Category: 7. Science

Astronomers are interested in finding planets of a similar size, composition, and temperature to Earth, also called Earth-like planets. However, there are challenges in this endeavor. Small, rocky planets are difficult to find because current planet-hunting methods are biased towards gas giants. Also, for a planet to be similar in temperature to Earth, it has to orbit a comparable distance from its host star, similar to Earth orbiting the Sun, which means it takes approximately a year to go around its star. This creates another problem for astronomers trying to find these planets, since searching for an Earth-like planet around just one star would involve dedicating a telescope to monitor it constantly for more than a year. 

To save time spent operating telescopes, scientists need a new way to find stars that are good candidates for thorough searches before dedicating resources to observing them. One team of astronomers investigated whether observable properties of planetary systems could indicate the presence of Earth-like planets. They found that the arrangement of known planets in the system and the mass, radius, and distance from its closest planet to its star could be used to predict the occurrence of an Earth-like planet. 

Then, the team tested how well machine learning could handle this task. They started by creating a sample set of planetary systems with and without Earth-like planets. Astronomers have only found around 5,000 stars in the sky with an orbiting exoplanet, which makes the sample size too small to train machine learning programs. So, the team generated 3 sets of planetary systems using a computational framework that simulates how planets form, called the Bern model. 

The Bern model starts with 20 clumps of dust that are 600 meters, or about 2,000 feet, across. These clumps kickstart gas and dust accumulating into full-sized planets that form over 20 million years. Then the planetary system evolves over 10 billion years to an end state, called the synthetic planetary system, that the astronomers include in their dataset. They used this model to create 24,365 systems with stars the size of the Sun, 14,559 systems with stars ½ the size of the Sun, and 14,958 systems with stars ⅕ the size of the Sun. They also split each of these groups into 2 sub-groups, including a group with an Earth-like planet and a group without an Earth-like planet. 

With these larger datasets, the team then tested whether a machine learning technique called a Random Forest model could categorize the planetary systems into those that likely had an Earth-like planet and those that did not. In a Random Forest, all the outputs are either true or false, and different parts of the program, called trees, make decisions on different subsections of the whole training dataset. The team decided that if a planetary system likely had 1 or more Earth-like planets, then the Random Forest should consider that “true.” The researchers tested their algorithm for accuracy using a metric known as a precision score.  

They set up the Random Forest to base its decision on specific factors in each synthetic planetary system. These factors included the arrangement of planets astronomers could feasibly find if they looked at a similar real-life system, how many of those planets were in the system, how many planets bigger than 100 times the Earth’s mass were in the system, and the size and distance of the nearest planet to the star. The team used 80% of the synthetic planetary systems as training data and reserved the remaining 20% for the first testing of the completed algorithm.

The team found that their Random Forest model predicted where an Earth-like planet likely existed with a precision score of 0.99, meaning it correctly identified systems with Earth-like planets 99% of the time. Following this success, they tested their model on real data for 1,567 stars in a similar size range that are known to have at least 1 planet orbiting them. Of these, 44 passed their algorithm’s threshold for having an Earth-like planet. The team suggested most of the systems in this subset wouldn’t fall apart if an Earth-like planet were present.

The team concluded that their model could identify candidate stars for Earth-like planets, but with caveats. One was that their training data was still limited, as generating synthetic planetary systems takes a long time and is expensive. However, the bigger caveat was that they assumed the Bern model accurately simulated planetary formation. They suggested researchers rigorously test its validity for future theoretical work.

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Dark, finger‑like marks slide down countless Martian cliffs each year. These stripes have prompted decades of speculation about water still trickling across the Red Planet.

A new analysis of 500,000 of these features shows that they form through avalanches of dry dust, report Valentin Tertius Bickel of the University of Bern and Adomas Valantinas of Brown University.

Why the Martian stripes matter

For almost 50 years, scientists have puzzled over the dusky streaks that run hundreds to thousands of feet down Martian slopes before slowly fading.

Their shorter‑lived cousins, recurring slope lineae (RSL), appear seasonally and were once thought to be briny trickles that might shelter microbes.

If liquid water were involved, these sites would demand strict planetary‑protection rules and might even hint at present‑day habitability.

Proving the absence of water, therefore, reshapes exploration priorities and eases contamination worries.

Building a map of dust‑based stripes

Bickel and Valantinas trained a deep‑learning model on images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and scanned 86,000 photographs, thus assembling the first global catalog of half a million Martian stripes.

The map shows that streaks cover less than 0.1 percent of Mars’ surface, yet shuffle enough dust each Martian year to rival several planet‑wide storms.

Most stripes cluster between 40 degrees north and 20 degrees south, in the dustiest lowlands where reflectance is high and grain size is tiny.

Bright, older streaks outnumber fresh dark ones by roughly 37 to 1, revealing a surface that is still reworked long after volcanic and fluvial eras ended.

Wind, impacts, and avalanches

The study found no link between Martian stripes and humidity, subsurface ice, or temperatures that ever rise above the freezing point.

Instead, stripe density rises sharply in areas with above‑average wind speeds and fresh impact craters, suggesting that blasts and gusts dislodge blankets of ultra‑fine dust.

“Once we had this global map, we could compare it to databases of temperature, wind speed, and rock‑slide activity. Then we could look for correlations over hundreds of thousands of cases,” said Bickel.

High‑resolution images catch some streaks cascading minutes after nearby meteorites land, while others follow seasonal dust deposition peaks tracked by orbital weather models.

Laboratory experiments with micron‑scale grains show that such powders can flow like a liquid under Mars’ weak gravity, giving the stripes smooth outlines.

Future investigations of Martian stripes

Because the streaks are dry, rovers and landers can safely approach them without risking forward contamination of a hidden oasis.

The dusty gullies also provide natural “core samples” of surface coatings, which offer clues to recent climate cycles without the need for drilling.

Planetary‑protection officers may reroute planned missions away from suspected wet spots and toward subsurface ice, where astrobiological potential remains stronger.

For human explorers, the result underscores that liquid water is still locked in ice or vapor, simplifying landing‑site selection but highlighting the need for in‑situ resource extraction.

Dust stripes and climate dynamics

The dust shifted by Martian stripes isn’t just a cosmetic feature, it’s part of a much larger atmospheric loop.

Each Martian year, flowing stripes displace enough dust to rival multiple global dust storms, suggesting that they play a bigger role in regulating Mars’ thin, dusty air than previously thought.

This ongoing redistribution could influence seasonal temperature patterns, surface reflectivity, and even the strength of regional wind systems.

Researchers haven’t yet observed the dust entering the atmosphere during a stripe’s formation, but models suggest this movement contributes significantly to the surface-atmosphere dust exchange budget.

Martian dust stripes flows like a fluid

The motion of Martian slope stripes mimics the behavior of liquids, even though they consist of dry dust.

Laboratory studies on granular materials show that fine particles can flow downhill in dense, smooth waves, especially in low-gravity environments like Mars.

On Earth, this kind of granular flow is seen in slow-moving avalanches or the collapse of powdery hills.

On Mars, it may explain why slope stripes form without leaving behind visible dust clouds. The dust might move in tightly packed sheets, held together by electrostatic forces and grain-to-grain interactions.

The unanswered questions

Researchers still debate why RSL favor sun‑facing southern highlands while most Martian stripes sit in northern lowlands. They question whether this is related to different grain sizes or bedrock textures.

Dust‑devil tracks often skirt stripe fields but rarely overlap, raising puzzles about the effects of localized wind turbulence and static charging.

Future high‑cadence imaging could reveal exactly how fast each stripe forms, whether seconds or hours, and whether Marsquakes ever help kick‑start an avalanche.

For now, the Red Planet’s famous stripes turn out to be the work of wind and impacts, not water, deepening our understanding of a world that remains strikingly dry.

The full study is published in Nature Communications.

Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / University of Arizona.

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Constantinos G. Vayenas, Dionysios Tsousis and Eftychia Martino discuss advancements in understanding particle physics through the development of the Rotating Lepton Model (RLM)

The development of the Bohr model for the H atom (Fig. 1) has played a central role in reaching our current level of understanding of chemical synthesis.

In recent years, the development of the Rotating Lepton Model (RLM) of hadrons and bosons ^(1-4) provided an equally effective approach for modeling the structure and accurately computing the masses of subatomic particles, such as hadrons and bosons, nuclei, and even cosmic rays. ⁽⁴⁾

The RLM bears an important similarity to the Bohr model of the H atom; it comprises one or more rotating leptons on a circular orbit, gravitationally attracting themselves, rather than electrostatically, as is the case with the Bohr model. In the case of the RLM, the rotating leptons are mostly neutrinos, which have extremely small (~1-5 eV/c2) rest masses. However, due to their lightness, these rotating neutrinos easily reach highly relativistic speeds, approaching the speed of light. Thus, according to Einstein’s Special Relativity, their relativistic and gravitational masses of γm_o and γ³m_o, respectively, increase dramatically and reach values of the order of 10⁹ eV/c² and 10²⁸ eV/c², respectively. This implies that the intraparticle gravitational forces reach the Strong Force value of ħc/r², which is 1030 times stronger than the normal gravitational attraction at the same distance.

The mechanism of hadronization (or baryogenesis)

Careful examination of the decay products of several hundreds of composite particles, such as of hadrons (including baryons and bosons) ^{(4, 7-8)} has shown that the ultimate decay products of all composite particles are only the following five leptons: The electron (e-), the positron (e+) and the three neutrinos (ν₁, ν₂ and ν₃), the masses of which were first measured by Kajita ⁽⁹⁾ and McDonald ⁽¹⁰⁾ in their pioneering work. These masses are of the order of 3 to 50 meV/c², i.e., 12 orders of magnitude (a million million times) smaller than the masses of protons/ neutrons (10⁹ eV/c²). A first question arising from these extremely demanding to measure and dramatically different mass values of neutrinos vs those of the basic constituents of atoms (i.e. protons, neutrons and electrons), is how the tiny masses of neutrinos are related to the huge (by neutrino standards) masses of our familiar electrons and protons which are typically 11 orders of magnitude bigger than those of neutrinos.

The three basic equations of the RLM are given in Figure 2. They represent Newton’s gravitational Law, coupled with Einstein’s special relativity, and the de Broglie equation of quantum mechanics.

In addition to these three scientific giants, there are two more exceptional scientists- philosophers who are worth mentioning, i.e. Plato with his famous phrase ‘Everything consists of triangles’ and his student Aristotle with his equally prophetic ‘The cyclic motion is the origin of everything,’ both exactly confirmed today by the RLM geometry.

Gravitational catalysis

A fundamental question since the conception of the RLM is how the neutrinos reach or have reached the highly relativistic speeds which, via Einstein’s special relativity ⁽⁵⁾ bring their masses from rest masses (~10-2 eV/c2) ^{(4, 13)} to the highly relativistic masses (~10⁹ eV/c²) of those rotating in protons and neutrons. ⁽⁴⁾ The answer has been provided by some recent works ^(1-4) as shown in Figure 5. It results from an initial catalytic gravitational acceleration of neutrinos by positrons (and/or) electrons to highly relativistic velocities, followed by the steady-state gravitational attraction by the other co-rotating neutrinos (Fig. 6). This two-step gravitational catalysis concept appears to be quite effective. ⁽⁴⁾

The validity of the RLM is confirmed emphatically by a recent, important, and, until recently, unexplained CERN experiment, as shown in Figure 7, in which electrons and positrons are confined in a ‘vacuum’ chamber that unavoidably contains trillions of neutrinos. Thus, the Z boson peak in Figure 7 can be immediately understood by the fact that, as shown recently, ⁽¹³⁾ the Z boson is a rotating electron-positron-neutrino structure.

Acknowledgments

This research has been co-financed by the Foundation for Education and European Culture (IPEP) and by the A.G. Leventis Foundation.

References

1. C.G. Vayenas & S. Souentie, Gravity, special relativity and the strong force: A Bohr-Einstein-de-Broglie model for the formation of hadrons. Springer, New York (2012).
2. C.G. Vayenas, S. Souentie, A. Fokas. A Bohr-type model of a composite particle using gravity as the attractive force, Physica A, 405, 360-379 (2014).
3. C.G. Vayenas, D. Tsousis and D. Grigoriou, Computation of the masses, energies and internal pressures of hadrons, mesons and bosons via the Rotating Lepton Model, Physica A, 545 (2020) 123679.
4. C.G. Vayenas, D.G. Tsousis, E.H. Martino, “Catalysis in Chemistry and Physics: The Roles of Leptons, Special Relativity and Quantum Mechanics”, Springer Nature, Switzerland AG, (2024). ISBN978-3-031-68121-9
5. A. Einstein (1905) Zür Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper. Ann. der Physik., Bd. XVII, S. 17:891-921; English translation On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies (http://fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/) by G.B. Jeffery and W. Perrett (1923).
6. A.P. French (1968) Special relativity. W.W. Norton and Co., New York.
7. R.L. Workman et al. (Particle Data Group) (2022) The review of particle physics. Prog. Theor. Exp. Phys., 083C01 (2022).
8. The Rotating Lepton Model: Electron and Positron Catalysis of Chemical and Nuclear synthesis, Open Access Government, October 2023
9. Takaaki Kajita, Nobel Lecture (2016): Discovery of Atmospheric Neutrino Oscillations. Rep. Prog. Phys. 69, 1607 – 1635 (2006).
10. A.B. McDonald, Nobel Lecture: The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory: Observation of flavor change for solar neutrinos. Rev. Mod. Phys. 88, 030502 (1-9) (2016).
11. D.Griffiths, Introduction to Elementary Particles, 2nd edn. (Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KgaA, Weinheim, 2008).
12. Precision electroweak measurements on the Z resonance, Physics Reports, 427, (5–6), 257-454, 2006, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physrep.2005.12.006.
13. A.S. Fokas, C.G. Vayenas. On the structure, mass and thermodynamics of the Zo bosons. Physica A, 464, 231-240 (2016).

Asteroids don’t always need to head straight for Earth to draw global attention. The case of asteroid 2024 YR4 is proving just that. Once flagged for a potential Earth impact, this 200-foot-wide object has since been ruled out as a threat to our planet. But now, astronomers are monitoring a different possibility– one that puts the Moon in the line of fire.With a projected 4% chance of striking the lunar surface in 2032, the asteroid might not pose any risk to people on Earth, but the consequences of such a collision could still reach closer to home, especially for satellites and orbiting infrastructure.

Initial Earth threat ruled out

As mentioned in a recent report by Space(dot)com, asteroid 2024 YR4 was initially tracked with a 1 in 43 chance of hitting Earth. That concern has now been cleared with fresh data, confirming there’s no risk to our planet. However, the focus has shifted to the Moon, which scientists say could be struck by the asteroid in less than a decade.Astronomer Paul Wiegert from the University of Western Ontario told Space(dot)com, “A 2024 YR4 impact on the moon would pose no risk to anything on the surface of the Earth: our atmosphere will shield us. But the impact could pose some danger to equipment or astronauts (if any) on the moon, and certainly to satellites and other Earth-orbiting platforms, which are above our atmosphere.”

An explosion unseen in Millennia

According to the report, if the asteroid does collide with the Moon, the impact is expected to be massive. Scientists estimate it would release energy equivalent to 6 million tons of TNT, making it the most powerful lunar impact in nearly 5,000 years.As per Wiegert and as quoted by Space(dot)com, the collision would create a crater about 1 kilometre wide. While most of the debris from the impact would fall back to the Moon, a small percentage– estimated at between 0.02% and 0.2% – could escape into space.

Lunar debris could threaten satellites

Though the escaped fraction may seem small, it could translate to 10–100 million kilograms of lunar material. This debris could pose a serious challenge to objects in Earth’s orbit.“The YR4 impact, if it occurs and if it occurs in a favorable location, could produce a flux of meteoroids 10 to 1,000 times higher than the normal background for a few days,” Wiegert said, as quoted by Space(dot)com.

As mentioned in the report, the fragments would travel at around 22,400 miles per hour (10 km/s) – slower than regular meteors but still fast enough to damage satellites or space-based assets.

Earth’s atmosphere offers protection

Despite the volume of debris, Earth’s surface remains well protected. “The debris will burn up in Earth’s atmosphere. We don’t expect there to be many pieces large enough to survive passing through Earth’s atmosphere,” Wiegert said.He added, “A rock would have to be 3.3 feet (1 meter) or more in diameter to survive entry, but we expect most of the debris to be inches or smaller.”While ground-based life is safe, the debris could continue orbiting Earth for years, raising concerns about long-term satellite safety.

Does this call for a new risk scale?

Given the possibility of indirect space hazards, some have raised questions about the need for a system to evaluate such events. But experts say a new scale isn’t necessary.Richard P. Binzel, the planetary scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told Space(dot)com, “No, the indirect consequences are too varied to compress into a single scale.”He explained further, “The Torino Scale is all about whether a passing asteroid merits attention in the first place, and of course, most asteroids don’t.”Binzel also underlined the importance of tracking asteroids accurately. “What one can control, by obtaining more telescopic measurements, is determining with certainty whether you have a hit or miss. After all, at the end of the day, an object either hits or misses. The answer is deterministic.”

Key updates expected in 2028

Astronomers expect a clearer picture in 2028, when asteroid 2024 YR4 will once again come into view. Until then, the current probability of a lunar impact remains at 4%.“Now we wait. There is, as of right now, about a 4% chance of asteroid YR4 hitting the moon, and we probably won’t get this number updated until the asteroid returns to visibility in 2028,” Wiegert said, as quoted by Space(dot)com. “At that point, we should know pretty quickly whether or not it will in fact hit the moon. The whole event would be exciting to watch in binoculars or a small telescope.”As per the Space(dot)com report, the study has been submitted to journals of the American Astronomical Society, with a preprint available on the online repository arXiv.

China is preparing to make history with its upcoming Mars Sample Return mission, Tianwen-3, scheduled to launch in 2028. This ambitious project aims to collect Martian soil and rock samples and bring them back to Earth for detailed analysis, potentially answering one of humanity’s most profound questions; has life ever existed on Mars?

Mars, the red planet. (Credit : NASA)

The mission represents leap forward in planetary exploration. While several countries have successfully landed rovers on Mars, returning samples to Earth requires an entirely different level of technological complexity and international coordination. If successful, China would become the first nation to bring potentially biologically active material from another planet back to Earth.

Mars wasn’t always the cold, dry desert we see today. Studies suggest that Mars once had a dense atmosphere and a warm, moist climate early in its history, making it suitable for the emergence and development of microbial life. Like Earth, Mars sits within our Solar System’s habitable zone, the region where liquid water can exist on a planet’s surface and therefore potentially support life!

Scientists believe that if life ever emerged on Mars, it would likely have been microbial, similar to the extremophiles found in Earth’s harshest environments. These hardy organisms thrive in conditions that would kill most life forms, surviving in environments with extreme temperatures, radiation, or chemical compositions.

Preliminary landing sites for the Tianwen-3 mission (Credit : By Zengqian Hou, Jizhong Liu, Yigang Xu, Fuchuan Pang, Yuming Wang, Liping Qin, Yang Liu, Yu-Yan Sara Zhao, Guangfei Wei, Mengjiao Xu, Kun Jiang, Chuanpeng Hao, Shichao Ji, Renzhi Zhu, Bingkun Yu, Jia Liu, Zhenfeng Sheng, Juntao Wang, Chaolin Zhang, Yiliang Li)

The Tianwen-3 mission involves a complex two part operation. There will be two separate components; a lander which will land on the Martian surface to collect samples and an orbiter, which will wait in orbit around Mars to receive the samples and bring them back to Earth. The lander will drill two meters underground, a crucial depth because Mars’ surface is constantly bombarded with radiation and corrosive chemicals that destroy organic materials. Below this hostile surface layer, valuable signs of past or present life might still be preserved after billions of years.

The mission’s success depends on careful site selection so the team are searching for regions where liquid water likely existed in Mars’ early history, areas rich in essential nutrients, and locations where traces of microbial activity could have been preserved. This preparatory research is ongoing and represents one of the mission’s most critical phases.

Surprisingly, the greatest obstacle isn’t the technical complexity of getting to Mars and back, it’s what happens when the samples arrive on Earth. The greatest challenge is in the quarantining and monitoring required once these extraterrestrial materials arrive, a process known as planetary protection. To address the risk, they plan to construct a specialised facility near Hefei Institute of Physical Sciences where Martian samples will undergo comprehensive testing under strict isolation from Earth’s environment. The samples will remain quarantined until scientists can conclusively determine they contain no active biological agents that could threaten Earth’s biosphere.

The Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (Credit : Yen Tzu)

This cautious approach reflects the profound implications of the mission. While the risk of dangerous Martian microbes may be small, the potential consequences are too significant to ignore. Only after extensive safety testing will the samples be released to laboratories worldwide for detailed scientific analysis.

The Tianwen-3 mission builds on China’s previous Mars success. In 2021, China became only the second country after the United States to successfully land and operate a rover on Mars with its Zhurong rover. This achievement demonstrated China’s growing capabilities in interplanetary exploration. This mission represents more than just a technological achievement, it could fundamentally change our understanding of life in the universe. If the samples contain evidence of past or present Martian life, it would prove that life can emerge independently on different worlds, suggesting that life might be common throughout the universe.

Source : In search of signs of life on Mars with China’s sample return mission Tianwen-3

University of Illinois engineers have created a groundbreaking eye-safe crystal laser. This first-of-its-kind design, utilising a buried glass-like layer, promises safer sensors and smarter tech for defence, autonomous vehicles, and advanced applications

The findings, published in the IEEE Photonics Journal, mark a new era in laser design and potential real-world utility.

A solid approach to laser performance

For decades, vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) have been integral to everyday technology, from smartphones to barcode scanners. However, the emerging field of photonic-crystal surface-emitting lasers (PCSELs) offers superior characteristics, such as high brightness and exceptionally narrow, round spot sizes, making them ideal for high-precision applications like LiDAR – a crucial remote sensing technology used in battlefield mapping and navigation.

The challenge with conventional PCSEL fabrication lies in the use of air holes within the photonic crystal layer. These air holes are prone to deformation during semiconductor regrowth, compromising the laser’s integrity and uniformity. Addressing this critical limitation, the Illinois Grainger engineers, with funding from the Air Force Research Laboratory, innovated a solution: they replaced the problematic air holes with a solid dielectric material, specifically silicon dioxide.

“The first time we tried to regrow the dielectric, we didn’t know if it was even possible,” stated Erin Raftery, a graduate student in electrical and computer engineering and lead author of the research paper. “Ideally, for semiconductor growth, you want to maintain that very pure crystal structure all the way up from the base layer, which is difficult to achieve with an amorphous material like silicon dioxide. But we were actually able to grow laterally around the dielectric material and coalesce on top.” This intricate process, a testament to their engineering prowess, has enabled the first proof-of-concept design for a PCSEL with buried dielectric features.

Opening new avenues for advanced applications

The implications of this innovative laser design are profound. By enhancing laser performance and ensuring greater stability, the new PCSEL technology paves the way for safer and more precise applications across various sectors. In defense, this could translate to more accurate targeting systems and improved battlefield awareness. For the rapidly evolving autonomous vehicle industry, the eye-safe nature and superior beam quality of these lasers could lead to more reliable and safer LiDAR systems, critical for navigation and obstacle detection.

Looking ahead, experts anticipate that within the next two decades, these advanced lasers will revolutionise industries such as laser cutting, welding, and free-space communication.

NASA has tested a scale X-59 experimental aircraft at speeds of Mach 1.4 to validate its quiet supersonic technology.

In partnership with the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), NASA tested the model in a wind tunnel, measuring the shockwaves generated when breaking the sound barrier.

The tests allowed NASA to validate how closely real-world airflow matched predictions from Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) models.

The X-59 is part of NASA’s Quesst mission (Quiet SuperSonic Technology), which aims to make overland supersonic passenger flights possible.

The hand-sized NASA X-59 test model

The full size NASA X-59 will be over 99 feet long (30 metres), with a wingspan of almost 30 feet (9 metres). However, the test model used in the Japanese wind tunnel is just 1.6% of the size at around 19 inches from nose to tail.

The aircraft was exposed to airflow matching the jet’s planned cruising speed of Mach 1.4 (around 925 mph).

The series of tests performed at JAXA allowed NASA researchers to gather critical experimental data to compare to their predictions derived through Computational Fluid Dynamics modeling, which include how air will flow around the aircraft.  

This is the third round of wind tunnel testing for the X-59 following another test at JAXA and one at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Ohio.

NASA hailed the test as “an important milestone for NASA’s one-of-a-kind X-59, which is designed to fly faster than the speed of sound without causing a loud sonic boom.”

Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works has developed the X-59 for NASA’s Low-Boom Flight Demonstrator project. Work on the project has been ongoing since 2016. The first flight of the full size model is expected later this year.

Quesst: Lowering the noise of supersonic travel

When built, the X-59 is expected to cruise at Mach 1.42 at an altitude of 55,000 feet, and is designed to break the sound barrier without the hallmark ‘thump’ supersonic aircraft usually create.

The NASA X-59 does this by disrupting shockwaves to prevent them merging together, reducing the potential for a loud boom.

It could provide a breakthrough to open up supersonic travel around the world. Previous supersonic commercial aircraft like Concorde were banned from flying supersonic over land, limiting routes to over water. 

Lockheed Martin writes that the experimental X-59 will help NASA provide regulators with the information needed to establish an “acceptable commercial supersonic noise standard to lift the ban on commercial supersonic travel over land.”

But regulators are moving ahead anyway, at least in the US. In June, President Trump signed an executive order encouraging regulators to fast-track the return of overland supersonic travel, potentially paving the way for lifting existing restrictions.

Supersonic passenger travel makes a comeback… quietly

With the X-59 paving the way for quiet supersonic flight, attention is also turning to commercial players. Chief among them is Boom Supersonic, a US company working towards bringing a supersonic passenger aircraft to market.

Earlier this year, Boom flew its XB-1 demonstrator at Mach speeds with zero audible noise on the ground. In what the company calls ‘boomless cruise,’ the aircraft uses altitude to ensure the sonic boom does not reach the ground.

This technology will be fundamental to its full size passenger aircraft, the Overture. The Overture is planned to have a range of 4,250 nautical miles and a cruise speed of Mach 1.7. It will have a seating capacity of 60-80 passengers. 

United Airlines, American Airlines, and Japan Airlines have all placed orders and pre-orders for the Overture. 

For now, it seems unlikely that supersonic travel will be viable on a large scale. The aviation industry is overwhelmingly focused on increased efficiency and reduced fuel consumption. The most economical speed for commercial aircraft is in the Mach 0.78-0.85 range. 

Next-generation commercial aircraft are increasingly focussed on fuel savings rather than speed. JetZero’s revolutionary new Z4 Blended Wing Body aircraft is also subsonic and seeks to reduce fuel consumption by up to 50%. 

While Boom says the Overture will be compatible with 100% Sustainable Aviation Fuel, critics argue that high fuel burn rates may still make supersonic travel environmentally burdensome, even with SAF.

In the search for life across our Solar System, planetary scientists are concentrating much of their efforts on the liquid oceans we find beneath the frozen crusts of icy moons.

It seems unbelievable that a dwarf planet like Pluto, so far from the Sun, could host a liquid ocean beneath its surface.

But if it did, wouldn’t that make it one of the best places to search for signs of habitability beyond Earth?

Evidence for an ocean on Pluto

Water worlds beyond Earth are nothing new, with Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus known to possess global oceans beneath their icy crusts, and perhaps the right kind of conditions for microbial life to evolve.

Both worlds’ oceans may be potentially habitable since evidence has been found for requisite nutrients and heat.

Water ice has been detected at Pluto, but could it have liquid water beneath its frozen surface?

In December 2016, it was reported that beneath its icy crust, Pluto’s internal heat could support a subsurface ocean at least 100km (60 miles) deep.

In June 2020, it was theorised that this putative ocean might even have been habitable when it first formed.

It could remain habitable today if conditions are warm enough and a source of geothermal heat exists at the ocean’s base.

Additionally, a life-enabling ocean would need to lack harmful toxins like hydrogen peroxide.

What a Pluto ocean would mean

If an ocean does exist beneath Pluto’s ice, it would reside much deeper and would be located in a darker, colder region of the Solar System, 4.5 times further into space than Europa and more than twice as distant as Enceladus: a potential showstopper for microbial life.

But it would demonstrate that liquid water oceans are possible, even at Pluto’s extreme distance from the Sun.

For now, however, the jury on Pluto’s ocean remains out.

This article appeared in the July 2025 issue of BBC Sky at Night Magazine

Name: Roman dodecahedron

What it is: A 12-sided bronze object