Category: 7. Science

A historic New York auction saw a 25-kilogram piece of Mars and a rare young dinosaur skeleton sell for staggering prices, capturing global attention

The star lot was a massive meteorite named NWA 16788, found in Niger’s Sahara Desert in November 2023. Scientists believe it was blasted off Mars by a colossal asteroid strike 140 million miles ago. Expected to fetch $2–4 million, it ultimately sold for $4.3 million, bringing the total to approximately $5.3 million once buyer’s fees were included, it the highest-priced Martian meteorite ever sold at auction, as confirmed by Sotheby’s.

The live bidding was slow, with the auctioneer trying to coax more offers and decreasing the minimum bid increases.

The dinosaur skeleton, on the other hand, sparked a war among six bidders over six minutes. With a pre-auction estimate of $4 million to $6 million, it is one of only four known Ceratosaurus nasicornis skeletons and the only juvenile skeleton of the species, which resembles the Tyrannosaurus rex but is smaller.

A mounted Juvenile Ceratosaurus skeleton, of the Late Jurassic, Kimmeridgian Stage, approximately 154-149 million years ago, estimated at $4 – 6 million, is displayed at Sotheby’s, in New York

Bidding for the skeleton started with a high advance offer of $6 million, then escalated during the live round with bids $500,000 higher than the last and later $1 million higher than the last before ending at $26 million.

People applauded after the auctioneer gaveled the bidding closed.

The official sale price was $30.5 million with fees and costs. That buyer also was not immediately disclosed, but the auction house said the buyer plans to loan the skeleton to an institution. It was the third-highest amount paid for a dinosaur at auction. A Stegosaurus skeleton called “Apex” holds the record after it was sold for $44.6 million last year at Sotheby’s.

Parts of the skeleton were found in 1996 near Laramie, Wyoming, at Bone Cabin Quarry, a gold mine for dinosaur bones. Specialists assembled nearly 140 fossil bones with some sculpted materials to recreate the skeleton and mounted it so it’s ready to exhibit, Sotheby’s says. It was acquired last year by Fossilogic, a Utah-based fossil preparation and mounting company.

It’s more than 6 feet (2 meters) tall and nearly 11 feet (3 meters) long, and is believed to be from the late Jurassic period, about 150 million years ago. Ceratosaurus dinosaurs could grow up to 25 feet (7.6 meters) long, while the T. rex could be 40 feet (12 meters) long.

The bidding for the Mars meteorite began with two advance offers of $1.9 million and $2 million. The live bidding slowly proceeded with increases of $200,000 and $300,000 until $4 million, then continued with $100,000 increases until reaching $4.3 million.

The red, brown and gray meteorite is about 70% larger than the next largest piece of Mars found on Earth and represents nearly 7% of all the Martian material currently on this planet, Sotheby’s says. It measures nearly 15 inches by 11 inches by 6 inches (375 millimeters by 279 millimeters by 152 millimeters).

It was also a rare find. There are only 400 Martian meteorites out of the more than 77,000 officially recognized meteorites found on Earth, the auction house says.

“This Martian meteorite is the largest piece of Mars we have ever found by a long shot,” Cassandra Hatton, vice chairman for science and natural history at Sotheby’s, said in an interview before the auction. “So it’s more than double the size of what we previously thought was the largest piece of Mars.”

It’s not clear exactly when the meteorite was blasted off the surface of Mars, but testing showed it probably happened in recent years, Sotheby’s says.

Hatton said a specialized lab examined a small piece of the red planet remnant and confirmed it was from Mars. It was compared with the distinct chemical composition of Martian meteorites discovered during the Viking space probe that landed on Mars in 1976, she said.

The examination found that it is an “olivine-microgabbroic shergottite,” a type of Martian rock formed from the slow cooling of Martian magma. It has a course-grained texture and contains the minerals pyroxene and olivine, Sotheby’s says.

It also has a glassy surface, likely due to the high heat that burned it when it fell through Earth’s atmosphere, Hatton said. “So that was their first clue that this wasn’t just some big rock on the ground,” she said.

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Topline

This week sees the start of the year’s most famous meteor shower, the Perseids. Peaking each August, the Perseid meteor shower is the most popular and celebrated in the Northern Hemisphere thanks to its coinciding with warm summer nights, but this year, an awkwardly timed full moon means some careful planning is required to avoid a washout.

Key Facts

How And Where To Watch A Meteor Shower

If you’re planning to observe meteors, make sure the moon will be down. After all, it’s the biggest light polluter there is in the night sky and will render pointless a trip to dark regions on a light pollution map or a Dark Sky Place. As well as a dark sky, a clear sky is required, so check the weather forecast in advance. Find somewhere with a clear view of as much of the night sky as possible, packing extra layers to keep warm, as well as bug spray, snacks and drinks. Be patient, giving your eyes at least 30 minutes to dark-adapt before expecting to see shooting stars. Take a break every 30 minutes and avoid looking at a smartphone, which will kill your night vision.

The Giant Comet That Causes The Perseids

All meteor showers are caused by streams of dust and debris left in the inner solar system by comets or large asteroids. In the case of the Perseids, it’s Comet Swift-Tuttle, which at 16 miles (26 km) has the largest nucleus of any comet known to regularly pass close to Earth. That’s about twice the size of the asteroid believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs, according to Space.com. It was last in the inner solar system in 1992 and will next visit in 2125.

Further Reading

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A star is unleashing a barrage of X-rays that is causing a closely-orbiting, young planet to wither away an astonishing rate, according to a new study using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and described in our latest press release. A team of researchers has determined that this planet will go from the size of Jupiter down to a small, barren world.

This graphic provides a visual representation of what astronomers think is happening around the star (known as TOI 1227) and a planet that is orbiting it at a fraction the distance between Mercury and the Sun. This “baby” planet, called TOI 1227 b, is just about 8 million years old, about a thousand times younger than our Sun. The main panel is an artist’s concept that shows the Jupiter-sized planet (lower left) around TOI 1227, which is a faint red star. Powerful X-rays from the star’s surface are tearing away the atmosphere of the planet, represented by the blue tail. The star’s X-rays may eventually completely remove the atmosphere.

The team used new Chandra data — seen in the inset — to measure the amounts of X-rays from TOI 1227 that are striking the planet. Using computer models of the effects of these X-rays, they concluded they will have a transformative effect, rapidly stripping away the planet’s atmosphere. They estimate that the planet is losing a mass equivalent to a full Earth’s atmosphere about every 200 years.

The researchers used different sets of data to estimate the age of TOI 1227 b. One method exploits measurements of how TOI 1227 b’s host star moves through space in comparison to nearby populations of stars with known ages. A second method compared the brightness and surface temperature of the star with theoretical models of evolving stars. The very young age of TOI 1227 b makes it the second youngest planet ever to be observed passing in front of its host star (a so-called transit). Previously the planet had been estimated by others to be about 11 million years old.

Of all the exoplanets astronomers have found with ages less than 50 million years, TOI 1227 b stands out for having the longest year and the host planet with the lowest mass. These properties, and the high dose of X-rays it is receiving, make it an outstanding target for future observations.

A paper describing these results has been accepted publication in The Astrophysical Journal and a preprint is available here. The authors of the paper are Attila Varga (Rochester Institute of Technology), Joel Kastner (Rochester Institute of Technology), Alexander Binks (University of Tubingen, Germany), Hans Moritz Guenther (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and Simon J. Murphy (University of New South Wales Canberra in Australia).

NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Chandra X-ray Center controls science operations from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and flight operations from Burlington, Massachusetts.

Way up in space, the Sun isn’t just glowing, it’s throwing. Fast-moving particles slam into Earth’s upper atmosphere, triggering dramatic bursts of energy through a mysterious process called magnetic reconnection. These invisible explosions can unleash more power than the U.S. burns in a whole day.

Enter TRACERS: NASA’s Space Detective Duo

NASA’s TRACERS mission is sending twin satellites to investigate these wild space events. Their goal? To uncover how solar outbursts influence space weather, the invisible forces that affect satellites, power grids, and even radio signals down here on Earth.

NASA’s TRACERS mission is set to blast off in late July 2025 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base.

After launch, the two spacecraft will orbit Earth to study how the solar wind, streams of charged particles from the Sun, interacts with Earth’s magnetic shield, known as the magnetosphere.

Earth’s magnetic field is gradually weakening

The Sun doesn’t just shine, it streams. Solar wind, a fierce mix of charged particles and tangled magnetic fields, races through space at over a million miles per hour, smacking into anything in its path.

Luckily, Earth has a guardian: the magnetosphere. Think of it as a floating cosmic shield, like a bar magnet spinning around in space, repelling most of the Sun’s fury. But when solar wind pressure builds, magnetic field lines can snap and whip particles away in explosive bursts; this is magnetic reconnection, one of space’s most powerful fireworks.

At Earth’s poles, the shield has entry points called polar cusps, funnel-shaped openings where particles pour in and crash into the atmosphere, painting the skies with auroras and, sometimes, chaos.

In May 2024, Earth got a taste of solar drama:

• The biggest geomagnetic storm in 20+ years
• Flights rerouted, power systems scrambled
• GPS-guided tractors lost track of the field

The two satellites of the TRACERS mission will fly “concurrently”, one after the other, in a relatively low orbit about 360 miles above Earth. They will travel at speeds exceeding 16,000 mph, equipped with a suite of instruments to measure various aspects of plasma and its interaction with Earth’s magnetosphere.

When the solar wind hits the magnetosphere, some energy waves …

The satellites will explore where Earth’s magnetic field descends to the ground at the North Polar Cusp. The satellites will be placed in a Sun-synchronous orbit, and they will always pass through Earth’s dayside polar cusp, studying thousands of reconnection events at these concentrated areas.

NASA’s twin TRACERS satellites aren’t just flying in circles; they’re dancing through Earth’s dayside polar cusp, a sweet spot where the planet’s magnetic field dips and solar particles stream in. By orbiting in sync with the Sun, TRACERS will repeatedly pass through this energetic gateway, capturing thousands of magnetic reconnection events in real time.

Why This Matters

This mission will stitch together a dynamic timeline of how magnetic reconnection evolves, not just across days, but from sunrise to starlight. It’s a leap beyond earlier snapshots, like the 2018 TRICE-2 mission, which launched short-term rockets over the Norwegian Sea and captured single moments.

“TRICE showed we could measure these effects,” said David Miles of the University of Iowa. “TRACERS shows we can track how they change.”

A method to study mini-magnetospheres

Previous missions could only grab a single snapshot of a space weather event, like trying to understand a thunderstorm from one lightning bolt. Too much was changing, too fast.

Enter NASA’s TRACERS satellites, flying in tandem like synchronized swimmers in space. Spaced just 10 seconds apart, they’ll capture multiple snapshots of the same stormy region, building a fluid, frame-by-frame view of how Earth’s magnetic shield reacts to the solar wind’s punch.

In one year, they’ll gather over 3,000 measurements, stitching together a time-lapse of how space weather unfolds around our planet. Scientists will finally be able to observe the magnetosphere as a dynamic system, rather than a static moment, improving predictions and paving the way for smarter safeguards against geomagnetic disruptions.

NASA’s new mission, TRACERS, isn’t going it alone; it’s joining a stellar squad of spacecraft across the solar system to better understand the Sun’s magnetic mood swings.

Early magnetic field around Earth was even stronger than previously believed

At the heart of it all is the Parker Solar Probe, which gets up close and personal with the Sun, tracking how magnetic reconnection heats and speeds up the solar wind, the very stuff TRACERS watches as it hits Earth.

Back at home, TRACERS taps into data from:

• EZIE, which studies electric currents on Earth’s nightside
• PUNCH, which keeps an eye on solar wind and its dance with Earth’s atmosphere

Together, this space fleet is building a clearer picture of how Earth’s magnetic shield opens up and lets solar particles stream in, sometimes lighting up the skies with auroras, and at other times interfering with satellites and power grids.

“TRACERS is a vital new piece of the puzzle,” says NASA’s Reinhard Friedel. “Combining forces across missions helps us predict and prepare for space weather impacts on our planet and our tech.”

The mission is led by David Miles from the University of Iowa, with instruments built by teams across Texas and California. From launchpads in Florida to space labs around the country, TRACERS is supported by NASA’s heliophysics experts and the VADR launch program.

On November 28, 1966, an American flight crossed the Antarctic Peninsula south of the southernmost tip of Chile. The plane was there to map the Antarctic landscape. Using a camera that may have been borrowed from the US Navy, the plan captured shots of the Wordie Ice Shelf, a once prominent part of the western Antarctic Peninsula located in Marguerite Bay. Once upon a time, this ice shelf – made up of multiple glaciers – covered an area of around 2,200 square kilometers (849 square miles), but as of the late 1980s, it started to retreat. By the early 2000s, it was almost completely gone, leaving behind a few small individual shelves.

An outcome of this loss was that the “plug” that held a lot of glacier ice broke off, contributing to sea level rise. Thankfully, the Wordie Ice Shelf was comparatively small, so this has only amounted to a rise on the scale of millimeters. However, there are more ice shelves in the Antarctic that could collapse due to climate change. Two in particular – Ronne and Ross – are thought to hold enough ice to produce a sea level rise of up to 5 meters (16 feet).

This will not be a remote incident either. It may feel like it is a long way away, but if these two ice shelves melt, then the sea level rise will be felt in places in the Northern Hemisphere too. This is where the newly discovered photo of the Wordie Ice Shelf can be so useful, representing a valuable first data point in the study of the ice shelf’s collapse over the subsequent years.

The team behind the research has used the image, alongside a vast archive of old aerial images and modern satellite observations, to show the collapse of an ice shelf as a constant process over a long period of time. This offers important insight that can help improve our understanding of these large icy structures and the mechanisms behind their demise. Moreover, it can be used to inform computer models to predict sea level rise, so we can prioritize how to adapt to climate change.

“We have identified several signs of incipient ice shelf collapse that we expect will be observed in other ice shelves, but perhaps more importantly, the dataset has given us a multitude of pinning points that can reveal how far advanced a collapse is,” lead author Mads Dømgaard, a postdoc from the Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management at the University of Copenhagen, said in a statement.

“It’s a completely new tool that we can use to do reality checks on ice shelves that are at risk of collapsing or already in the process of collapsing.”

The historical aerial photos were analyzed with a technique known as “structure-from-motion” photogrammetry, which allows scientists to reconstruct the ice’s thickness, its surface structure, extent, and its flow velocity all the way back to the 1960s.

What did this tell them? It was always assumed that the Wordie Ice Shelf collapsed due to a warmer atmosphere. At the same time, scientists believed that meltwater lakes had formed on the ice’s surface, which contributed to its disintegration. But analyzing the photos reveals that that does not seem to have been the case. Instead, the new research suggests that the main melting occurred under the ice where the sea and the shelf met.

“Our findings show that the primary driver of Wordie’s collapse is rising sea temperatures, which have generated the melting beneath the floating ice shelf,” Dømgaard said.

This research has already had a significant impact on our understanding of ice shelf collapse.

“The tentative conclusion from our findings is that ice shelf collapse may be slower than we thought. This means that the risk of a very rapid development of violent sea level rise from melting in Antarctica is slightly lower, based on knowledge from studies like this one,” study author Anders Anker Bjørk, Assistant Professor at the Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management, added.

But there is another side to this.

“It was already a supertanker that needed to be turned to stall the melting of ice in Antarctica, but our data shows a collapse process that is even more protracted than previously assumed,” said Bjørk. “And this longer process will make it harder to reverse the trend once it has started. This is an unambiguous signal to prioritize halting greenhouse gas emissions now rather than sometime in the future.”

The study is published in Nature Communications. 

Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, appears to have the right ingredients and conditions for a certain kind of tiny bubble to form that has the potential to lead to alien life. 

These microscopic bubbles — called vesicles — could naturally occur in Titan’s methane lakes, according to a new NASA study. On Earth, the structures are considered a crucial early step in the development of living cells. On Titan, a moon 880 million miles away in space, they could hint at chemistry capable of mimicking an Earth-like path to simple life-forms.

Titan is no ordinary moon. It’s the only place besides Earth in the solar system known to have a thick atmosphere, active weather, and liquid on its surface. But instead of water, Titan’s lakes and seas are filled with methane and ethane. They cycle through the atmosphere, forming clouds and oily rain that shape the landscape below, similar to Earth’s water cycle, but at temperatures hundreds of degrees below freezing. 

Scientists have long wondered whether Titan’s liquids could also provide an environment for the chemical building blocks of life — or rather, the kind of life people know about.

“The existence of any vesicles on Titan would demonstrate an increase in order and complexity, which are conditions necessary for the origin of life,” said NASA scientist Conor Nixon in a statement.

Mashable Light Speed

Scientists believe one of the most important steps in the origin of life on early Earth was the formation of vesicles. These protocells develop when certain molecules arrange themselves into spherical pockets encased in flexible membranes. Water and other substances can get trapped within them, thus serving as natural containers for complex reactions. Because of this, NASA researchers have wondered whether a similar process could take shape in those freezing lakes on Titan, one of Saturn’s 274 known moons. 

According to the new study, published in the International Journal of Astrobiology, it could. If a methane raindrop were to hit one of the moon’s lakes, it could splash back a mist of droplets. These droplets, along with the lake’s surface, could become coated in certain molecules called amphiphiles. If the droplets were to then land back on the lake, their surfaces could fuse, creating a double-layer membrane droplet. 

The result could be a vesicle floating in liquid methane — similar to how the first cell-like structures may have formed on Earth. Over time, these vesicles might float, interact, and evolve into the groundwork for primitive cells.

While there’s no direct evidence yet that vesicles actually do exist on Titan, the research shows it would be possible in the alien world’s current conditions. NASA’s upcoming $3.35 billion Dragonfly mission won’t visit Titan’s lakes directly, but the new findings offer a reason to keep looking.

“We’re excited about these new ideas,” Nixon said. “They can open up new directions in Titan research and may change how we search for life on Titan in the future.”

The Subaru Telescope has spotted a cosmic relic that could rewrite what we know about the early Solar System.

Nicknamed ‘Ammonite’ but officially designated 2023 KQ14, this newly discovered space rock is now the fourth known sednoid, a rare class of distant, icy bodies with highly elongated orbits that dance around the outermost fringes of our cosmic neighbourhood.

What makes Ammonite special? It’s not just its extreme orbit.

It’s a frozen relic from the dawn of the Solar System, offering clues about how our planets formed around the Sun, and whether a mysterious ninth planet still lurks in the darkness.

Finding Solar System fossils

Ammonite’s discovery comes courtesy of FOSSIL (Formation of the Outer Solar System: An Icy Legacy), a project aimed at uncovering ancient remnants of the early Solar System.

By studying relics from the Solar System’s formation, scientists can learn more about what our early cosmic neighbourhood was like.

This sort of science is also conducted by missions like Hayabusa 2 and OSIRIS-REx, which collected samples of asteroids and returned them to Earth for examination under laboratory conditions.

But the scope of such missions is limited to what can physically be reached by spacecraft and safely returned to Earth.

Launched in 2020 and led by an international team primarily from Japan and Taiwan, FOSSIL uses the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) on the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii, one of the most powerful wide-field cameras on Earth.

“In recent years, spacecraft have been sent to various small bodies in the Solar System for close observation and sample collection,” says Dr. Fumi Yoshida of the University of Occupational and Environmental Health and the Chiba Institute of Technology, who leads FOSSIL.

“However, these spacecrafts have only explored limited regions of the Solar System. Most of the vast Solar System remains unexplored.

“Wide-field observations with the Subaru Telescope are steadily pushing back the frontier.”

A two-decade trail of clues

Although official discovery of Ammonite, 2023 KQ14, came in 2023 through Subaru’s observations, astronomers later found it in archived data stretching all the way back to 2005.

That includes images from the Dark Energy Camera and the Kitt Peak National Observatory.

These astronomical breadcrumbs give astronomers 19 years of observational data, enabling them to reconstruct Ammonite’s orbit

Ammonite has maintained a stable orbit around the Sun for at least 4.5 billion years – almost as old as the Sun itself – making it one of the oldest wanderers out there.

What Ammonite tells us about Planet Nine

Ammonite’s orbit doesn’t match those of other sednoids like Sedna, 2012 VP113, and 2015 TG387, which has implications for one of astronomy’s biggest mysteries: Planet Nine.

Some scientists believe the bizarre orbits of sednoids are due to the gravitational pull of an unseen planet far beyond Neptune — a so-called Planet Nine.

Evidence for Planet Nine was announced in a study released in April 2025.

But Ammonite breaks the pattern. Its orbit is different enough that it weakens the case for Planet Nine as it’s currently imagined.

“The fact that Ammonite’s current orbit does not align with those of the other three sednoids lowers the likelihood of the Planet Nine hypothesis,” says Dr. Yukun Huang of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, who conducted simulations of Ammonite’s.

“It is possible that a planet once existed in the Solar System but was later ejected, causing the unusual orbits we see today.”

One possibility is that a long-lost planet may have once stirred up the Solar System’s outer regions, only to be ejected, leaving behind scrambled orbits and icy fossils like Ammonite.

A new piece of the Solar System puzzle

The discovery of Ammonite challenges our current models and opens up new possibilities for what shaped the outer Solar System.

“This region is far from the Sun, where Neptune’s gravity has little influence,” says Dr. Yoshida.

“The presence of objects with elongated orbits and large perihelion distances implies that something extraordinary occurred during the ancient era when Ammonite formed.”

With telescopes like Subaru continuing to peer into the deep dark, the FOSSIL project is far from finished.

More discoveries like Ammonite could soon help us piece together the full story of our Solar System, from chaotic beginnings to the (relatively) quiet stability we enjoy today.

Read the full paper at www.nature.com/articles/s41550-025-02595-7

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