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What happens when you use a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to launch Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus supply ship? A record-setting resupply mission to the International Space Station.

The first flight of Northrop’s upgraded Cygnus spacecraft, called Cygnus XL, is on its way to the international research lab after launching Sunday evening from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. This mission, known as NG-23, is set to arrive at the ISS early Wednesday with 10,827 pounds (4,911 kilograms) of cargo to sustain the lab and its seven-person crew.

By a sizable margin, this is the heaviest cargo load transported to the ISS by a commercial resupply mission. NASA astronaut Jonny Kim will use the space station’s Canadian-built robotic arm to capture the cargo ship on Wednesday, then place it on an attachment port for crew members to open hatches and start unpacking the goodies inside.

A bigger keg

The Cygnus XL spacecraft looks a lot like Northrop’s previous missions to the station. It has a service module manufactured at the company’s factory in Northern Virginia. This segment of the spacecraft provides power, propulsion, and other necessities to keep Cygnus operating in orbit.

The most prominent features of the Cygnus cargo freighter are its circular, fan-like solar arrays and an aluminum cylinder called the pressurized cargo module that bears some resemblance to a keg of beer. This is the element that distinguishes the Cygnus XL from earlier versions of the Cygnus supply ship.

The cargo module is 5.2 feet (1.6 meters) longer on the Cygnus XL. The full spacecraft is roughly the size of two Apollo command modules, according to Ryan Tintner, vice president of civil space systems at Northrop Grumman. Put another way, the volume of the cargo section is equivalent to two-and-a-half minivans.

“The most notable thing on this mission is we are debuting the Cygnus XL configuration of the spacecraft,” Tintner said. “It’s got 33 percent more capacity than the prior Cygnus spacecraft had. Obviously, more may sound like better, but it’s really critical because we can deliver significantly more science, as well as we’re able to deliver a lot more cargo per launch, really trying to drive down the cost per kilogram to NASA.”

Cargo modules for Northrop’s Cygnus spacecraft are built by Thales Alenia Space in Turin, Italy, employing a similar design to the one Thales used for several of the space station’s permanent modules. Officials moved forward with the first Cygnus XL mission after the preceding cargo module was damaged during shipment from Italy to the United States earlier this year.

Protoplanets are celestial objects in the act of forming into full planets within the gas and dust disks surrounding hot, young stars. These objects, often several times the mass of Jupiter, are still embedded in their birth environments, actively feeding on surrounding material through their own circumplanetary disks. Unlike mature planets, protoplanets offer a rare glimpse into the violent, chaotic processes of planetary formation, revealing how the worlds we see today form.

Vesta is a known surviving protoplanet (Credit : NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCAL/MPS/DLR/IDA)

Now, a team of astronomers have caught one such object in the act of forming. The object in question is AB Aurigae b, a giant protoplanet about four times the mass of Jupiter, located 93 astronomical units from its young star, that’s roughly three times the distance between the Sun and Neptune. What makes this discovery particularly exciting is that astronomers have detected the planet actively accreting material, essentially watching it grow in real time.

Using the Very Large Telescope’s MUSE spectrograph in Chile, an international team led by researchers from the Astrobiology Center in Japan detected hydrogen alpha emission lines from the protoplanet. This hydrogen light comes from hot gas spiralling into the planet as it feeds from the surrounding protoplanetary disk.

“AB Aurigae hosts only the second protoplanetary system detected in hydrogen alpha thus far and the first with a source showing a spectrum resembling an inverse P Cygni profile.” T. Currie from the Astrobiology Centre

The hydrogen emission detected from AB Aurigae b shows a distinctive pattern that reveals gas falling inward toward the planet rather than being blown away, this is known as an “inverse P Cygni profile.” This pattern has been seen in young stars undergoing rapid accretion, but AB Aurigae b represents the first protoplanet showing such clear evidence of ongoing mass accretion.

The emission appears at wavelengths slightly blue shifted from the hydrogen alpha line which indicates gas moving toward us at about 100 kilometres per second, while absorption features appear at red shifted wavelengths, showing material moving away at roughly 75 kilometres per second. This combination creates the characteristic “inverse” profile that indicates infalling material.

MUSE mounted on the VLT (Credit : Gahouti Hansali)

What makes AB Aurigae b particularly interesting is that, unlike other directly imaged young planets which orbit in cleared gaps in their disks, AB Aurigae b remains buried within its birth disk. This allows us to observe the actual feeding process as the planet accumulates mass from its surroundings The system’s young age of approximately 2 million years means we’re witnessing planetary formation in its earliest stages.

The observations of AB Aurigae b’s challenge standard models of planet formation. Located so far from its star, the planet likely formed through a process where dense regions of the disk rapidly collapse under their own gravity rather than the core accretion method that formed Jupiter and Saturn.

Detection of the protoplanet AB Auriga b from the Subaru Telescope (Credit : 2632cgn)

The detection of hydrogen emission provides direct evidence of mass accretion onto a protoplanet still within the disk it formed out of, offering crucial insights into how gas giant planets grow during their formation phase. The circumplanetary disk surrounding AB Aurigae b acts as a feeding mechanism, channeling material from the larger protoplanetary disk onto the growing planet.

The detection of AB Aurigae b marks just the beginning of a new era in studying planetary formation. Future observations will help determine exactly how much of the detected emission comes from the planet itself versus reprocessed light from the surrounding disk, and whether similar signatures can be found around other young stars.

Source : A Glimpse of a Planet in Formation: AB Aurigae b Detected in H-alpha Light

Paleontologists have identified a new species of rodent in Acarechimys, an extinct genus with a widespread South American distribution, from a partial jaw and teeth unearthed in Brazil.

Acarechimys hunikuini lived in what is now Brazilian Amazonia around 10 million years ago (Late Miocene epoch).

The ancient species belongs to Octodontoidea, a family of Neotropical hystricognathous rodents within the parvorder Caviomorpha.

“Hystricognathous rodents of the Neotropics, i.e., Caviomorpha, are a fascinating mammal group because of their astonishing taxonomic and ecological diversity, which reflects a complex evolutionary history,” said Dr. Emmanuelle Fontoura, a paleontologist with the Universidade Federal de Santa Maria and CAPPA-Centro de Apoio à Pesquisa Paleontológica da Quarta Colônia, and colleagues.

“These rodents appear suddenly in the South American fossil record at the end of the Eocene epoch, at least from what we know from the available record, especially that of Peruvian Amazonia.”

“By the Early Oligocene, they had already diversified, with the first representatives of the crown groups.”

“Present‐day caviomorphs comprise 266 species, structured into two major clades and four superfamilies: i) Erethicavioi grouping Cavioidea (e.g., guinea pig and related forms) and Erethizontoidea (New World porcupines), and ii) Octochinchilloi with Chinchilloidea (chinchilla and pacaranas) and Octodontoidea (e.g., spiny rats and related forms).”

“The superfamily Octodontoidea includes the extant families Abrocomidae, Echimyidae, Octodontidae and Ctenomyidae, plus extinct lineages.”

“This is the richest and most diverse clade among Caviomorpha, both taxonomically and phenotypically through time.”

The dental remains of Acarechimys hunikuini were collected during field trips in 2019 and 2022 at the PRE06 outcrop of the Solimões Formation near the city of Feijó in the Brazilian state of Acre.

“The Solimões Formation has yielded a great diversity of vertebrate fossils since the mid‐19th century,” the paleontologists said.

“Fossil‐bearing localities from this formation were recently dated, revealing maximum ages of deposition within the Tortonian, i.e., Upper Miocene.”

“Mammals are among the most diverse fossils found there, including bats, cetaceans, litopterns, marsupials, notoungulates, primates, rodents, sirenians, and xenarthrans.”

“In addition, fossil remains of birds, crocodilians, chelonians, fishes, amphibians, invertebrates, ichnofossils, and plants have also been documented.”

The discovery of Acarechimys hunikuini shows that several superfamilies of caviomorphous rodents co-existed in this region, in addition to many other animal groups, highlighting the existence of a rich fauna in the Brazilian Amazonia.

“Acarechimys possibly emerged during the Late Oligocene and diversified in the Patagonian region during the Early Miocene,” the researchers said.

“During the Middle Miocene, it spread to extra‐Patagonian regions, towards the north of South America.”

“During the Late Miocene, the lineage remained only in extra‐Patagonian regions.”

“This new record, which is the last appearance of the genus, supports the hypothesis of the late survival of rodent lineages in the tropics, a pattern that has been documented in octodontoids, hydrochoerines and neoepiblemids.”

“The rapid diversification and radiation of Acarechimys, as well as the scarcity of data, divergence of opinions between studies dedicated to this group, and the many isolated teeth reported for the Amazonian region, make the research of this genus challenging.”

“Further research is required to enhance our comprehension of the diversification and temporal variation of this broad lineage of Octodontoidea.”

The team’s paper was published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

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Emmanuelle Fontoura et al. 2024. A new Late Miocene stem Octodontoid (Rodentia: Caviomorpha: Octochinchilloi) from the Solimões Formation (Brazil): paleobiogeographic implications. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 44 (1): e2382822; doi: 10.1080/02724634.2024.2382822