Category: 7. Science

A team of astronomers has detected for the first time a growing planet outside our solar system, embedded in a cleared gap of a multi-ringed disk of dust and gas.

The team, led by University of Arizona astronomer Laird Close and Richelle van Capelleveen, an astronomy graduate student at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, discovered the unique exoplanet using the University of Arizona’s MagAO-X extreme adaptive optics system at the Magellan Telescope in Chile, the U of A’s Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona and the Very Large Telescope at the European Southern Observatory in Chile. Their results are published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

For years, astronomers have observed several dozen planet-forming disks of gas and dust surrounding young stars. Many of these disks display gaps in their rings, hinting at the possibility that they are being “plowed” by nearby nascent planets, or protoplanets, like lanes being cleared by a snowplow. Yet, only about three actual young growing protoplanets have been discovered to date, all in the cavities between a host star and the inner edge of its adjacent protoplanetary disk. Until this discovery, no protoplanets had been seen in the conspicuous disk gaps – which appear as dark rings.

“Dozens of theory papers have been written about these observed disk gaps being caused by protoplanets, but no one’s ever found a definitive one until today,” said Close, professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona. He calls the discovery a “big deal,” because the absence of planet discoveries in places where they should be has prompted many in the scientific community to invoke alternative explanations for the ring-and-gap pattern found in many protoplanetary disks. 

“It’s been a point of tension, actually, in the literature and in astronomy in general, that we have these really dark gaps, but we cannot detect the faint exoplanets in them,” he said. “Many have doubted that protoplanets can make these gaps, but now we know that in fact, they can.”

4.5 billion years ago, our solar system began as just such a disk. As dust coalesced into clumps, sucking up gas around them, the first protoplanets began to form. How exactly this process unfolded, however, is still largely a mystery. To find answers, astronomers have looked to other planetary systems that are still in their infancy, known as planet-forming disks, or protoplanetary disks. 

Close’s team took advantage of an adaptive optics system, one of the most formidable of its kind in the world, developed and built by Close, Jared Males and their students. Males is an associate astronomer at Steward Observatory and the principal investigator of MagAO-X. MagAO-X, which stands for “Magellan Adaptive Optics System eXtreme,” dramatically improves the sharpness and resolution of telescope images by compensating for atmospheric turbulence, the phenomenon that causes stars to flicker and blur, and is dreaded by astronomers. 

Suspecting there should be invisible planets hiding in the gaps of protoplanetary disks, Close’s team surveyed all the disks with gaps and probed them for a specific emission of visible light known as hydrogen alpha or H-alpha.

“As planets form and grow, they suck in hydrogen gas from their surroundings, and as that gas crashes down on them like a giant waterfall coming from outer space and hits the surface, it creates extremely hot plasma, which in turn, emits this particular H-alpha light signature,” Close explained. “MagAO-X is specially designed to look for hydrogen gas falling onto young protoplanets, and that’s how we can detect them.” 

The team used the 6.5-meter Magellan Telescope and MagAO-X to probe WISPIT-2, a disk van Capelleveen recently discovered with the VLT. Viewed in H-alpha light, Close’s group struck gold. A dot of light appeared inside the gap between two rings of the protoplanetary disk around the star. In addition, the team observed a second candidate planet inside the “cavity” between the star and the inner edge of the dust and gas disk. 

“Once we turned on the adaptive optics system, the planet jumped right out at us,” said Close, who called this one of the more important discoveries in his career. “After combining two hours’ worth of images, it just popped out.”

According to Close, the planet, designated WISPIT 2b, is a very rare example of a protoplanet in the process of accreting material onto itself. Its host star, WISPIT 2 is similar to the sun and about the same mass. The inner planet candidate, dubbed CC1, contains about nine Jupiter masses, whereas the outer planet, WISPIT 2b, weighs in at about five Jupiter masses. These masses were inferred, in part, from the thermal infrared light observed by the University of Arizona’s 8.4-meter Large Binocular Telescope on Mount Graham in Southeastern Arizona with the help of U of A astronomy graduate student Gabriel Weible. 

“It’s a bit like what our own Jupiter and Saturn would have looked like when they were 5,000 times younger than they are now,” Weible said. “The planets in the WISPIT-2 system appear to be about 10 times more massive than our own gas giants and more spread out. But the overall appearance is likely not so different from what a nearby ‘alien astronomer’ could have seen in a ‘baby picture’ of our solar system taken 4.5 billion years ago.” 

“Our MagAO-X adaptive optics system is optimized like no other to work well at the H-alpha wavelength, so you can separate the bright starlight from the faint protoplanet,” Close said. “Around WISPIT 2 you likely have two planets and four rings and four gaps. It’s an amazing system.” 

CC1 might orbit at about 14-15 astronomical units – with one AU equaling the average distance between the sun and Earth, which would place it halfway between Saturn and Uranus, if it was part of our solar system, according to Close. WISPIT-2b, the planet carving out the gap, is farther out at about 56 AU, which in our own solar system, would put it well past the orbit of Neptune, around the outer edge of the Kuiper Belt. 

A second paper published in parallel and led by van Capelleveen and the University of Galway details the detection of the planet in the infrared light spectrum and the discovery of the multi-ringed system with the 8-meter VLT telescope’s SPHERE adaptive optics system. 

“To see planets in the fleeting time of their youth, astronomers have to find young disk systems, which are rare,” van Capelleveen said, “because that’s the one time that they really are brighter and so detectable. If the WISPIT-2 system was the age of our solar system and we used the same technology to look at it, we’d see nothing. Everything would be too cold and too dark.”

This research was supported in part by a grant from the NASA eXoplanet Research Program. MagAO-X was developed in part by a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation and by the generous support of the Heising-Simons Foundation. 

Volcanoes can bring catastrophic consequences, and reliable warnings can make the difference between a close call and a tragedy.

A new study on Japan’s Ontake Volcano identifies a signal, in the form of a subtle change in earthquake waves, that could sharpen those warnings.

Researchers compared two eruptions of Ontake and focused on a detail in the waves that ripple through stressed rock.

The study was led by Professor Mike Kendall of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Oxford.

What the volcano signal shows

Scientists track a pattern in earthquake waves called shear-wave splitting, which appears when the same wave separates into a fast twin and a slow twin as it passes through cracked, stressed rock.

The effect is a form of seismic anisotropy, and changes in the timing of that effect have been documented around eruptions at different volcanoes for decades.

Because cracks tend to align with local stress, tracking the split and the direction of the fast wave shows how stress changes underground. That makes the signal a practical way to watch a volcano’s plumbing without digging a hole.

Mapping these changes does not replace other tools – it complements them. It can bring clarity when other signals are messy or missing.

Tale of two volcanic eruptions

Mount Ontake erupted on September 27, 2014, killing at least 58 hikers and marking Japan’s deadliest volcanic disaster since 1926. A smaller event in late March, 2007, produced far less impact and activity.

Steam driven blasts, known as a phreatic eruption, can start fast and with few surface clues, which explains why Ontake 2014 surprised so many people.

In the weeks leading up to 2014, seismologists detected small quakes beneath the summit, but other classic signs were muted. That context makes a clean, measurable stress signal especially valuable to public safety.

Volcano signals change

The Ontake team found that readings from 12 monitoring stations showed a sudden shift when the 2014 eruption began.

Small delays in the seismic waves nearly doubled, and the signal strength jumped from about 3 percent to 20 percent, with the main direction of stress in the rock also shifting.

These changes suggest that cracks in the volcano’s system of hot water and steam opened quickly as pressure built up, forcing the rock to break in new ways. Nothing similar showed up during the 2007 activity, which stayed mild.

The study also points out the big difference in eruption size: a very small event in 2007 compared with a much larger one in 2014, which matched the stronger seismic signal.

“The focal mechanisms of volcano-tectonic earthquakes changed drastically before and after the 2014 eruption,” said Professor Toshiko Terakawa of Nagoya University.

“Integrating data from shear-wave splitting and earthquake focal mechanisms could provide deeper insights into conditions required for an eruption to occur,” she added.

The analyses of focal mechanisms, which describe how faults move during quakes, added another layer of evidence. 

Predicting eruptions saves lives

A parameter that jumps when stress crosses a threshold is the kind of signal that can build confidence. It is clear, it has a size, and it ties directly to physics in the rock.

“The records around two eruptions on Ontake volcano in Japan have been able to show that the method can not only show changes before eruptions, but that they can potentially help to predict the size of an eruption,” said Professor Martha Savage of Victoria University of Wellington (VUW).

Emergency managers care about false alarms because trust erodes when communities evacuate for nothing. A detectable change in how cracks line up can reduce risk by pointing to real shifts in pressure inside the volcano.

Local monitoring teams can add this volcano signal tool to networks that already track ground tilt, gas, and tremor. It slots into existing workflows and draws on the same earthquakes that many stations already record.

What comes next

Every volcano has its own structure and history, so thresholds will need local calibration. That work takes time, but it is a straightforward path that builds on current instrumentation.

Results from other volcanoes have shown that splitting can track stress through time, which sets the stage for operations that watch for sudden increases rather than subtle drifts. That change in approach can matter when decisions must be made quickly.

“We expect to see these effects at other volcanoes across the globe, not just at Ontake Volcano,” said Dr. Tom Kettlety of the University of Oxford. The team expects broader use beyond Ontake as more stations apply the method. 

As with all warning tools, clarity begins with solid evidence and honest communication. Splitting, used alongside other lines of data, can help alerts land with the weight they deserve.

The study is published in Seismica.

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One of three rockets for the TOMEX+ mission sits on a launcher at Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. U.S. citizens in the mid-Atlantic region may catch a weather-permitted glimpse Tuesday night of NASA’s launch of its mission to launch a TOMEX+ sounding rocket in its second attempt, according to NASA. Photo by Danielle Johnson/NASA

Aug. 26 (UPI) — NASA has set Tuesday for its next launch attempt of its TOMEX+ sounding rocket mission to take a peak at the Earth’s atmosphere.

U.S. citizens in the mid-Atlantic region may catch a weather-permitted glimpse Tuesday night of NASA’s launch of its mission to launch a TOMEX+ sounding rocket in its second attempt, according to NASA.

The live-streamed launch is targeted in a window anywhere from 10:30 p.m. EDT to 3:30 a.m.

On Wednesday, NASA announced its TOMEX+ plan that looks to study the turbulence where Earth’s atmosphere ends and outer space begins.

Tuesday’s launch attempt comes after repeated other launch attempts.

Sounding rockets are those that can be aimed to reach the Earth’s mesopause, an area of the atmosphere that’s too high for weather balloons and too low for traditional satellites to reach.

A new study explains how tiny water bugs use fan-like propellers to zip across streams at speeds up to 120 body lengths per second.

The researchers then created a similar fan structure and used it to propel and maneuver an insect-sized robot.

The discovery offers new possibilities for designing small machines that could operate during floods or other challenging situations.

“Scientists thought the bugs used their muscles to control the fans, so we were surprised to learn that surface tension actually powers them,” says Saad Bhamla, one of the study’s authors and associate professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.

Instead of relying on their muscles, the insects about the size of a grain of rice use the water’s surface tension and elastic forces to morph the ribbon-shaped fans on the end of their legs to slice the water surface and change directions.

Once they understood the mechanism, the team built a self-deployable, one-milligram fan and installed it into an insect-sized robot capable of accelerating, braking, and maneuvering right and left.

The study appears in the journal Science.

Because contact with water triggers a mechanical response (opening the bug’s fans), the researchers suggested that the findings open the door to designing more energy-efficient and adaptive microrobots for use in rivers, wetlands, or flooded urban areas.

The research team, which included the University of California, Berkeley, and South Korea’s Ajou University, studied the millimeter-sized Rhagovelia. The water bug glides across fast-moving streams thanks to their fan-like propellers. The team found that the structures passively open and close 10 times faster than the blink of an eye.

The structures allow the bugs to execute sharp turns in just 50 milliseconds, rivaling the rapid aerial maneuvers of flies. In addition, the insects can produce wakes on the surface of the water that resemble the vortexes produced by flying wings.

Victor Ortega-Jimenez, a former Georgia Tech research scientist and the study’s lead author, first saw the ripple bugs during the pandemic while working at Kennesaw State University.

“These tiny insects were skimming and turning so rapidly across the surface of turbulent streams that they resembled flying insects,” says Ortega-Jimenez, assistant professor in Berkeley’s integrative biology department.

“How do they do it? That question stayed with me and took more than five years of incredible collaborative work to answer it.”

The next step was creating a robot inspired by the water striders. Ajou University Postdoctoral Researcher Dongjin Kim and Professor Je-Sung Koh solved a mystery of the fan’s design when they captured high-resolution images using a scanning electron microscope.

“Our robotic fans self-morph using nothing but water surface forces and flexible geometry, just like their biological counterparts. It’s a form of mechanical embedded intelligence refined by nature through millions of years of evolution,” says Koh, a senior author of the study.

“In small-scale robotics, these kinds of efficient and unique mechanisms would be a key enabling technology for overcoming limits in miniaturization of conventional robots.”

For example, the researchers say the findings lay the foundation for future design of compact, semi-aquatic robots that can explore water surfaces in challenging, fast-flowing environments.

Support for this research came from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of any funding agency.

Source: Georgia Tech

We’re on day three of the lunar cycle, a series of eight unique phases of the moon’s visibility. The whole cycle takes about 29.5 days, according to NASA, and these different phases happen as the Sun lights up different parts of the moon whilst it orbits Earth. 

So let’s see what’s happening with the moon tonight, Aug. 26.

What is today’s moon phase?

As of Tuesday, Aug. 26, the moon phase is Waxing Crescent, and only 11% will be lit up to us on Earth, according to NASA’s Daily Moon Observation.

There’s still not enough of the moon lit up to see anything on its surface, so keen moon gazers will need to wait a few more days before it is bright enough to see anything.

When is the next full moon?

The next full moon will be on Sept. 7. The last full moon was on Aug. 9.

What are moon phases?

According to NASA, moon phases are caused by the 29.5-day cycle of the moon’s orbit, which changes the angles between the Sun, Moon, and Earth. Moon phases are how the moon looks from Earth as it goes around us. We always see the same side of the moon, but how much of it is lit up by the Sun changes depending on where it is in its orbit. This is how we get full moons, half moons, and moons that appear completely invisible. There are eight main moon phases, and they follow a repeating cycle:

Mashable Light Speed

New Moon – The moon is between Earth and the sun, so the side we see is dark (in other words, it’s invisible to the eye).

Waxing Crescent – A small sliver of light appears on the right side (Northern Hemisphere).

First Quarter – Half of the moon is lit on the right side. It looks like a half-moon.

Waxing Gibbous – More than half is lit up, but it’s not quite full yet.

Full Moon – The whole face of the moon is illuminated and fully visible.

Waning Gibbous – The moon starts losing light on the right side.

Last Quarter (or Third Quarter) – Another half-moon, but now the left side is lit.

Waning Crescent – A thin sliver of light remains on the left side before going dark again.

A deep sea worm that inhabits hydrothermal vents survives the high levels of toxic arsenic and sulfide in its environment by combining them in its cells to form a less hazardous mineral. Chaolun Li of the Institute of Oceanology, CAS, China, and colleagues report these findings in a new study published August 26^th in the open-access journal PLOS Biology.

The worm, named Paralvinella hessleri, is the only animal to inhabit the hottest part of deep sea hydrothermal vents in the west Pacific, where hot, mineral-rich water spews from the seafloor. These fluids can contain high levels of sulfide, as well as arsenic, which builds up in the tissues of P. hessleri, sometimes making up more than 1% of the worm’s body weight.

Li and his team investigated how P. hessleri can tolerate the high levels of arsenic and sulfide in the vent fluids. They used advanced microscopy, and DNA, protein and chemical analyses to identify a previously unknown detoxification process. The worm accumulates particles of arsenic in its skin cells, which then react with sulfide from the hydrothermal vent fluids to form small clumps of a yellow mineral called orpiment.

The study provides new insights into the novel detoxification strategy that P. hessleri uses for “fighting poison with poison,” which enables it to live in an extremely toxic environment. Previous studies have found that related worms living in other parts of the world, as well as some snail species in the west Pacific, also accumulate high levels of arsenic, and may use this same strategy.

Coauthor Dr. Hao Wang adds, “This was my first deep-sea expedition, and I was stunned by what I saw on the ROV monitor—the bright yellow Paralvinella hessleri worms were unlike anything I had ever seen, standing out vividly against the white biofilm and dark hydrothermal vent landscape. It was hard to believe that any animal could survive, let alone thrive, in such an extreme and toxic environment.”

Dr. Wang says, “What makes this finding even more fascinating is that orpiment—the same toxic, golden mineral produced by this worm—was once prized by medieval and Renaissance painters. It’s a curious convergence of biology and art history, unfolding in the depths of the ocean.”

The authors note, “We were puzzled for a long time by the nature of the yellow intracellular granules, which had a vibrant color and nearly perfect spherical shape. It took us a combination of microscopy, spectroscopy, and Raman analysis to identify them as orpiment minerals—a surprising finding.”

The authors conclude, “We hope that this ‘fighting poison with poison’ model will encourage scientists to rethink how marine invertebrates interact with and possibly harness toxic elements in their environment.”

In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available paper in PLOS Biology: http://plos.io/4ks3PKo

Citation: Wang H, Cao L, Zhang H, Zhong Z, Zhou L, Lian C, et al. (2025) A deep-sea hydrothermal vent worm detoxifies arsenic and sulfur by intracellular biomineralization of orpiment (As₂S₃). PLoS Biol 23(8): e3003291. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3003291

Author countries: China

Funding: This work was supported by grants from Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 42476133 to H.W.), Science and Technology Innovation Project of Laoshan Laboratory (Project Number No. LSKJ202203104 to H.W.), National Key RandD Program of China (Project Number 2018YFC0310702 to H.W.), Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 42030407 to C.Li), and the NSFC Innovative Group Grant (No. 42221005 to M.X.W.). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Asteroid Ryugu is proving to be one of the most scientifically valuable time capsules in the solar system.

A recent study of microscopic grains collected from Ryugu by Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft found the tiny space rock harbors minerals that formed long before Earth itself — minerals that have been preserved in pristine condition for billions of years.

The first bodies to form in the Solar System acquired their materials from stars, the presolar molecular cloud and the protoplanetary disk. Asteroids that have not undergone planetary differentiation retain evidence of these primary materials; however, geologic processes such as hydrothermal alteration can dramatically change their compositions and chemistry. In new research, scientists analyzed the elemental and isotopic compositions of samples from asteroid Bennu to uncover the sources and types of material accreted by its parent body.

“We found that Bennu has an elemental composition that very closely matches the Sun,” said LLNL scientist Greg Brennecka.

“That means the material recovered from Bennu is a great reference for the starting composition of the entire Solar System.”

“It is remarkable that Bennu has survived so long without seeing high temperatures that would ‘cook’ some of the ingredients.”

Scientists are still studying how planets form, and learning the initial composition of the Solar System is like obtaining the list of ingredients to bake a cake.

“With that ingredients list, we now have a better idea of how those elements all came together to form the planets in our Solar System, and, eventually, Earth and its living inhabitants,” Dr. Brennecka said.

“If we are to learn about our origins, the starting point is the composition of the Solar System.”

By returning a pristine sample to Earth and avoiding any contamination from our planet, NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) mission opened up new opportunities.

“The amount of information you can obtain from returned sample material in the laboratory is incredible,” said LLNL scientist Quinn Shollenberger.

“We simply cannot answer the big ‘origins’ questions without having the sample on Earth.”

“One of our goals is to determine what elements in the periodic table, and in what proportions, the Solar System started with. Bennu allows us to find this out,” said LLNL scientist Jan Render.

To obtain these results, the researchers crushed the asteroid material into a fine powder and dissolved it in acid.

Then, they fed it into a suite of mass spectrometers, which provided the concentrations of most elements in the periodic table.

From there, the scientists have been separating the sample by element, and, so far, they have been able to analyze isotope ratios of several elements.

“One perk of working at a national laboratory is the amazing analytical capabilities that we have at our disposal and experts in utilizing state-of-the-art machinery,” said LLNL scientist Josh Wimpenny.

“Having these capabilities all in one place is very unique, and we get better use out of these precious materials.”

“We traced the origins of these initial materials accumulated by Bennu’s ancestor,” said Dr. Ann Nguyen, a researcher at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

“We found stardust grains with compositions that predate the Solar System, organic matter that likely formed in interstellar space, and high temperature minerals that formed closer to the Sun.”

“All of these constituents were transported great distances to the region that Bennu’s parent asteroid formed.”

The findings were published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

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J.J. Barnes et al. The variety and origin of materials accreted by Bennu’s parent asteroid. Nat Astron, published online August 22, 2025; doi: 10.1038/s41550-025-02631-6