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Categories: Space: Structures and Features, Space: The Solar System

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A team reveals the eventful migration history of planets bordering the Hot Neptune Desert, these extrasolar planets that orbit very close to their star.

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Perseverance has now completed its investigation of the atmosphere throughout the first Martian year (which lasts approximately two Earth years). Specifically, astronomers have studied seasonal and daily cycles of temperature and pressure, as well as their significant variations on other time scales resulting from very different processes.

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Antarctica is a tough place to work, for obvious reasons -- it's bitterly cold, remote, and wild. However, it's one of the best places in the world to hunt for meteorites. That's partly because Antarctica is a desert, and its dry climate limits the degree of weathering the meteorites experience. On top of the dry conditions, the landscape is ideal for meteorite hunting: the black space rocks stand out clearly against snowy fields.

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As space missions delve deeper into the outer solar system, the need for more compact, resource-conserving and accurate analytical tools has become increasingly critical -- especially as the hunt for extraterrestrial life and habitable planets or moons continues. A University of Maryland-led team developed a new instrument specifically tailored to the needs of NASA space missions. Their mini laser-sourced analyzer is significantly smaller and more resource efficient than its predecessors--all without compromising the quality of its ability to analyze planetary material samples and potential biological activity onsite.

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Hundreds of millions of light-years away in a distant galaxy, a star orbiting a supermassive black hole is being violently ripped apart under the black hole's immense gravitational pull. As the star is shredded, its remnants are transformed into a stream of debris that rains back down onto the black hole to form a very hot, very bright disk of material swirling around the black hole, called an accretion disc. This phenomenon -- where a star is destroyed by a supermassive black hole and fuels a luminous accretion flare -- is known as a tidal disruption event (TDE), and it is predicted that TDEs occur roughly once every 10,000 to 100,000 years in a given galaxy.

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Understanding how dust grains form in interstellar gas could offer significant insights to astronomers and help materials scientists develop useful nanoparticles.

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A team has studied the relation between galaxy size and luminosity of some of the earliest galaxies in the universe taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, less than a billion years after the Big Bang.

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Black holes are gatherers, not hunters. They lie in wait until a hapless star wanders by. When the star gets close enough, the black hole's gravitational grasp violently rips it apart and sloppily devours its gasses while belching out intense radiation. Astronomers have recorded a star's final moments in detail as it gets gobbled up by a black hole.

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A new theory could explain the origin and properties of systems of rocky super-Earths and their relationship with the terrestrial planets of the solar system.

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Something is amiss in the Butterfly Nebula. When astronomers compared two exposures of this planetary nebula that had been taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2009 and 2020, they saw dramatic changes in the material within its 'wings.' Powerful winds are apparently driving complex alterations of material within the Butterfly Nebula, behavior not seen in planetary nebulae to date. The researchers want to understand how such activity is possible from what should be a 'sputtering, largely moribund star with no remaining fuel.'

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Unraveling the origin stories of the Tissint meteorite's organic compounds can help scientists understand whether the Red Planet ever hosted life, as well as Earth's geologic history.

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Scientists have reported something unexpected about the distinct populations of stars that make up the Triangulum galaxy: In this satellite galaxy, a close companion of the much larger Andromeda galaxy, old and new stars occur in separate parts of the galaxy's structure, something not seen in galaxies like our own and so far not reporter for other satellite galaxies.

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NGC 346, one of the most dynamic star-forming regions in nearby galaxies, is full of mystery. Now, it is less mysterious with new findings from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope.

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NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has imaged the inner workings of a dusty disk surrounding a nearby red dwarf star. These observations represent the first time the previously known disk has been imaged at these infrared wavelengths of light. They also provide clues to the composition of the disk.

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Researchers confirmed an exoplanet, a planet that orbits another star, using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope for the first time. Formally classified as LHS 475 b, the planet is almost exactly the same size as our own, clocking in at 99% of Earth's diameter.

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Amino acids make up millions of proteins that drive the chemical gears of life, including essential bodily functions in animals. Because of amino acids' relationship to living things scientists are eager to understand the origins of these molecules. After all, amino acids may have helped spawn life on Earth after being delivered here about 4 billion years ago by pieces of asteroids or comets.

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A new study posits that interstellar cloud conditions may have played a significant role on the presence of key building blocks of life in the solar system.

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Astrophysicists have discovered the tightest ultracool dwarf binary system ever observed. The two stars are so close that it takes them less than one Earth day to revolve around each other. In other words, each star's 'year' lasts just 20.5 hours.

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Astronomers were on the lookout for 'stars behaving strangely' when an automated alert from pointed them to Gaia17bpp, a star that had gradually brightened over a 2 1/2-year period. But follow-up analyses indicated that Gaia17bpp wasn't changing. Instead, the star is likely part of a rare type of binary system. Its apparent brightening was the end of a years-long eclipse by an unusual, 'dusty' stellar companion.

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Using data from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, scientists have identified an Earth-size world, called TOI 700 e, orbiting within the habitable zone of its star -- the range of distances where liquid water could occur on a planet's surface. The world is 95% Earth's size and likely rocky.