars, organic matter from the outer Solar System or molecular cloud, refractory solids that formed close to the Sun, and dust enriched in neutron-rich Ti isotopes,” the paper states.

These panels show the bulk titanium and oxygen isotopic compositions of Bennu samples in relation to other astromaterials. Panel a plots epsilon 50-titanium against oxygen isotopic composition. This comparison is important because both titanium and oxygen isotopes are used to trace the formation regions and processes in the early Solar System. Panel b shows the relationship between two titanium isotope signatures – bulk epsilon 50-Ti versus epsilon 46-Ti. This plot helps distinguish between different nucleosynthetic sources and processes that affected the titanium isotope composition. The symbols at the center of ovals represent the centre of the range of values. The sizes of the ovals represent the range of data for each material. Image Credit: Barnes et al. 2025. NatAstr

Perhaps the most interesting result from these samples is the abundance of material from outside our Solar System. This ancient stardust predates the Solar System, and is identified by its isotopic composition, which sets it apart from our Solar System. So Bennu’s recipe is more complex than thought.

“Those are pieces of stardust from other stars that are long dead, and these pieces were incorporated into the cloud of gas and dust from which our solar system formed,” Barnes said. “In addition, we found organic material that’s highly anomalous in their isotopes and that was probably formed in interstellar space, and we have solids that formed closer to the sun, and for the first time, we show that all these materials are present in Bennu.”

While some of Bennu’s material is unaltered by space weathering, chemistry, and even collisions, much of it has been altered. The second paper, “Mineralogical evidence for hydrothermal alteration of Bennu samples,” shows that most of Bennu’s material has been altered by hydrothermal processes. “The mineralogical evidence indicates alteration of accreted minerals by a fluid that evolved with time, leading to etching, dissolution and reprecipitation,” the authors write.

“We think that Bennu’s parent asteroid accreted a lot of icy material from the outer solar system, which melted over time,” said Tom Zega, director of the Kuiper-Arizona Laboratory who co-led the study.

Remnant heat from Bennu’s formation, or heat from subsequent impacts, could’ve melted ice in the asteroid. The resulting water could’ve interacted with silicate minerals, creating the hydrothermal reactions that changed the Bennu samples.

“Now you have a liquid in contact with a solid and heat – everything you need to start doing chemistry,” Zega said. “The water reacted with the minerals and formed what we see today: samples in which 80% of minerals contain water in their interior, created billions of years ago when the solar system was still forming.”

This is an electron microscope image of a Bennu sample. It shows both coarse-grained (CG) and fine-grained (FG) hydrated sheet silicates that formed in the presence of water. The water came from ice in Bennu that was melted by remnant heat or heat from collisions. Image Credit: Zega et al. 2025. NatGeo

The third paper, “Space weathering effects in Bennu asteroid samples,” shows how micrometeorite impacts have altered Bennu during its long life. “Space weathering processes, dominated by micrometeoroid impacts and solar irradiation, modify the mineralogy and chemistry of exposed surfaces,” the authors explain. “Comparison of Bennu samples with those collected from the asteroids Ryugu and Itokawa suggest that micrometeoroid impacts might play a more active and rapid role in the space weathering of asteroidal surfaces than was initially suggested, particularly for carbonaceous bodies.”

Some of the particles in the sample bear the imprints of micrometeoroid impacts. These impacts, along with the solar wind, are considered space weathering. With no atmosphere to prevent these tiny impacts, the surface of Bennu has been constantly bombarded. The study shows that space weathering is happening a lot faster than previously thought.

These panels are scanning electron microscope images of one of the Bennu samples. a shows microcraters in yellow, b shows a typical microcrater, and c shows an impact melt deposit. Image Credit: Keller et al. 2025. NatGeo

“Melt deposits occur in <0.5% of Itokawa samples, 2% of Ryugu particles and 20% of Bennu particles (although analyses of additional material may improve these statistics),” the paper states. “Together, these results suggest that micrometeoroid impacts play a more important role in the space weathering of asteroidal surfaces than was suggested from early observations of asteroidal returned samples.”

Most asteroid fragments that reach Earth are burned up as they plunge through the atmosphere. But Earth’s atmosphere is unrelenting, and even meteorites that survive the plunge are exposed to it, and can be altered quickly. That’s why asteroid sample return missions are so important to understanding the Solar System.

“Those that do make it to the ground can react with Earth’s atmosphere, particularly if the meteorite is not recovered quickly after it falls,” Zega said, “which is why sample return missions such as OSIRIS-REx are critical.”

Small, colorless, and blind, amblyopsid cavefishes inhabit subterranean waters throughout the eastern United States. In a new study, Yale researchers reveal insights into just how these distinctive cave dwellers evolved — and provide a unique method for dating the underground ecosystems where they reside.

In an analysis of the genomes of all known amblyopsid species, the researchers found that the different species colonized caves systems independently of each other and separately evolved similar traits — such as the loss of eyes and pigment — as they adapted to their dark cave environments.

Their findings are published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.

By studying the genetic mutations that caused the fishes’ eyes to degenerate, the researchers developed a sort of mutational clock that allowed them to estimate when each species began losing their eyes. They found that vision-related genes of the oldest cavefish species, the Ozark cavefish (Troglichthys rosae), began degenerating up to 11 million years ago. 

The technique provides a minimum age for the caves that the fishes colonized since the cavefish must have been inhabiting subterranean waters when their eyesight began devolving, the researchers said.

“The ancient subterranean ecosystems of eastern North America are very challenging to date using traditional geochronological cave-dating techniques, which are unreliable beyond an upper limit of about 3 to 5 million years,” said Chase Brownstein, a student in Yale’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, and the study’s co-lead author. “Determining the ages of cave-adapted fish lineages allows us to infer the minimum age of the caves they inhabit because the fishes wouldn’t have started losing their eyes while living in broad daylight. In this case we estimate a minimum age of some caves of over 11 million years.”

Maxime Policarpo of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence and the University of Basel is the co-lead author.

For the study, the researchers reconstructed a time-calibrated evolutionary tree for amblyopsids, which belong to an ancient, species-poor order of freshwater fishes called Percopsiformes, using the fossil record as well as genomic data and high-resolution scans of all living relevant species. 

All the cavefish species have similar anatomies, including elongated bodies and flattened skulls, and their pelvic fins have either been lost or severely reduced. Swampfish (Chologaster cornuta), a sister to cavefish lineage that inhabits murky surface waters, also has a flattened skull, elongated body, and no pelvic fin. While it maintains sight and pigment, there is softening of the bones around its eyes, which disappear in cavefishes. This suggests that cavefishes evolved from a common ancestor that was already equipped to inhabit low-light environments, Brownstein said. 

To understand when the cavefish began populating caves — something impossible to discern from the branches of an evolutionary tree — the researchers studied the fishes’ genomes, examining 88 vision-related genes for mutations. The analysis revealed that the various cavefish lineages had completely different sets of genetic mutations involved in the loss of vision. This, they said, suggests that separate species colonized caves and adapted to those subterranean ecosystems independently of each other. 

From there, the researchers developed a method for calculating the number of generations that have passed since cavefish species began adapting to life in caves by losing the functional copies of vision-related genes. 

Their analysis suggests that cave adaptations occurred between 2.25 and 11.3 million years ago in Ozark cavefish and between 342,000 to 1.70 million years ago (at minimum) and 1.7 to 8.7 million years ago (at maximum) for other cavefish lineages. The findings support the conclusion that at least four amblyopsid lineages independently colonized caves after evolving from surface-dwelling ancestors, the researchers said. 

The maximum ages exceed the ranges of traditional cave-dating methods, which includes isotope analysis of cosmogenic nuclides that are produced within rocks and soils by cosmic rays, the researchers noted.

The findings also suggest potential implications for human health, said Thomas Near, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), and senior author of the study. 

“A number of the mutations we see in the cavefish genomes that lead to degeneration of the eyes are similar to mutations that cause ocular diseases in humans,” said Near, who is also the Bingham Oceanographic Curator of Ichthyology at the Yale Peabody Museum. “There is the possibility for translational medicine through which by studying this natural system in cavefishes, we can glean insights into the genomic mechanisms of eye diseases in humans.”

The other co-authors are Richard C. Harrington of the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, Eva A. Hoffman of the American Museum of Natural History, Maya F. Stokes of Florida State University, and Didier Casane of Paris-Cité University.

Astronomers have found something strange in the James Webb Space Telescope’s first images of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS as it hurtles toward our sun, according to a new study.

The telescope’s initial observations suggested that 3I/ATLAS has one of the highest carbon dioxide (CO2) to water (H2O) ratios ever recorded in a comet. This unusual chemistry, if confirmed, could shed light on 3I/ATLAS’ mysterious origins beyond our solar system.

A remarkably well-preserved fossil from southern Patagonia in Argentina has revealed a new species of large crocodile relative that once roamed the area’s freshwater floodplains.

The fossilised skeleton, which includes a skull, jaws and multiple body bones, was discovered 20 miles south-west of the Argentine town of El Calafate in the Chorrillo Formation, a fossil-rich site dating to the Maastrichtian age, just before the mass extinction that ended the age of dinosaurs.

Named Kostensuchus atrox, the apex predator lived around 70 million years ago and probably preyed on dinosaurs, according to new research published in PLOS One.

Kostensuchus atrox: a fierce predator

With an estimated length of 3.5 metres and a weight of 250 kilograms, K. atrox was of impressive stature, and the animal had wide jaws and sharp teeth capable of tackling large prey. Researchers think it was ‘hypercarnivore’ – an animal whose diet is made up of more than 70% meat – that ate medium-sized dinosaurs. 

“This is the first crocodyliform fossil from the Chorrillo Formation, and one of the most intact peirosaurids ever found,” says lead author of the study Fernando Novas from Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales.

The discovery also provides new clues about ancient Patagonian environments, which were warm and seasonally humid, home to dinosaurs, turtles, frogs and mammals. “Our study shows this species was the second-largest predator in the Chorrillo Formation,” says Novas, who believes K. atrox was among the most dominant predators in the area.

The name Kostensuchus atrox includes both local and cultural references: Kosten comes from the Tehuelche word for the fierce Patagonian wind, while Souchos is the Egyptian crocodile-headed god. The Latin atrox means ‘harsh’ or ‘fierce’.

Top image: Kostensuchus atrox skull. Credit: José Brusco, CC-BY 4.0

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