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Mars’ glaciers are over 80% pure ice, formed by similar processes worldwide. This discovery sheds light on past climate and future exploration resources.

On the slopes of Martian mountains and within its craters lie formations that look like streams of honey, blanketed in dust and frozen in place. These structures are, in fact, glaciers that creep forward at an almost imperceptible pace. For years, scientists believed they were largely composed of rock with only limited amounts of ice mixed in.

Research carried out over the past two decades has shown that some of these glaciers are actually made up of mostly ice, with just a thin surface layer of dust and rock. Now, a new study published in Icarus reveals that this is not limited to a few sites—glaciers across Mars contain more than 80% water ice. This discovery indicates that the planet’s glacial deposits are remarkably pure on a global scale, offering fresh insight into Mars’ climate history and pointing to a potential resource for future exploration.

The study was led by Yuval Steinberg, a recent graduate of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. His coauthors, Oded Aharonson and Isaac Smith, are senior scientists at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, with academic affiliations at the Weizmann Institute of Science and York University, respectively.

“This study highlights how NASA programs are advancing science not just within the United States, but also reaching students around the world,” Aharonson said.

Peering under the dust-covered veil

As the researchers reviewed earlier studies, they realized that the analysis of debris-covered glaciers had been inconsistent and difficult to compare.

“Different techniques had been applied by researchers to various sites, and the results could not be easily compared,” explained Smith. “One of the sites in our study had never been studied, and at two of the five sites we used, only partial analysis had been completed previously.”

To address this, the team developed a standardized approach for examining debris-covered glaciers. They focused on two key measurements: the dielectric property (which reflects how quickly radar waves travel through a material) and the loss tangent (which indicates how much of that energy is absorbed by the material). These values make it possible to estimate the ratio of ice to rock within a glacier—something that cannot be determined through surface observation alone, since dust and rock often obscure what lies beneath.

Global comparison of Martian glaciers

They also identified another area on Mars where SHARAD, short for the SHAllow RADar instrument onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, could also do these analyses. This gave them a total of five sites spread across the red planet, enabling global comparison.

They were surprised to find that all glaciers, even in opposite hemispheres, have nearly the same properties.

“This is important because it tells us that the formation and preservation mechanisms are probably the same everywhere,” Smith said. “From that, we can conclude that Mars experienced either one widespread glaciation or multiple glaciations that had similar properties. And, by bringing together these sites and techniques for the first time, we were able to unify our understanding of these types of glaciers.”

Knowing the minimum purity of these glaciers benefits scientific understanding of the processes that form and preserve them. Additionally, it helps when planning for future human exploration of Mars, when using local resources, such as water, becomes mission-critical.

Next, the team will seek out additional glaciers to add their global comparison and solidify their understanding of these dust-covered mysteries.

Reference: “Physical properties of subsurface water ice deposits in Mars’s Mid-Latitudes from the shallow radar” by Yuval Steinberg, Isaac B. Smith and Oded Aharonson, 7 July 2025, Icarus.
DOI: 10.1016/j.icarus.2025.116716

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A massive impact may have temporarily strengthened the Moon’s weak magnetic field, producing a short-lived surge that became preserved in certain lunar rocks.

For decades, scientists have wrestled with a simple question: what happened to the Moon’s magnetism? Instruments on orbiting spacecraft once detected strong magnetic signatures in lunar surface rocks, indicating a powerful field in the past. Yet the moon itself has no inherent magnetism today.

Researchers at MIT now believe they may have uncovered the answer. Their hypothesis suggests that the Moon once possessed a faint magnetic field, and when a massive impact occurred, it produced a burst of plasma that temporarily strengthened this field, particularly on the far side of the Moon.

In findings published in Science Advances, the team used detailed simulations to test this scenario. They showed that an asteroid-scale collision could have created a cloud of charged particles that briefly surrounded the Moon. As the plasma swept around the lunar surface and collected on the side opposite the impact, it would have interacted with the Moon’s weak field, causing a short-lived but powerful amplification. During this fleeting episode, rocks in the region could have absorbed and preserved the record of the enhanced magnetism before it quickly faded.

This sequence of events offers a plausible explanation for the unusually magnetic rocks found near the Moon’s south pole, on the far side. Notably, the Imbrium basin—one of the largest known impact craters—lies almost exactly opposite this region on the near side. The researchers propose that the event that created the Imbrium basin likely generated the plasma cloud that set the process in motion.

“There are large parts of lunar magnetism that are still unexplained,” says lead author Isaac Narrett, a graduate student in the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). “But the majority of the strong magnetic fields that are measured by orbiting spacecraft can be explained by this process — especially on the far side of the moon.”

Narrett’s co-authors include Rona Oran and Benjamin Weiss at MIT, along with Katarina Miljkovic at Curtin University, Yuxi Chen and Gábor Tóth at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and Elias Mansbach PhD ’24 at Cambridge University. Nuno Loureiro, professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT, also contributed insights and advice.

Tracing lunar magnetism

For many years, scientists have recognized that the Moon retains traces of an ancient magnetic field. Evidence comes both from Apollo-era lunar samples brought back in the 1960s and 70s and from remote measurements collected by orbiting spacecraft. These studies reveal that surface rocks, particularly those on the Moon’s far side, still carry signatures of magnetism.

One widely accepted explanation is that the Moon once generated a global magnetic field through a “dynamo” mechanism, driven by movement within a molten core. Earth produces its current magnetic field through such a process, and it is believed the Moon may have done something similar in the past. However, because the Moon’s core is much smaller, any dynamo it sustained would likely have been weak, insufficient to fully account for the strongly magnetized rocks found in certain regions.

Another possibility explored over the years is that a massive impact created plasma, which then temporarily boosted a weak magnetic field. In 2020, Oran and Weiss tested this scenario using simulations of a large collision, combined with the solar magnetic field, which reaches the Moon but is very faint at that distance.

Their simulations examined whether such an impact could strengthen the solar field enough to match the high levels of magnetism detected in lunar rocks. The results indicated it could not, effectively casting doubt on plasma-driven impacts as the main explanation for the Moon’s puzzling magnetic record.

A new simulation approach

But in their new study, the researchers took a different tack. Instead of accounting for the sun’s magnetic field, they assumed that the moon once hosted a dynamo that produced a magnetic field of its own, albeit a weak one. Given the size of its core, they estimated that such a field would have been about 1 microtesla, or 50 times weaker than the Earth’s field today.

From this starting point, the researchers simulated a large impact to the moon’s surface, similar to what would have created the Imbrium basin, on the moon’s near side. Using impact simulations from Katarina Miljkovic, the team then simulated the cloud of plasma that such an impact would have generated as the force of the impact vaporized the surface material. They adapted a second code, developed by collaborators at the University of Michigan, to simulate how the resulting plasma would flow and interact with the moon’s weak magnetic field.

These simulations showed that as a plasma cloud arose from the impact, some of it would have expanded into space, while the rest would stream around the moon and concentrate on the opposite side. There, the plasma would have compressed and briefly amplified the moon’s weak magnetic field. This entire process, from the moment the magnetic field was amplified to the time that it decays back to baseline, would have been incredibly fast — somewhere around 40 minutes, Narrett says.

Would this brief window have been enough for surrounding rocks to record the momentary magnetic spike? The researchers say, yes, with some help from another, impact-related effect.

Shocks aligning electrons

They found that an Imbrium-scale impact would have sent a pressure wave through the moon, similar to a seismic shock. These waves would have converged to the other side, where the shock would have “jittered” the surrounding rocks, briefly unsettling the rocks’ electrons — the subatomic particles that naturally orient their spins to any external magnetic field. The researchers suspect the rocks were shocked just as the impact’s plasma amplified the moon’s magnetic field. As the rocks’ electrons settled back, they assumed a new orientation, in line with the momentary high magnetic field.

“It’s as if you throw a 52-card deck in the air, in a magnetic field, and each card has a compass needle,” Weiss says. “When the cards settle back to the ground, they do so in a new orientation. That’s essentially the magnetization process.”

The researchers say this combination of a dynamo plus a large impact, coupled with the impact’s shockwave, is enough to explain the moon’s highly magnetized surface rocks — particularly on the far side. One way to know for sure is to directly sample the rocks for signs of shock, and high magnetism. This could be a possibility, as the rocks lie on the far side, near the lunar south pole, where missions such as NASA’s Artemis program plan to explore.

“For several decades, there’s been sort of a conundrum over the moon’s magnetism — is it from impacts or is it from a dynamo?” Oran says. “And here we’re saying, it’s a little bit of both. And it’s a testable hypothesis, which is nice.”

Reference: “Impact plasma amplification of the ancient lunar dynamo” by Isaac S. Narrett, Rona Oran, Yuxi Chen, Katarina Miljković, Gábor Tóth, Elias N. Mansbach and Benjamin P. Weiss, 23 May 2025, Science Advances.
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adr7401

The team’s simulations were carried out using the MIT SuperCloud. This research was supported, in part, by NASA.

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A new trans-Neptunian object, 2017 OF201, has been found with a vast orbit and potential dwarf planet size. The finding hints at more hidden bodies beyond Neptune.

A research team led by Sihao Cheng at the Institute for Advanced Study’s School of Natural Sciences has identified a remarkable trans-Neptunian object (TNO) at the far reaches of the solar system. The object has been designated 2017 OF201.

Based on its estimated size, 2017 OF₂₀₁ could meet the criteria for classification as a dwarf planet, placing it in the same category as Pluto. It is among the most distant objects ever observed in the solar system and indicates that the region beyond Neptune in the Kuiper Belt, long assumed to be nearly empty, may in fact harbor more bodies than expected.

Cheng, working with Princeton University collaborators Jiaxuan Li and Eritas Yang, detected the object using advanced computational techniques designed to reveal distinctive orbital patterns across the sky. The discovery was confirmed by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center on May 21, 2025, and was also described in a preprint released on arXiv.

Trans-Neptunian objects are minor planets whose orbits lie, on average, farther from the Sun than Neptune’s. What makes 2017 OF₂₀₁ particularly noteworthy is both its extreme orbital characteristics and its unusually large size.

“The object’s aphelion—the farthest point on the orbit from the Sun—is more than 1600 times that of the Earth’s orbit,” explains Cheng. “Meanwhile, its perihelion—the closest point on its orbit to the Sun—is 44.5 times that of the Earth’s orbit, similar to Pluto’s orbit.”

Complex history of gravitational encounters

This extreme orbit, which takes the object approximately 25,000 years to complete, suggests a complex history of gravitational interactions. “It must have experienced close encounters with a giant planet, causing it to be ejected to a wide orbit,” says Yang. “There may have been more than one step in its migration. It’s possible that this object was first ejected to the Oort cloud, the most distant region in our solar system, which is home to many comets, and then sent back,” Cheng adds.

“Many extreme TNOs have orbits that appear to cluster in specific orientations, but 2017 OF₂₀₁ deviates from this,” says Li. This clustering has been interpreted as indirect evidence for the existence of another planet in the solar system, Planet X or Planet Nine, which could be gravitationally shepherding these objects into their observed patterns. The existence of 2017 OF₂₀₁ as an outlier to such clustering could potentially challenge this hypothesis.

Cheng and his team estimate that 2017 OF₂₀₁ is about 700 km in diameter, which would make it the second largest object discovered with such an extended orbit. For comparison, Pluto’s diameter is 2,377 km. The researchers note that further observations, possibly with radio telescopes, will be required to measure the object’s true size more precisely.

Identifying the object in telescope data

Cheng discovered the object as part of an ongoing research project to identify TNOs and possible new planets in the outer solar system. The object was identified by pinpointing bright spots in an astronomical image database from the Victor M. Blanco Telescope and Canada France Hawaii Telescope (CFHT), and trying to connect all possible groups of such spots that appeared to move across the sky in the way a single TNO might. This search was carried out using a computationally efficient algorithm produced by Cheng. Ultimately, they identified 2017 OF₂₀₁ in 19 different exposures, captured over 7 years.

The discovery has significant implications for our understanding of the outer solar system. The area beyond the Kuiper Belt, where the object is located, has previously been thought to be essentially empty, but the team’s discovery suggests that this is not so.

“2017 OF₂₀₁ spends only 1% of its orbital time close enough to us to be detectable. The presence of this single object suggests that there could be another hundred or so other objects with similar orbit and size; they are just too far away to be detectable now,” Cheng states. “Even though advances in telescopes have enabled us to explore distant parts of the universe, there is still a great deal to discover about our own solar system.”

The detection also demonstrates the power of open science. “All the data we used to identify and characterize this object are archival data that are available to anyone, not only professional astronomers,” says Li. “This means that groundbreaking discoveries aren’t limited to those with access to the world’s largest telescopes. Any researcher, student, or even citizen scientist with the right tools and knowledge could have made this discovery, highlighting the value of sharing scientific resources.”

Reference: “Discovery of a dwarf planet candidate in an extremely wide orbit: 2017 OF201” by Sihao Cheng, Jiaxuan Li and Eritas Yang, 21 May 2025, arXiv.
DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2505.15806

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Life doesn’t always play by the tidy rules in textbooks. Most organisms use oxygen to produce ATP, which is energy used by cells. Some life forms, especially microbes, tap other chemicals when oxygen is scarce. The usual explanation says it’s one mode or the other.

A team studying a microbe from a Yellowstone hot spring found something different. This bacterium can use oxygen and sulfur at the same time to produce energy. That mixed strategy gives it an edge when oxygen levels fluctuate.

Lisa Keller of Montana State University is the lead author of this research that describes her work with bacterial samples from a group called Aquificales.

Along with her adviser and mentor Eric Boyd, professor in the College of Agriculture’s Department of Microbiology and Cell Biology, they published their fascinating work in the journal Nature Communications.

Microbes that breathe oxygen and sulfur

Respiration is how a cell converts food into usable energy (ATP). In oxygen-based respiration, cells move electrons through a chain of reactions and pass them to oxygen at the end.

Anaerobic respiration does a similar job but transfers electrons to other acceptors, such as sulfur, nitrate, or iron. Both strategies work; they are just different.

The hot-spring bacterium, Aquificales, challenged the usual either-or assumption. Under the right conditions, it kept both systems running.

That meant that while the bacteria were producing sulfide – an anaerobic process – they were using oxygen, meaning that both metabolisms were occurring.

“There’s no explanation other than that these cells are breathing oxygen at the same time that they are breathing elemental sulfur,” Keller said.

Keller explained that the bacterium’s ability to conduct both processes at once challenges our understanding of how microbes survive, especially in dynamic, low-oxygen environments such as hot springs. 

Oxygen and sulfur in hot springs

Hot springs are tough places to live. Temperatures run high. Minerals dissolve into the water. Gases bubble in and out.

Oxygen dissolves less in hot water than in cool water and escapes more easily, so levels change from moment to moment. In that kind of environment, a flexible energy strategy goes a long way.

The bacterium in this study thrives at high temperatures and feeds on simple molecules, including hydrogen gas. It can use oxygen when it’s available and elemental sulfur when oxygen dips.

How the study was done

Keller and her team isolated the microbe, then grew it in the lab at high temperatures with three ingredients: hydrogen gas as the energy source, elemental sulfur, and oxygen. They then tracked the cells’ chemical reactions and which genes were switched on.

Next, the team measured oxygen levels directly using gas chromatography. They also watched for the conversion of sulfur to sulfide, a clear sign of anaerobic sulfur respiration.

Gene expression data aligned with the chemistry: enzymes for both oxygen use and sulfur processing were active simultaneously.

Microbe’s oxygen-sulfur strategy

Cultures given hydrogen, sulfur, and oxygen grew faster and reached higher cell counts than cultures that had to use only oxygen or only sulfur.

That growth boost points to a simple payoff: more net energy when both pathways run together under low or unstable oxygen.

One detail matters for interpreting the results. The sulfide produced doesn’t persist in a mixed setup. Oxygen and certain metal ions in the broth can quickly consume it.

Without careful controls, that can hide the microbe’s dual strategy. This study accounted for that factor, which helps explain why this behavior may have been missed in past experiments.

Widespread pattern in nature

Genes and enzymes similar to those involved here are found in many microbes.

That suggests this hybrid mode could be more common than we realized, especially in places where conditions shift minute to minute. Hot springs and deep-sea vents contain fuels and oxidants that rise and fall.

Microbes that can keep multiple electron acceptors available may outgrow neighbors that wait for a single, ideal condition.

Flexibility like this also fits the story of early Earth. Oxygen didn’t flood the oceans all at once. It rose in patchy, inconsistent ways.

Microbes that could sense tiny amounts of oxygen while still relying on older, oxygen-free reactions likely had an advantage.

The results of this study may explain how ancient lifeforms adapted to the progressive oxygenation of Earth that began around 2.8 billion years ago – the Great Oxidation Event.

“This is really interesting, and it creates so many more questions,” Keller said. “We don’t know how widespread this is, but it opens the door for a lot of exploring.”

The Yellowstone bacterium isn’t ancient, but it shows a strategy that would have made sense when oxygen first began to matter.

How oxygen-sulfur combo works

Oxygen sits at the top of the energy ladder because it accepts electrons strongly, which usually means more energy per unit of fuel.

Sulfur compounds accept electrons too, though the energy yield is lower. When oxygen is scarce or fluctuating, using sulfur in parallel keeps the energy flowing rather than stalling.

Temperature and chemistry help set the stage. High heat speeds reactions and lowers oxygen solubility. Hydrogen gas, common around hydrothermal systems, supplies a steady stream of electrons.

Elemental sulfur is abundant in many volcanic and geothermal settings. Together, these conditions make simultaneous oxygen and sulfur respiration advantageous.

Real-world implications

Mixed respiration hints at new ways to run bioreactors and environmental cleanup efforts.

If microbes can be encouraged to keep more than one pathway active, engineers may squeeze extra efficiency from waste-to-energy systems, or keep pollutant breakdown steady when oxygen supply is uneven.

The same thinking applies to managing the sulfur and carbon cycles in complex settings where oxygen isn’t easy to control.

The work also urges careful experimental design. Testing a microbe in a strict “oxygen-only” or “no-oxygen” setup can miss behaviors that only appear when both are present.

Real environments rarely offer neat categories. Lab protocols that match those complex realities reveal strategies that would otherwise stay hidden.

To sum it all up, this heat-loving bacterium, Aquificales, broadens how we think about life’s energy playbook. It’s messy, adaptive, and full of clever workarounds that let microbes, and maybe eventually us, survive in a changing world.

The full study was published in the journal Nature Communications.

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Around 11,300 years ago, a massive star teetered on the precipice of annihilation. It pulsed with energy as it expelled its outer layers, shedding the material into space. Eventually it exploded as a supernova, and its remnant is one of the most studied supernova remnants (SNR). It’s called Cassiopeia A (Cas A) and new observations with the Chandra X-ray telescope are revealing more details about its demise.

Cas A’s progenitor star had between about 15 to 20 solar masses, though some estimates range as high as 30 solar masses. It was likely a red supergiant, though there’s debate about its nature and the path it followed to exploding as a supernova. Some astrophysicists think it may have been a Wolf-Rayet star.

In any case, it eventually exploded as a core-collapse supernova. Once it built up an iron core, the star could no longer support itself and exploded. The light from Cas A’s demise reached Earth around the 1660s.

There are no definitive records of observers seeing the supernova explosion in the sky, but astronomers have studied the Cas A SNR in great detail in modern times and across multiple wavelengths.

This is a composite false colour image of Cassiopeia A. It contains data from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, and the Chandra X-ray telescope. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

New research in The Astrophysical Journal explains Chandra’s new findings. It’s titled “Inhomogeneous Stellar Mixing in the Final Hours before the Cassiopeia A Supernova.” The lead author is Toshiki Sato of Meiji University in Japan.

“It seems like each time we closely look at Chandra data of Cas A, we learn something new and exciting,” said lead author Sato in a press release. “Now we’ve taken that invaluable X-ray data, combined it with powerful computer models, and found something extraordinary.”

One of the problems with studying supernovae is that their eventual explosions are what trigger our observations. A detailed understanding of the final moments before a supernova explodes is difficult to obtain. “In recent years, theorists have paid much attention to the final interior processes within massive stars, as they can be essential for revealing neutrino-driven supernova mechanisms and other potential transients of massive star collapse,” the authors write in their paper. “However, it is challenging to observe directly the last hours of a massive star before explosion, since it is the supernova event that triggers the start of intense observational study.”

The lead up to the SN explosion of a massive star involves the nucleosynthesis of increasingly heavy elements deeper into its interior. The surface layer is hydrogen, then helium is next, then carbon and even heavier elements under the outer layers. Eventually, the star creates iron. But iron is a barrier to this process, because while lighter elements release energy when they fuse, iron requires more energy to undergo further fusion. The iron builds up in the core, and once the core reaches about 1.4 solar masses, there’s not enough outward pressure to prevent collapse. Gravity wins, the core collapses, and the star explodes.

This high-definition image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) unveils intricate details of supernova remnant Cassiopeia A (Cas A), and shows the expanding shell of material slamming into the gas shed by the star before it exploded. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Danny Milisavljevic (Purdue University), Ilse De Looze (UGhent), Tea Temim (Princeton University)

Chandra’s observations, combined with modelling, are giving astrophysicists a look inside the star during its final moments before collapse.

“Our research shows that just before the star in Cas A collapsed, part of an inner layer with large amounts of silicon traveled outwards and broke into a neighboring layer with lots of neon,” said co-author Kai Matsunaga of Kyoto University in Japan. “This is a violent event where the barrier between these two layers disappears.”

The results were two-fold. Silicon-rich material travelled outward, while neon-rich material travelled inward. This created inhomogeneous mixing of the elements, and small regions rich in silicon were found near small regions rich in neon.

Inhomogeneous elemental distribution in Cas A observed by Chandra. The difference in the mixing ratio of blue and green colors clearly shows the different composition in the O-rich ejecta. The red, green, and blue include emission within energy bands of 6.54–6.92 keV (Fe Heα), 1.76–1.94 keV (Si Heα), and 0.60–0.85 keV (O lines), respectively. The ejecta highlighted in red and green are products of explosive nucleosynthesis, while the ejecta in blue and emerald green reflect stellar nucleosynthesis. The circles in the small panels are O-rich regions used for spectral analysis. The regions of high and low X-ray intensity in the Si band are indicated by the magenta and cyan circles, respectively. Image Credit: Toshiki Sato et al 2025 ApJ 990 103

This is part of what the researchers call a ‘shell merger’. They say it’s the final phase of stellar activity. It’s an intense burning where the oxygen burning shell swallows the outer Carbon and Neon burning shell deep inside the star’s interior. This happens only moments before the star explodes as a supernova. “In the violent convective layer created by the shell merger, Ne, which is abundant in the stellar O-rich layer, is burned as it is pulled inward, and Si, which is synthesized inside, is transported outward,” the authors explain in their research.

This schematic shows the interior of a massive star in the process of a ‘shell merger.’ It shows both the downward plumes of Neon-rich material and the upward plumes of silicon-rich material. Image Credit: Toshiki Sato et al 2025 ApJ 990 103

The intermingled silicon-rich and neon-rich regions are evidence of this process. The authors explain that the the silicon and neon did not mix with the other elements either immediately before or immediately after the explosion. Though astrophysical models have predicted this, it’s never been observed before. “Our results provide the first observational evidence that the final stellar burning process rapidly alters the internal structure, leaving a pre-supernova asymmetry,” the researchers explain in their paper.

For decades, astrophysicists thought that SN explosions were symmetrical. Early observations supported the idea, and the basic idea behind core-collapse supernovae also supported symmetry. But this research changes the fundamental understanding of supernova explosions as asymmetrical. “The coexistence of compact ejecta regions in both the “O-/Ne-rich” and “O-/Si-rich” regimes implies that the merger did not fully homogenize the O-rich layer prior to collapse, leaving behind multiscale compositional inhomogeneities and asymmetric velocity fields,” the researchers write in their conclusion.

This asymmetry can also explain how the neutron stars left behind get their acceleration kick and lead to high-velocity neutron stars.

These final moments in a supernova’s life may also trigger the explosion itself, according to the authors. The turbulence created by the inner turmoil may have aided the star’s explosion.

“Perhaps the most important effect of this change in the star’s structure is that it may have helped trigger the explosion itself,” said co-author Hiroyuki Uchida also of Kyoto University. “Such final internal activity of a star may change its fate—whether it will shine as a supernova or not.”

“For a long time in the history of astronomy, it has been a dream to study the internal structure of stars,” the researchers write in their paper’s conclusion. This research has given astrophysicists a critical glimpse into a progenitor star’s final moments before explosion. “This moment not only has a significant impact on the fate of a star, but also creates a more asymmetric supernova explosion,” they conclude.