Category: 7. Science

August is one of the best months of the year for stargazing, and 2025 is no exception. Whether you’re scanning the eastern sky at dusk or venturing out before sunrise, there’s something to see almost every night. The Perseids return, the Milky Way arches high overhead, and a rare “planet parade” delivers four bright objects in the morning twilight. Here’s everything you need to know about the night sky in August 2025:

1. A Full ‘Sturgeon Moon’

When: dusk on Friday and Saturday, August 8-9

Where: eastern horizon

This month’s full moon will occur early on Aug. 9, but both Aug. 8 and Aug. 9 will offer dramatic moonrises. Look east shortly after sunset to watch the sturgeon moon rise, appearing a lovely orange color.

2. A Conjunction Of Venus And Jupiter

When: before dawn on Tuesday, Aug. 12

Where: east-northeast horizon

In a rare planetary pairing, Venus and Jupiter will be separated by just one degree in the pre-dawn sky. This is a striking sight for the naked eye, with the two brightest planets close together, just above the eastern horizon an hour before sunrise.

3. Perseid Meteor Shower Peaks

When: around midnight, August 12-15

Where: northeast to overhead

The Perseids reach their maximum overnight on Aug. 12-13 evening, but a 91%-lit gibbous moon will wash out all but the brightest. For the best chance, head out before midnight and keep your back to the moon. Better still, wait until Aug. 15, when the night sky will be much darker, and there will still be an elevated rate of meteors.

4. A Planet Parade

When: one hour before sunrise, Sunday to Wednesday, August 17–20

Where: eastern sky

For four consecutive mornings, Jupiter, Venus and Mercury form a graceful arc in the pre-dawn sky. The waning crescent moon moves past them each morning, getting slimmer each day. The highlight comes Aug. 20 when a 9% crescent moon sits next to Venus.

5. Milky Way At Its Best

When: after astronomical twilight, all month

Where: southeast to the zenith

August’s moonless evening sky — from Aug. 16-26 — brings some of the clearest views of the Milky Way for northern observers. On moonless nights, trace its arc through the Summer Triangle stars high in the southeast and down to the galactic core near the constellations Scorpius and Sagittarius in the south. Do whatever you can to escape light pollution, using a light pollution map or staying overnight in an International Dark Sky Place.

6. A ‘Black Moon’

When: Saturday, Aug. 23

Where: all-sky

Today’s new moon has a special name — a seasonal “black moon,” the third new moon in a season of four. Although not visible itself, its presence means an entire night of dark, moonless night skies ideal for stargazing, astronomy and astrophotography.

7. Venus And The Beehive Cluster

When: before dawn on Sunday, Aug. 31

Where: east-northeast sky

Look east an hour before sunrise to find brilliant Venus. Nearby, through binoculars, you’ll spot the faint but pretty Beehive Cluster (M44). This open cluster in the constellation Cancer is one of the most beautiful sights in the night sky — especially when paired with a bright planet.

Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.

High-resolution spectroscopy (HRS) plays a crucial role in characterizing exoplanet atmospheres, revealing detailed information about their chemical composition, temperatures, and dynamics.

However, inaccuracies in orbital parameters can affect the result of HRS analyses. In this paper, we simulated HRS observations of an exoplanet’s transit to model the effects of an offset in transit midpoint or eccentricity on the resulting spectra.

We derived analytical equations to relate an offset in transit midpoint or eccentricity to shifted velocities, and compared it with velocities measured from simulated HRS observations. Additionally, we compared velocity shifts in the spectrum of the ultra-hot Jupiter WASP-76b using previously reported and newly measured transit times.

We found that transit midpoint offsets on the order of minutes, combined with eccentricity offsets of approximately 0.1, lead to significant shifts in velocities, yielding measurements on the order of several kilometers per second. Thus, such uncertainties could conflate derived wind measurements.

Yasmine J. Meziani, Laura Flagg, Jake D. Turner, Emily K. Deibert, Ray Jayawardhana, Adam B. Langeveld, Ernst J.W. de Mooij

Comments: 11 pages, 8 figures, Accepted to AJ
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Cite as: arXiv:2507.11708 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2507.11708v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2507.11708
Focus to learn more
Submission history
From: Yasmine Meziani
[v1] Tue, 15 Jul 2025 20:24:21 UTC (591 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11708
Astrobiology,

The grants are for innovative, high-quality, fundamental research or studies involving matters of scientific urgency. The funding is a maximum of EUR 800,000.

The three Leiden projects are:

Tracking mucus munching bacteria

Zach Armstrong, assistant professor at Leiden Institute of Chemistry

Mucus provides an essential barrier between the gut microbiome and cells that line the intestines. This barrier is depleted in inflammatory bowel disease and colorectal cancer. One hurdle to understanding mucus-microbiome interactions is the lack of chemical tools to monitor mucus degradation.

In this project, the researchers will generate a new class of chemical tools targeting enzymes fundamental to mucin degradation – carbohydrate sulfatases. These tools will reveal fundamental insight into the mechanism and action of carbohydrate sulfatases and in the future will enable detection of sulfatase activity in biopsies and animal models of colitis, furthering our understanding of mucus degradation in gut diseases.

Unveiling the hidden complexity of Planetary Nebulae in 3D

Ana Monreal Ibero (LEI), assistant professor at Leiden Observatory

Planetary nebulae are the stunning remnants of dying stars like our Sun, crucial in recycling elements that fuel the chemical evolution of galaxies. With an appearance resembling cosmic jellyfish, they show complex and diverse structures that traditional methods miss. This project seeks to unveil and map this hidden complexity using cutting-edge spectroscopy.

The researchers will reveal the full physical and chemical makeup of planetary nebulae, offering an unprecedented view that will impact our understanding of stellar evolution, interstellar medium characterisation, and Galactic chemical evolution. The data collected here will constitute ideal ancillary information to complement observations with the JWST, and forthcoming BlueMUSE.

Tools to manipulate how TGF-β talks to different cells

Peter ten Dijke, Professor of Molecular Cell Biology at the LUMC

TGF-β is a multifunctional secreted cytokine that plays a crucial role in maintaining tissue homeostasis and cancer by acting on multiple cell types. In this project, the researchers will generate cell-type-restricted inhibitors of TGF-β that will allow them to dissect its role in complex biological processes precisely.

Moreover, with their potential to be developed into novel drugs, these inhibitors offer a solution to the current limitations of TGF-β-targeting agents. The researchers predict that these novel inhibitors will bypass the on-target adverse side effects, providing a more effective and safer alternative for cancer and other diseases.

Technicians have successfully installed two sunshields onto NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope’s inner segment. Along with the observatory’s Solar Array Sun Shield and Deployable Aperture Cover, the panels (together called the Lower Instrument Sun Shade), will play a critical role in keeping Roman’s instruments cool and stable as the mission explores the infrared universe.

The team is on track to join Roman’s outer and inner assemblies this fall to complete the full observatory, which can then undergo further prelaunch testing.

“This shield is like an extremely strong sunblock for Roman’s sensitive instruments, protecting them from heat and light from the Sun that would otherwise overwhelm our ability to detect faint signals from space,” said Matthew Stephens, an aerospace engineer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

The sunshade, which was designed and engineered at NASA Goddard, is essentially an extension of Roman’s solar panels, except without solar cells. Each sunshade flap is roughly the size of a garage door — about 7 by 7 feet (2.1 by 2.1 meters) — and 3 inches (7.6 centimeters) thick.

“They’re basically giant aluminum sandwiches, with metal sheets as thin as a credit card on the top and bottom and the central portion made up of a honeycomb structure,” said Conrad Mason, an aerospace engineer at NASA Goddard.

This design makes the panels lightweight yet stiff, and the material helps limit heat transfer from the side facing the Sun to the back—no small feat considering the front will be hot enough to boil water (up to 216 degrees Fahrenheit, or 102 degrees Celsius) while the back will be much colder than Antarctica’s harshest winter (minus 211 Fahrenheit, or minus 135 Celsius). A specialized polymer film blanket will wrap around each panel to temper the heat, with 17 layers on the Sun side and one on the shaded side.

The sunshade will be stowed and gently deploy around an hour after launch.

“The deploying mechanisms have dampers that work like soft-close hinges for drawers or cabinets, so the panels won’t slam open and rattle the observatory,” Stephens said. “They each take about two minutes to move into their final positions. This is the very first system that Roman will deploy in space after the spacecraft separates from the launch vehicle.”

Now completely assembled, Roman’s inner segment is slated to undergo a 70-day thermal vacuum test next. Engineers and scientists will test the full functionality of the spacecraft, telescope, and instruments under simulated space conditions. Following the test, the sunshade will be temporarily removed while the team joins Roman’s outer and inner assemblies, and then reattached to complete the observatory. The mission remains on track for launch no later than May 2027 with the team aiming for as early as fall 2026.

Download high-resolution video and images from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is managed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with participation by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California; Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena, California; the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore; and a science team comprising scientists from various research institutions. The primary industrial partners are BAE Systems Inc. in Boulder, Colorado; L3Harris Technologies in Rochester, New York; and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging in Thousand Oaks, California.

By Ashley Balzer
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

Heat is usually treated like an invisible fog that slips through solids as they warm or cool. Until now, nobody had watched its tiniest messengers move that heat, one by one. New research now shows that it is phasons that dominate thermal motion.

Using cameras sharp enough to see a hydrogen atom jitter, researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have recorded heat in action inside a single sheet of tungsten diselenide.

The work is directed by Pinshane Huang of Grainger College of Engineering, with imaging specialist Yichao Zhang supplying the ptychography expertise.

Unseen vibrations at the scale of atoms

Every crystal vibrates, but moiré phonons arise only when two lattices are stacked with a slight twist, creating a larger superlattice pattern.

Among these modes sit the ultrasoft phasons, with frequencies so low that standard spectroscopy misses them.

The Illinois team used a powerful imaging technique called electron ptychography, which can capture details as small as one-fifth the width of a carbon atom.

That sharpness lets scientists measure how much the image of a single atom blurs as it vibrates, thus turning a microscope into a motion detector.

Phasons emerged as localized patches where the rigid crystal briefly shears, a bit like tectonic plates sliding at faults, yet on a scale of picometers and picoseconds.

These motions carry heat in directions that ordinary phonons cannot, rewriting expectations for thermal transport in layered devices.

Imaging heat, one atom at a time

Traditional electron microscopes treat atoms as static dots, and average their motions into still pictures. Ptychography, instead, records thousands of diffraction patterns while the beam scans, then computationally stitches them into a phase map that preserves minute displacements.

“This works by getting such high spatial resolution that the vibrations of atoms change how blurry the atoms appear,” explained Zhang, who is now at the University of Maryland.

The team reached a time-averaged positional accuracy of below fifteen picometers, which is enough to separate thermal blur from instrumental noise.

The researchers studied a special type of ultra-thin material made by stacking two layers of tungsten diselenide slightly out of alignment, by less than two degrees.

Their images showed stronger atomic vibrations in specific areas of the material, matching what scientists expected to see if phasons were present.

Simulations that were run alongside the images matched amplitude maps across the sample, giving confidence that the camera truly watched heat moving rather than electron-beam artifacts.

Meeting the moiré family of phonons

Phonons normally ferry heat as collective waves of stretching and squeezing. Moiré superlattices add a second scale, so their vibrational menu broadens to include zone-folded acoustic branches and ultrasoft shear oscillations.

Phasons sit at the bottom of that menu, with calculated frequencies below one wavenumber – far beneath the reach of Raman or infrared probes.

Their long periods let them couple efficiently to defects, impurities, and interfaces, turning them into gatekeepers of thermal flow.

That sensitivity opens a path to engineer heat management from the bottom up: tweak the twist angle, layer count, or composition, and phasons should tune themselves accordingly.

Engineers already adjust electronic band structures with moiré patterns – manipulating vibrational spectra may be just as powerful.

At room temperature, a single layer of this material doesn’t move heat very well. It’s almost ten times worse at it than graphene, mostly because the atoms are heavier and vibrate more slowly.

Phasons could make it even harder for heat to spread or change the direction it flows, giving engineers new ways to keep tiny devices cool. 

Why phasons could remake electronics

Modern chips throttle performance when hotspots rise by a few degrees, and 2D materials promise compact transistors but worsen cooling by stacking device layers. If phasons dominate thermal motion in these stacks, understanding them becomes urgent.

“We could look at a single atom and identify a defect that’s preventing the material from cooling down more efficiently,” explained Zhang.

Such pinpoint inspection could drive a new generation of thermal interface materials and on-chip heat spreaders.

Phasons also interact with electrons and excitons, influencing optical response and superconductivity as reported in twisted graphene.

Imaging them may therefore unlock links between heat, charge, and light in van der Waals heterostructures.

Future devices might exploit controlled phason populations as thermal switches, shunting heat away when open and trapping it when closed – all without moving parts.

Ptychography captures details of delicate materials

In just five years, imaging tools improved enough to see five times more detail than before. Because ptychography uses a gentler beam, it can capture images of delicate materials without damaging them, making it useful for studying things like proteins and other soft substances.

Automated parameter tuning now uses Bayesian optimization to pick scan steps, defocus, and aperture size, all of which trim human bias while squeezing extra clarity from noisy data. Those tools turn once-esoteric setups into push-button accessories for modern transmission microscopes.

Metrology agencies already cite ptychography as the highest-resolution imaging method on record, and laboratories worldwide race to pair it with cryogenic stages, ultrafast beams, and holographic probes. Each add-on promises sharper movies showing matter in motion.

As microscopes evolve, theoretical models must keep pace, integrating quantum molecular dynamics with machine-learned potentials to simulate the sprawling moiré supercells that are seen experimentally.

What comes next for cooler chips

Phasons have moved from mathematical footnotes to observable actors, yet many questions linger. Do they scatter with electrons strongly enough to limit mobility, or might they carry spin information in magnetic layers?

Temperature-dependent studies will test whether phason amplitudes freeze out at cryogenic temperatures or persist to influence low-temperature quantum phases.

Pump-probe experiments, meanwhile, could capture their real-time evolution after a laser pulse, measuring lifetimes directly.

Device engineers will watch closely, because controlling phasons might spell the difference between a 2D logic chip that throttles under load and one that cruises at full speed.

Tailored twist angles, patterning, or substrate choice could shepherd heat exactly where designers want it.

For now, the Illinois team shows that heat need not stay hidden. Atoms vibrate, the camera rolls, and the secret life of crystals steps into view.

The study is published in Science.

Image credit: (left) atoms present in the 2D material. (right) photos of single atoms. The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

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Scientists have mapped 332 Antarctic canyon networks to help assess the future course of climate breakdown.

The research, published in the journal Marine Geology, shows in high resolution submarine valleys that can reach down more than 4,000 metres, more than twice the depth of the Grand Canyon in the US.

The resulting data shows that the canyons may have a bigger impact than thought on ocean circulation, ice-shelf thinning and climate change.

The study was carried out by researchers from the Faculty of Earth Sciences at the University of Barcelona, Spain, and the marine geosciences research group at University College Cork, Ireland.

The Antarctic canyons resemble those elsewhere “but tend to be larger and deeper because of the prolonged action of polar ice and the immense volumes of sediment transported by glaciers to the continental shelf”, said David Amblàs of the research team.

He added: “That’s why we must continue to gather high-resolution bathymetric data in unmapped areas that will surely reveal new canyons, collect observational data … and keep improving our climate models to better represent these processes and increase the reliability of projections on climate change impacts.”

Submarine canyons are carved valleys on the seafloor that play a crucial role in the movement of sediments, nutrients and the creations of biodiverse habitats. Antarctica’s canyons become enlarged because of the turbulent water currents that carry sediments at high speed through them.

Scientists have been able to map in high resolution only 27% of the Earth’s seafloor, uncovering 10,000 submarine canyons worldwide. But most of these canyons remain underexplored, especially in polar regions.

Using data from the International Bathymetric Chart of the Southern Ocean, researchers produced high-resolution maps of 332 Antarctic canyon networks, five times as many as previous studies had managed. The most spectacular of these are in east Antarctica and “characterised by complex, branching canyon systems”, said Amblàs.

Maps of the Antarctic submarine canyons are increasingly recognised by scientists as essential for understanding the impact of the climate crisis. The canyons channel warm water from the open sea towards the coastline, thinning the floating ice shelves and contributing to the rise in global sea levels, said Riccardo Arosio, another of the researchers.

Mapping the seafloor and its influence on the movement of water is necessary to build accurate ocean circulation models that can be used to predict the impact of the climate crisis, especially in vulnerable polar regions.

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The Exploration Company has successfully completed a six-week test campaign of the oxygen-rich preburner for its Typhoon rocket engine.

With co-financing from the French space agency CNES, The Exploration Company began work on its Typhoon rocket engine in January 2024. The reusable engine uses a full-flow staged combustion cycle and is designed to produce 250 tonnes of thrust, which is comparable to a SpaceX Raptor.”

On 31 July, the company announced that it had completed a series of 16 hot-fire tests of the oxygen-rich preburner for the Typhoon engine. The preburner powers a rocket engine’s turbopumps, which feed fuel and oxidiser into the combustion chamber at high pressure. The six-week test campaign was conducted on the P8 research and development test bench at the German aerospace agency DLR’s facilities in Lampoldshausen.

According to the company, once it had overcome low-frequency instabilities, it achieved stable combustion test firings of up to 85 seconds, a significant improvement over its previous test campaign earlier this year.

In early February, the company revealed that it had completed the first six-week test campaign of the preburner. Due to challenges, which included hardware failures, it was unable to achieve more than 16 seconds of stable combustion at that time.

While there’s been clear progress since the February test campaign, the 31 July update offered no indication of a path forward.

At this point, the Typhoon engine does not have a confirmed application, as it is far too powerful for any of the company’s current in-space logistics projects. According to information provided to European Spaceflight by the company, The Exploration Company partnered with an industrial prime to submit a proposal for the European Space Agency’s European Launcher Challenge. While unconfirmed, the company’s contribution to the bid likely included the Typhoon engine. The Exploration Company has not made any public comments on whether the unnamed industrial prime was among the five companies selected by ESA to move forward. As a result, the engine’s future remains uncertain.