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Tag: Solar System

  • Scientists Found a Massive Lava Tube Hiding Beneath the Surface of Venus

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    Scientists may have found the first evidence of underground tunnels lurking beneath the surface of Venus, carved by the planet’s ancient volcanic activity.

    A team of researchers from the University of Trento spotted what appears to be an underground lava tube on Venus, the first subsurface feature ever detected on the volcanic world. The findings, detailed in a study published in Nature this month, could confirm long-held theories about Venus’ volcanism and how it shaped the planet.

    “Our knowledge of Venus is still limited, and until now we have never had the opportunity to directly observe processes occurring beneath the surface of Earth’s twin planet,” Lorenzo Bruzzone, a professor at the University of Trento and co-author of the study, said in a statement. “The identification of a volcanic cavity is therefore of particular importance, as it allows us to validate theories that for many years have only hypothesized their existence.”

    Secret cave

    The scientists behind the study scoured through radio data collected by the Megallen mission between 1990 and 1992. The spacecraft pierced through Venus’ thick clouds to map its surface using synthetic aperture radar.

    The team analyzed the radar images to search for signs of localized surface collapse, and found what they believe to be an empty, subsurface lava tube near the planet’s Nux Mons volcano. The lava tube is around 0.6 miles wide (1 kilometer), which is larger than ones found on Earth and Mars. Its roof has a thickness of around 490 feet (150 meters) and it boasts an empty cavity that’s at least a quarter of a mile (375 meters) high. 

    Lava tubes are underground tunnels that are created by volcanic activity. They usually form as a by-product of basaltic lava flows, where low viscosity lava continues to flow beneath a surface of solidifying lava.

    Venus is the most volcanically active planet in the solar system, and the planet’s extreme volcanism has shaped its surface. Scientists have long theorized that Venus’ volcanic history may have also resulted in a large underground network of lava tubes, but that has so far been hard to detect due to the planet’s dense atmosphere.

    Underground tunnels

    The detection of the first lava tube on Venus suggests there may be more lurking beneath the planet’s surface. “This discovery contributes to a deeper understanding of the processes that have shaped Venus’s evolution and opens new perspectives for the study of the planet,” Bruzzone said.

    The researchers behind the study suggest that new high-resolution images and data acquired by radar systems that penetrate the surface are needed to determine whether there are more lava tubes on Venus.

    Upcoming missions such as NASA’s VERITAS and the European Space Agency’s EnVision, both set to launch in 2031, may just have what it takes to peer beneath the surface of Venus in search of ancient tunnels carved by the planet’s volcanic history.

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    Passant Rabie

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  • NASA Detects Most Powerful Eruption Ever on Jupiter’s Volcanic Moon Io

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    Jupiter’s moon Io is covered in hundreds of volcanoes, which spew fountains of lava that constantly refill impact craters on its surface with scorching molten lakes. A recent discovery of extreme volcanic activity on the Jovian moon tops any eruption previously detected on Io, proving that this chaotic world knows no bounds.

    NASA’s Juno mission detected a volcanic hot spot in the southern hemisphere of Jupiter’s moon, marking the most energetic eruption ever detected on Io or anywhere else in the solar system beyond Earth The volcanic hot spot spans 40,000 square miles (100,000 square kilometers), erupting with six times the amount of energy produced by all of the world’s power plants combined.

    “This is the most powerful volcanic event ever recorded on the most volcanic world in our solar system—so that’s really saying something,” Scott Bolton, a researcher at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio and principal investigator of the Juno mission, said in a statement.

    Details of the discovery were recently published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.

    The massive hotspot can be seen just to the right of Io’s south pole in this annotated image taken by the JIRAM infrared imager aboard NASA’s Juno on December 27, 2024.
    Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/ASI/INAF/JIRAM

    Fountain of lava

    Juno has been orbiting Jupiter for nearly a decade. The spacecraft’s extended mission, which began in 2021, has allowed scientists to study Jupiter’s moons Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.

    Juno flies over the same region of Io once every two orbits. During its latest flyby on December 27, 2024, the spacecraft flew to within about 46,200 miles (74,400 kilometers) of the moon and focused its infrared instrument on the southern hemisphere.

    Using Juno’s Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument, contributed by the Italian Space Agency, scientists detected an event of extreme infrared radiance. The total power value of the new hot spot’s radiance measured well above 80 trillion watts.

    “What makes the event even more extraordinary is that it did not involve a single volcano, but multiple active sources that lit up simultaneously, increasing their brightness by more than a thousand times compared to typical levels,” Alessandro Mura, a researcher at the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), and lead author of the paper, said in an emailed statement. “This perfect synchrony suggests that it was a single enormous eruptive event, propagating through the subsurface for hundreds of kilometers.”

    Images of Io captured in 2024 by the JunoCam imager aboard NASA’s Juno show signif-icant and visible surface changes (indicated by the arrows) near the Jovian moon’s south pole.
    Images of Io captured in 2024 by the JunoCam show significant and visible surface changes near the moon’s south pole. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS Image processing by Jason Perry

    The data not only suggests that this is the most intense volcanic eruption ever recorded on Io, it also hints that there’s a massive chamber system of interconnected magma reservoirs beneath the moon’s surface. This interwoven system can be activated simultaneously to produce a single, planetary-wide energy release. “We have evidence what we detected is actually a few closely spaced hot spots that emitted at the same time,” Mura said.

    JunoCam, the spacecraft’s visible light camera, also captured the event. The team compared images captured by JunoCam from the mission’s last two flybys of Io in April and October of 2024 with the latest ones taken in December 2024, discovering significant changes in the surface coloring around the area where the hot spot was detected.

    Tormented world

    Io’s volcanic activity is the result of a gravitational tug-of-war between Jupiter’s gravitational pull on the moon and precisely timed pulls from neighboring moons Ganymede and Europa. The tortured moon is the subject of extreme tidal forces, causing its surface to bulge up and down by as much as 330 feet (100 meters) at a time, according to NASA.

    The tidal forces generate a tremendous amount of heat within Io, thereby causing its liquid subsurface crust to seek relief from the pressure by escaping to the surface. The surface of Io is constantly being renewed, as molten lava refills the moon’s impact craters, smoothing out the moon with fresh liquid rock.

    The recently detected eruption will likely leave a long-lasting impact on Io. The team behind Juno will use the mission’s upcoming flyby of the moon on March 3 to look at the hot spot again and make note of any changes to the landscape surrounding it.

    “While it is always great to witness events that rewrite the record books, this new hot spot can potentially do much more,” Bolton said. “The intriguing feature could improve our understanding of volcanism not only on Io but on other worlds as well.”

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    Passant Rabie

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  • Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS will fly by Earth Friday — Here’s how you can see it

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    An interstellar comet first spotted passing through our solar system in July is beginning its departure from our corner of the universe — but first it will fly by Earth, and scientists are capturing stunning new images during its approach.Related video above: Why asteroid 2024 YR4 is unlikely to hit Earth in 2032Known as 3I/ATLAS, the comet will make its closest pass by us on Friday, coming within about 167 million miles (270 million kilometers) of our planet, but on the other side of the sun. For reference, the sun’s distance from Earth is about 93 million miles (150 million kilometers).Comet 3I/ATLAS won’t be visible to the naked eye and the optimal viewing window, which opened in November, has passed. Those hoping to glimpse it will need an 8-inch (20-centimeter) telescope or larger, according to EarthSky.The Virtual Telescope Project will share a livestream of the comet at 4:00 a.m. UTC on Saturday, or 11 p.m. ET Friday, after cloudy weather prevented a Thursday night streaming opportunity, said Gianluca Masi, astronomer and astrophysicist at the Bellatrix Astronomical Observatory in Italy and founder and scientific director of the Virtual Telescope Project.The comet is expected to remain visible to telescopes and space missions for a few more months before exiting our solar system, according to NASA.Astronomers have closely tracked the comet since its initial discovery over the summer in the hopes of uncovering details about its origin outside of our solar system as well as its composition. Multiple missions have observed the object in optical, infrared and radio wavelengths of light — and recently, scientists captured their first glimpses in X-rays to and discovered new details. The ingredients of an interstellar cometComets are like dirty snowballs left over from the formation of solar systems.A comet’s nucleus is its solid core, made of ice, dust and rocks. When comets travel near stars such as the sun, heat causes them to release gas and dust, which creates their signature tails.Astronomers are interested in capturing as many observations of the comet as they can because as it nears the sun, material releasing from the object could reveal more about its composition — and the star system where it originated.“When it gets closest to the sun, you get the most holistic view of the nucleus possible,” Seligman said. “One of the main things driving most cometary scientists is, what is the composition of the volatiles? It shows you the initial primordial material that it formed from.”Scientists have used powerful tools, such as the Hubble Space and James Webb Space telescopes, along with a multitude of space-based missions, such as SPHEREx, to study the comet.The SPHEREx and Webb observations detected carbon dioxide, water, carbon monoxide, carbonyl sulphide and water ice releasing from the comet as it neared the sun, according to the ESA.Preliminary estimates indicate that the interstellar comet is 3 billion to 11 billion years old, according to a study coauthored by Seligman and Aster Taylor, a doctoral student and Fannie and John Hertz Foundation Fellow at the University of Michigan, in August. For reference, our solar system is estimated to be about 4.6 billion years old.Carbon dioxide turns directly from a solid into a gas in response to temperature changes much more easily than most elements — which means the comet has likely never been close to another star before its brush with the sun, Seligman said.All eyes on 3I/ATLASThe interstellar comet faded from the view of ground-based telescopes in October, but it remained in sight for missions such as PUNCH, or Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere, and SOHO, or the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory. The object also made its closest approach of Mars on October 3, coming within 18.6 million miles (30 million kilometers) of the red planet — and the spacecraft orbiting it.While the government shutdown has prevented data sharing from any NASA missions that have observed the comet since October 1, the ESA’s Mars Express and ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter attempted to capture views of 3I/ATLAS in October.The cameras aboard those missions are designed to study the relatively close, bright surface of Mars, but ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter managed to observe the comet as a fuzzy white dot.“This was a very challenging observation for the instrument,” Nick Thomas, principal investigator of the orbiter’s camera, said in a statement, noting the comet is around 10,000 to 100,000 times “fainter than our usual target.”ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, or Juice, will also attempt to observe 3I/ATLAS in November using multiple instruments despite the comet being farther from the spacecraft than it was when observed by the Mars orbiters. But astronomers don’t expect to receive the observations until February due to the rate at which the spacecraft is sending data back to Earth.“We’ve got several more months to observe it,” Seligman said. “And there’s going to be amazing science that comes out.”X-raying an interstellar visitorComets that originate in our solar system emit X-rays, but astronomers have long wondered whether interstellar comets behave the same.Although previous attempts to find out were made as two other interstellar comets passed through our solar system in 2017 and 2019, no X-rays were detected.But that all changed with 3I/ATLAS.Japan’s X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission, or XRISM, observed 3I/ATLAS for 17 hours in late November with its Xtend telescope. The instrument captured X-rays fanning out to a distance of 248,000 miles (400,000 kilometers) from the comet’s solid core, or nucleus, which could be a result of clouds of gas around the object, according to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. But more observations are needed to confirm the finding.X-rays can originate from interactions between gases given off by the comet — such as water vapor, carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide — and the continuous stream of charged particles releasing from the sun called solar wind. Comets, which are a combination of ice, rock, dust and gas, heat up as they approach stars like the sun, causing them to sublimate materials. XRISM detected signatures of carbon, oxygen and nitrogen near the comet’s nucleus. The European Space Agency’s X-ray space observatory XMM-Newton also observed the interstellar comet on December 3 for about 20 hours using its most sensitive camera. A dramatic image released by the agency shows the red X-ray glow of the comet.The X-ray observations, combined with others across various wavelengths of light, could reveal what the comet is made of — and just how similar or different the object is from those in our own solar system.

    An interstellar comet first spotted passing through our solar system in July is beginning its departure from our corner of the universe — but first it will fly by Earth, and scientists are capturing stunning new images during its approach.

    Related video above: Why asteroid 2024 YR4 is unlikely to hit Earth in 2032

    Known as 3I/ATLAS, the comet will make its closest pass by us on Friday, coming within about 167 million miles (270 million kilometers) of our planet, but on the other side of the sun. For reference, the sun’s distance from Earth is about 93 million miles (150 million kilometers).

    Comet 3I/ATLAS won’t be visible to the naked eye and the optimal viewing window, which opened in November, has passed. Those hoping to glimpse it will need an 8-inch (20-centimeter) telescope or larger, according to EarthSky.

    The Virtual Telescope Project will share a livestream of the comet at 4:00 a.m. UTC on Saturday, or 11 p.m. ET Friday, after cloudy weather prevented a Thursday night streaming opportunity, said Gianluca Masi, astronomer and astrophysicist at the Bellatrix Astronomical Observatory in Italy and founder and scientific director of the Virtual Telescope Project.

    The comet is expected to remain visible to telescopes and space missions for a few more months before exiting our solar system, according to NASA.

    NASA/ESA/David Jewitt (UCLA) via CNN Newsource

    Hubble captured this image of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS on July 21.

    This image, provided by NASA, shows the interstellar comet 3I/Atlas captured by the Hubble Space Telescope on Nov. 30, 2025, about 178 million miles (286 million kilometers) from Earth. (NASA, ESA, STScI, D. Jewitt (UCLA), M.-T. Hui (Shanghai Astronomical Observatory), J. DePasquale (STScI) via AP)

    NASA, ESA, STScI, D. Jewitt (UCLA), M.-T. Hui (Shanghai Astronomical Observatory), J. DePasquale (STScI) via AP

    This image, provided by NASA, shows the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS captured by the Hubble Space Telescope on Nov. 30, 2025, about 178 million miles from Earth.

    Astronomers have closely tracked the comet since its initial discovery over the summer in the hopes of uncovering details about its origin outside of our solar system as well as its composition. Multiple missions have observed the object in optical, infrared and radio wavelengths of light — and recently, scientists captured their first glimpses in X-rays to and discovered new details.

    The ingredients of an interstellar comet

    Comets are like dirty snowballs left over from the formation of solar systems.

    A comet’s nucleus is its solid core, made of ice, dust and rocks. When comets travel near stars such as the sun, heat causes them to release gas and dust, which creates their signature tails.

    Astronomers are interested in capturing as many observations of the comet as they can because as it nears the sun, material releasing from the object could reveal more about its composition — and the star system where it originated.

    “When it gets closest to the sun, you get the most holistic view of the nucleus possible,” Seligman said. “One of the main things driving most cometary scientists is, what is the composition of the volatiles? It shows you the initial primordial material that it formed from.”

    Scientists have used powerful tools, such as the Hubble Space and James Webb Space telescopes, along with a multitude of space-based missions, such as SPHEREx, to study the comet.

    FILE - This photo provided by Gianluca Masi shows the interstellar comet 3I/Atlas as it streaks through space, 190 million miles from Earth, on Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2025, seen from Manciano, Italy. (Gianluca Masi via AP, File)

    Gianluca Masi

    This photo provided by Gianluca Masi shows the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS as it streaks through space, 190 million miles from Earth, on Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2025, seen from Manciano, Italy.

    The SPHEREx and Webb observations detected carbon dioxide, water, carbon monoxide, carbonyl sulphide and water ice releasing from the comet as it neared the sun, according to the ESA.

    Preliminary estimates indicate that the interstellar comet is 3 billion to 11 billion years old, according to a study coauthored by Seligman and Aster Taylor, a doctoral student and Fannie and John Hertz Foundation Fellow at the University of Michigan, in August. For reference, our solar system is estimated to be about 4.6 billion years old.

    Carbon dioxide turns directly from a solid into a gas in response to temperature changes much more easily than most elements — which means the comet has likely never been close to another star before its brush with the sun, Seligman said.

    All eyes on 3I/ATLAS

    The interstellar comet faded from the view of ground-based telescopes in October, but it remained in sight for missions such as PUNCH, or Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere, and SOHO, or the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory. The object also made its closest approach of Mars on October 3, coming within 18.6 million miles (30 million kilometers) of the red planet — and the spacecraft orbiting it.

    While the government shutdown has prevented data sharing from any NASA missions that have observed the comet since October 1, the ESA’s Mars Express and ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter attempted to capture views of 3I/ATLAS in October.

    The cameras aboard those missions are designed to study the relatively close, bright surface of Mars, but ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter managed to observe the comet as a fuzzy white dot.

    This diagram shows the trajectory of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS as it passes through the solar system. It will make its closest approach to the Sun in October.

    Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

    This diagram shows the trajectory of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS as it passes through the solar system. It made its closest approach to the Sun in October.

    “This was a very challenging observation for the instrument,” Nick Thomas, principal investigator of the orbiter’s camera, said in a statement, noting the comet is around 10,000 to 100,000 times “fainter than our usual target.”

    ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, or Juice, will also attempt to observe 3I/ATLAS in November using multiple instruments despite the comet being farther from the spacecraft than it was when observed by the Mars orbiters. But astronomers don’t expect to receive the observations until February due to the rate at which the spacecraft is sending data back to Earth.

    “We’ve got several more months to observe it,” Seligman said. “And there’s going to be amazing science that comes out.”

    X-raying an interstellar visitor

    Comets that originate in our solar system emit X-rays, but astronomers have long wondered whether interstellar comets behave the same.

    Although previous attempts to find out were made as two other interstellar comets passed through our solar system in 2017 and 2019, no X-rays were detected.

    But that all changed with 3I/ATLAS.

    Japan’s X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission, or XRISM, observed 3I/ATLAS for 17 hours in late November with its Xtend telescope. The instrument captured X-rays fanning out to a distance of 248,000 miles (400,000 kilometers) from the comet’s solid core, or nucleus, which could be a result of clouds of gas around the object, according to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. But more observations are needed to confirm the finding.

    XRISM captured an image of comet 3I/ATLAS in X-ray light.

    JAXA/ESA via CNN Newsource

    XRISM captured an image of comet 3I/ATLAS in X-ray light.

    X-rays can originate from interactions between gases given off by the comet — such as water vapor, carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide — and the continuous stream of charged particles releasing from the sun called solar wind. Comets, which are a combination of ice, rock, dust and gas, heat up as they approach stars like the sun, causing them to sublimate materials. XRISM detected signatures of carbon, oxygen and nitrogen near the comet’s nucleus.

    The XMM-Newton observatory spotted a red X-ray glow around the interstellar comet on December 3.

    ESA/XMM-Newton/C. Lisse; S. Cabot & the XMM ISO Team via CNN Newsource

    The XMM-Newton observatory spotted a red X-ray glow around the interstellar comet on Dec. 3.

    The European Space Agency’s X-ray space observatory XMM-Newton also observed the interstellar comet on December 3 for about 20 hours using its most sensitive camera. A dramatic image released by the agency shows the red X-ray glow of the comet.

    The X-ray observations, combined with others across various wavelengths of light, could reveal what the comet is made of — and just how similar or different the object is from those in our own solar system.

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  • Our Solar System Is Moving Faster Than It’s Supposed To, Study Suggests

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    It may not feel like it, but everything in the universe is in constant motion. Our Sun, with all its planets, orbits the center of the Milky Way, flying through the cosmos at around 450,000 miles per hour (720,000 kilometers per hour), completing one full orbit in about 230 million years, according to NASA.

    Astronomers measure the speed at which the solar system is hurtling through space by mapping surrounding galaxies and observing how light from other objects is shifted. New measurements, however, put the existing models to the test and found that the solar system may in fact be much speedier than previously believed.

    A team of researchers used extremely sensitive instruments to detect a subtle headwind created by the motion of the solar system and found that our host star and neighboring planets are moving more than three times faster than current models predict. The study, published in Physical Review Letters, challenges the standard model of cosmology and our understanding of how the universe evolved since the Big Bang.

    Speeding through

    The scientists behind the recent study turned to radio galaxies to hone in on the speed at which the solar system travels. Radio galaxies are an excellent source of radio waves, emitting as much as one trillion solar luminosities of radiation with long wavelengths.

    The team analyzed the distribution of radio galaxies using the LOFAR (Low Frequency Array) telescope, a radio telescope network that stretches across Europe, combined with data from two additional radio observatories. As the solar system moves through the cosmos, it creates a subtle headwind whereby more radio galaxies appear in the direction in which it’s traveling.

    The researchers also applied a new statistical method that accounts for the fact that many radio galaxies consist of multiple components, producing a more accurate analysis of the solar system’s speed.

    Combining the data revealed that the distribution of radio galaxies is 3.7 times stronger than what the standard model currently predicts.

    “If our solar system is indeed moving this fast, we need to question fundamental assumptions about the large-scale structure of the universe,” Dominik Schwarz, cosmologist at Bielefeld University and co-author of the study, said in a statement. “Alternatively, the distribution of radio galaxies itself may be less uniform than we have believed. In either case, our current models are being put to the test.”

    Either way, we’re zipping around the galaxy at a rapid clip, even if a firm grasp on why, or what it means for the universe, remains out of reach.

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  • The Asteroid Belt Is Vanishing

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    Between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter lies a ring-shaped region called the asteroid belt, home to the vast majority of our solar system’s space rocks. The asteroid belt is as old as the solar system itself, having formed from leftover material that failed to coalesce into a full-grown planet due to Jupiter’s gravitational influence.

    Over the past 4.6 billion years, Jupiter has continued to shape the asteroid belt through gravitational resonances—regions where an asteroid’s orbit aligns with that of Jupiter, Saturn, or Mars. This can either fling an asteroid toward the inner solar system or outward toward Jupiter’s orbit. Meanwhile, those that don’t escape constantly collide with other asteroids in the belt, gradually being pulverized into dust. As such, the asteroid belt is slowly disappearing.

    In a new study that has yet to undergo peer review, researchers led by planetary scientist Julio Fernández of Universidad de la Republica in Uruguay estimate the rate of the belt’s depletion. The findings, currently available on the preprint server arXiv, indicate that the collisionally active portion of the asteroid belt is losing about 0.0088% of its mass every million years.

    A very slow vanishing act

    The collisionally active portion of the belt refers to asteroids that are small enough to be involved in frequent collisions and dynamical ejections—basically everything except large, primordial bodies such as Ceres, Vesta, and Pallas. A loss of 0.0088% per million years may not sound like much, but over the eons, it adds up.

    Fernández and his colleagues estimate that 3.5 billion years ago, the asteroid belt may have contained 50% more mass, with a loss rate double what it is today. That estimate correlates nicely with a more intense impact rate reflected in Earth and the Moon’s geologic records, according to the researchers.

    Where do the lost asteroids end up? Well, according to the researchers’ calculations, about 20% escape into space, occasionally crossing into Earth’s orbit and even plummeting through our atmosphere as meteors. The other 80% gets ground into meteoritic dust that filters into the zodiacal cloud—a thick, pancake-shaped dust cloud that orbits the Sun within the inner solar system.

    Will the asteroid belt completely disappear?

    Previous research has estimated that the combined mass of all the asteroids in the belt today is roughly equivalent to just 3% of the Moon’s mass. Still, it would take many, many more years for the belt to disappear completely through pulverization and dynamical ejections alone. The death of the Sun—projected to occur in about 5 billion years—will destroy it sooner than that.

    This study provides an answer to an arguably more important question: At what rate is the asteroid belt ejecting space rocks that could potentially impact Earth? Additionally, by extrapolating the rate of dynamical ejection back in time, the researchers present data that can help scientists better understand the impact history that shaped the planet’s surface.

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    Ellyn Lapointe

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  • Strange Green Glow From Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS Has Scientists Puzzled

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    Images of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS snapped during the September 7 total lunar eclipse seem to suggest that the latest visitor to the Solar System may be turning green.

    That’s not all that strange for a comet. Many Solar System comets give off a green glow when they heat up enough to emit vapor. However, for 3I/ATLAS, it might be quite strange: observations of the comet’s chemistry obtained to date show very few signs of the dicarbon (C2) molecules usually responsible for a comet’s green glow.

    This could mean that the C2 is there, but yet to be detected. Or there could be another molecule responsible for making the comet appear green. Either way, the implication is that the chemistry of 3I/ATLAS still has some secrets it is yet to divulge.

    Related: Images Show Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS Is Now Growing a Tail

    The images were taken by astrophotographers Gerald Rhemann and Michael Jäger from Namibia during the total lunar eclipse that took place on the night of 7 September 2025.

    As a comet grows closer to the Sun, the ices that are bound up around its rocky nucleus begin to sublime, turning into a gas atmosphere, or coma. Molecules in this gas, stimulated by solar radiation, then fluoresce, glowing with light in a range of visible, near-infrared, ultraviolet, and radio wavelengths.

    We know from JWST observations that 3I/ATLAS has a peculiar chemical composition that contains larger than usual proportions of carbon dioxide. Other observations so far also show the presence of nickel and cyanogen. But these don’t normally make comets emit green fluorescence, and the molecule that does has not been found.

    YouTube Thumbnail

    The problem is even thornier than a mere non-detection of C2 might indicate. According to a preprint led by astronomer Luis Salazar Manzano of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, the early detection of cyanogen implies a strong depletion of carbon-chain molecules – including both C2 and C3.

    “Our upper limit on the C2-to-CN ratio,” they write, “places 3I/ATLAS among the most carbon-chain depleted comets known.”

    So there’s a fascinating mystery there. Here’s hoping our scientists can collect enough data to solve it when the comet makes its closest pass to Earth in December.

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  • Last-Minute Software Patch Saves Jupiter Probe Ahead of Critical Venus Flyby

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    An exceptionally heavy interplanetary probe is on an eight-year journey to Jupiter, using the gravity of Earth and Venus to propel it on its path toward the gas giant. Just weeks before its scheduled flyby of Venus, the European Space Agency’s JUICE mission went silent, threatening its ability to perform the planetary encounter.

    Unable to communicate with the spacecraft, teams of engineers got to work on figuring out the problem under a tight schedule, hoping their efforts would reach JUICE as it cruises millions of miles away.

    JUICE, or JUpiter ICy moons Explorer, is currently on its way to Venus to perform a gravity assist maneuver on August 31, following the resolution of a pesky software glitch that had weakened the spacecraft’s signal. Mission control managed to reestablish communication with the spacecraft just in time to prepare it for its upcoming flyby, pulling off an impressive recovery of the mission as it heads toward its target.

    Waiting not an option

    The team detected the anomaly on July 16 as JUICE was flying above a ground station in Cebreros, Spain. ESA’s deep space antenna was unable to establish contact with the spacecraft, raising concerns that JUICE was in a dreaded survival mode triggered by multiple onboard system failures.

    “Losing contact with a spacecraft is one of the most serious scenarios we can face,” Angela Dietz, JUICE spacecraft operations manager, said in a statement. “With no telemetry, it is much more difficult to diagnose and resolve the root cause of an issue.”

    The spacecraft would automatically reset in 14 days, but the team could not wait that long and risk missing JUICE’s scheduled encounter with Venus. “Waiting was not an option. We had to act fast.” Dietz added. “Waiting two weeks for the reset would have meant delaying important preparations for the Venus flyby.”

    Instead, the team of engineers behind the mission began to blindly send commands toward JUICE’s presumed location in space. That proved to be challenging, as the spacecraft is currently located 124 million miles (200 million kilometers) away on the other side of the Sun. Each rescue signal would take 11 minutes to reach the spacecraft, and the team would then have to wait another 11 minutes to hear back from JUICE.

    The dreaded software timing bug

    Nearly 20 hours later, a command signal finally reached the spacecraft, triggering a response. Thankfully, the team found JUICE in good condition, and no system failures were detected.

    As it turns out, a software timing bug caused JUICE’s signal to become too weak to detect from Earth. JUICE has built-in software that switches its signal amplifier on and off using an internal timer. The timer restarts from zero once every 16 months, but if the software happens to be using the timer at the same moment it restarts, then the signal amplifier remains switched off, silencing JUICE’s calls to Earth.

    The team was able to resolve the issue and is now devising ways to ensure JUICE’s signal is always heard across deep space. “We have identified a number of possible ways to ensure that this does not happen again, and we are now deciding which solution would be the best to implement,” Dietz said.

    JUICE launched on April 14, 2023, carrying a suite of remote sensing, geophysical, and in situ instruments to explore Jupiter and its three ocean-bearing moons—Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa. The 13,227-pound (6,000-kilogram) spacecraft is expected to arrive at the gas giant system in 2031, using a series of gravity assists to pick up speed. This week’s Venus flyby is the second of four planned gravity assist maneuvers.

    JUICE will also use Earth to reach its required transfer velocity through an upcoming flyby in September 2026 and another one planned for January 2029.

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    Passant Rabie

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  • Liftoff: NASA’s Europa Clipper Sails Toward Ocean Moon of Jupiter

    Liftoff: NASA’s Europa Clipper Sails Toward Ocean Moon of Jupiter

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    NASA’s Europa Clipper has embarked on its long voyage to Jupiter, where it will investigate Europa, a moon with an enormous subsurface ocean that may have conditions to support life.

    The spacecraft launched at 12:06pm EDT Monday aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Central Florida.

    The largest spacecraft NASA ever built for a mission headed to another planet, Europa Clipper also is the first NASA mission dedicated to studying an ocean world beyond Earth. The spacecraft will travel 1.8 billion miles (2.9 billion kilometers) on a trajectory that will leverage the power of gravity assists, first to Mars in four months and then back to Earth for another gravity assist flyby in 2026. After it begins orbiting Jupiter in April 2030, the spacecraft will fly past Europa 49 times.

    “Congratulations to our Europa Clipper team for beginning the first journey to an ocean world beyond Earth,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “NASA leads the world in exploration and discovery, and the Europa Clipper mission is no different. By exploring the unknown, Europa Clipper will help us better understand whether there is the potential for life not just within our solar system, but among the billions of moons and planets beyond our Sun.”

    Approximately five minutes after liftoff, the rocket’s second stage fired up and the payload fairing, or the rocket’s nose cone, opened to reveal Europa Clipper. About an hour after launch, the spacecraft separated from the rocket. Ground controllers received a signal soon after, and two-way communication was established at 1:13pm with NASA’s Deep Space Network facility in Canberra, Australia. Mission teams celebrated as initial telemetry reports showed Europa Clipper is in good health and operating as expected.

    “We could not be more excited for the incredible and unprecedented science NASA’s Europa Clipper mission will deliver in the generations to come,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Everything in NASA science is interconnected, and Europa Clipper’s scientific discoveries will build upon the legacy that our other missions exploring Jupiter — including Juno, Galileo, and Voyager — created in our search for habitable worlds beyond our home planet.”

    The main goal of the mission is to determine whether Europa has conditions that could support life. Europa is about the size of our own Moon, but its interior is different. Information from NASA’s Galileo mission in the 1990s showed strong evidence that under Europa’s ice lies an enormous, salty ocean with more water than all of Earth’s oceans combined. Scientists also have found evidence that Europa may host organic compounds and energy sources under its surface.

    If the mission determines Europa is habitable, it may mean there are more habitable worlds in our solar system and beyond than imagined.

    “We’re ecstatic to send Europa Clipper on its way to explore a potentially habitable ocean world, thanks to our colleagues and partners who’ve worked so hard to get us to this day,” said Laurie Leshin, director, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “Europa Clipper will undoubtedly deliver mind-blowing science. While always bittersweet to send something we’ve labored over for years off on its long journey, we know this remarkable team and spacecraft will expand our knowledge of our solar system and inspire future exploration.”

    In 2031, the spacecraft will begin conducting its science-dedicated flybys of Europa. Coming as close as 16 miles (25 kilometers) to the surface, Europa Clipper is equipped with nine science instruments and a gravity experiment, including an ice-penetrating radar, cameras, and a thermal instrument to look for areas of warmer ice and any recent eruptions of water. As the most sophisticated suite of science instruments NASA has ever sent to Jupiter, they will work in concert to learn more about the moon’s icy shell, thin atmosphere, and deep interior.

    To power those instruments in the faint sunlight that reaches Jupiter, Europa Clipper also carries the largest solar arrays NASA has ever used for an interplanetary mission. With arrays extended, the spacecraft spans 100 feet (30.5 meters) from end to end. With propellant loaded, it weighs about 13,000 pounds (5,900 kilograms).

    In all, more than 4,000 people have contributed to Europa Clipper mission since it was formally approved in 2015.

    “As Europa Clipper embarks on its journey, I’ll be thinking about the countless hours of dedication, innovation, and teamwork that made this moment possible,” said Jordan Evans, project manager, NASA JPL. “This launch isn’t just the next chapter in our exploration of the solar system; it’s a leap toward uncovering the mysteries of another ocean world, driven by our shared curiosity and continued search to answer the question, ‘are we alone?’”

    Europa Clipper’s three main science objectives are to determine the thickness of the moon’s icy shell and its interactions with the ocean below, to investigate its composition, and to characterize its geology. The mission’s detailed exploration of Europa will help scientists better understand the astrobiological potential for habitable worlds beyond our planet.

    Managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California, NASA JPL leads the development of the Europa Clipper mission in partnership with the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The main spacecraft body was designed by APL in collaboration with NASA JPL and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. The Planetary Missions Program Office at Marshall executes program management of the Europa Clipper mission.

    NASA’s Launch Services Program, based at NASA Kennedy, managed the launch service for the Europa Clipper spacecraft.

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  • The largest storm in our solar system is moving unexpectedly, scientists say

    The largest storm in our solar system is moving unexpectedly, scientists say

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    New observations of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot captured by the Hubble Space Telescope show that the 190-year-old storm wiggles like gelatin and shape-shifts like a squeezed stress ball.Related video above: Space Station captures view of colossal Hurricane MiltonThe unexpected observations, which Hubble made over 90 days from December to March, show that the Great Red Spot isn’t as stable as it appears, according to astronomers.The Great Red Spot, or GRS, is an anticyclone, or a large circulation of winds in Jupiter’s atmosphere that rotates around a central area of high pressure along the planet’s southern midlatitude cloud belt. And the long-lived storm is so large — the biggest in the solar system — that Earth could fit inside it.Although storms are generally considered unstable, the Great Red Spot has persisted for nearly two centuries. The observed changes in the storm appear related to its motion and size.A time-lapse of the images shows the vortex “jiggling” like gelatin and expanding and contracting over time.Researchers described the observation in an analysis published in The Planetary Science Journal and presented Wednesday at the 56th annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences in Boise, Idaho.“While we knew its motion varies slightly in its longitude, we didn’t expect to see the size oscillate as well. As far as we know, it’s not been identified before,” said lead study author Amy Simon, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in a statement. “This is really the first time we’ve had the proper imaging cadence of the GRS,” Simon said. “With Hubble’s high resolution we can say that the GRS is definitively squeezing in and out at the same time as it moves faster and slower. That was very unexpected.”A shifting extraterrestrial stormAstronomers have observed the iconic crimson feature for at least 150 years, and sometimes, the observations result in surprises, including the latest revelation that the storm’s oval shape can change dimensions and look skinnier or fatter at times.Recently, a separate team of astronomers peered into the heart of the Great Red Spot using the James Webb Space Telescope to capture new details in infrared light. The Hubble observations were made in visible and ultraviolet light.The study, published Sept. 27 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, revealed that the Great Red Spot is cold in the center, which causes ammonia and water to condense inside the vortex and create thick clouds. The research team also detected the gas phosphine within the storm, which could play “a role in generating those mysterious” red colors that make the Great Red Spot so iconic, said study co-author Leigh Fletcher, a professor of planetary science at the U.K.’s University of Leicester, in a statement.NASA scientists use Hubble’s sharp eye to track the storm’s behavior once a year through the Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy, or OPAL, program, which Simon leads. Scientists use this program to observe the outer planets in our solar system and watch how they change over time.But the new observations were made separately through a program dedicated to studying the Great Red Spot in more detail by watching how the storm changed over a matter of months rather than a singular, yearly snapshot.“To the untrained eye, Jupiter’s striped clouds and famous red storm might appear to be static, stable, and long-lived over many years,” Fletcher said. “But closer inspection shows incredible variability, with chaotic weather patterns just as complex as anything we have here on Earth. Planetary scientists have been striving for years to see patterns in this variation, anything that might give us a handle on the physics underpinning this complex system.”Fletcher was not involved in the new study.The insights gathered from the program’s observations of the largest storms in our solar system can help scientists understand what weather may be like on exoplanets orbiting other stars. That knowledge can broaden their understanding of meteorological processes beyond ones we experience on Earth.Simon’s team used Hubble’s high-resolution images to take a detailed look at the size, shape and color changes of the Great Red Spot.“When we look closely, we see a lot of things are changing from day to day,” Simon said.The changes included a brightening of the storm’s core when the Great Red Spot is at its largest size as it oscillates.“As it accelerates and decelerates, the GRS is pushing against the windy jet streams to the north and south of it,” said study co-author Mike Wong, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, in a statement. “It’s similar to a sandwich where the slices of bread are forced to bulge out when there’s too much filling in the middle.”On Neptune, dark spots can drift across the planet since no strong jet streams are holding them in place, Wong said, while the Great Red Spot is trapped between jet streams at a southern latitude on Jupiter.A shrinking spotAstronomers have noticed the Great Red Spot shrinking since the OPAL program began a decade ago and predict that it will continue to shrink until it reaches a stable, less-elongated shape, which could reduce the wobble.“Right now it’s over-filling its latitude band relative to the wind field. Once it shrinks inside that band the winds will really be holding it in place,” Simon said.The new Hubble study fills in more pieces of the puzzle about the Great Red Spot, Fletcher said. While scientists have known that the westward drift of the storm has an unexplained 90-day oscillation, the accelerating and decelerating pattern doesn’t seem to change although the storm is shrinking, he said.“By watching the GRS over a few months, Hubble has shown that the anticyclone itself is changing its shape along with this oscillation,” Fletcher said. “The shape change is important, as it may be affecting how the edge of the vortex interacts with other passing storms. Besides the gorgeous Hubble imagery, this study shows the power of observing atmospheric systems over long periods of time. You need that sort of monitoring to spot these patterns, and it’s clear that the longer you watch, the more structure you see in the chaotic weather.”

    New observations of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot captured by the Hubble Space Telescope show that the 190-year-old storm wiggles like gelatin and shape-shifts like a squeezed stress ball.

    Related video above: Space Station captures view of colossal Hurricane Milton

    The unexpected observations, which Hubble made over 90 days from December to March, show that the Great Red Spot isn’t as stable as it appears, according to astronomers.

    The Great Red Spot, or GRS, is an anticyclone, or a large circulation of winds in Jupiter’s atmosphere that rotates around a central area of high pressure along the planet’s southern midlatitude cloud belt. And the long-lived storm is so large — the biggest in the solar system — that Earth could fit inside it.

    Although storms are generally considered unstable, the Great Red Spot has persisted for nearly two centuries. The observed changes in the storm appear related to its motion and size.

    A time-lapse of the images shows the vortex “jiggling” like gelatin and expanding and contracting over time.

    Researchers described the observation in an analysis published in The Planetary Science Journal and presented Wednesday at the 56th annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences in Boise, Idaho.

    “While we knew its motion varies slightly in its longitude, we didn’t expect to see the size oscillate as well. As far as we know, it’s not been identified before,” said lead study author Amy Simon, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in a statement.

    “This is really the first time we’ve had the proper imaging cadence of the GRS,” Simon said. “With Hubble’s high resolution we can say that the GRS is definitively squeezing in and out at the same time as it moves faster and slower. That was very unexpected.”

    NASA/ESA/STScI/Amy Simon via CNN Newsource

    A shifting extraterrestrial storm

    Astronomers have observed the iconic crimson feature for at least 150 years, and sometimes, the observations result in surprises, including the latest revelation that the storm’s oval shape can change dimensions and look skinnier or fatter at times.

    Recently, a separate team of astronomers peered into the heart of the Great Red Spot using the James Webb Space Telescope to capture new details in infrared light. The Hubble observations were made in visible and ultraviolet light.

    The study, published Sept. 27 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, revealed that the Great Red Spot is cold in the center, which causes ammonia and water to condense inside the vortex and create thick clouds. The research team also detected the gas phosphine within the storm, which could play “a role in generating those mysterious” red colors that make the Great Red Spot so iconic, said study co-author Leigh Fletcher, a professor of planetary science at the U.K.’s University of Leicester, in a statement.

    NASA scientists use Hubble’s sharp eye to track the storm’s behavior once a year through the Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy, or OPAL, program, which Simon leads. Scientists use this program to observe the outer planets in our solar system and watch how they change over time.

    But the new observations were made separately through a program dedicated to studying the Great Red Spot in more detail by watching how the storm changed over a matter of months rather than a singular, yearly snapshot.

    “To the untrained eye, Jupiter’s striped clouds and famous red storm might appear to be static, stable, and long-lived over many years,” Fletcher said. “But closer inspection shows incredible variability, with chaotic weather patterns just as complex as anything we have here on Earth. Planetary scientists have been striving for years to see patterns in this variation, anything that might give us a handle on the physics underpinning this complex system.”

    Fletcher was not involved in the new study.

    The insights gathered from the program’s observations of the largest storms in our solar system can help scientists understand what weather may be like on exoplanets orbiting other stars. That knowledge can broaden their understanding of meteorological processes beyond ones we experience on Earth.

    Simon’s team used Hubble’s high-resolution images to take a detailed look at the size, shape and color changes of the Great Red Spot.

    “When we look closely, we see a lot of things are changing from day to day,” Simon said.

    The changes included a brightening of the storm’s core when the Great Red Spot is at its largest size as it oscillates.

    “As it accelerates and decelerates, the GRS is pushing against the windy jet streams to the north and south of it,” said study co-author Mike Wong, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, in a statement. “It’s similar to a sandwich where the slices of bread are forced to bulge out when there’s too much filling in the middle.”

    On Neptune, dark spots can drift across the planet since no strong jet streams are holding them in place, Wong said, while the Great Red Spot is trapped between jet streams at a southern latitude on Jupiter.

    Hubble's images allowed scientists to measure the Great Red Spot's size, shape, brightness and color over one full oscillation cycle.

    NASA/ESA/Amy Simon via CNN Newsource

    A shrinking spot

    Astronomers have noticed the Great Red Spot shrinking since the OPAL program began a decade ago and predict that it will continue to shrink until it reaches a stable, less-elongated shape, which could reduce the wobble.

    “Right now it’s over-filling its latitude band relative to the wind field. Once it shrinks inside that band the winds will really be holding it in place,” Simon said.

    The new Hubble study fills in more pieces of the puzzle about the Great Red Spot, Fletcher said. While scientists have known that the westward drift of the storm has an unexplained 90-day oscillation, the accelerating and decelerating pattern doesn’t seem to change although the storm is shrinking, he said.

    “By watching the GRS over a few months, Hubble has shown that the anticyclone itself is changing its shape along with this oscillation,” Fletcher said. “The shape change is important, as it may be affecting how the edge of the vortex interacts with other passing storms. Besides the gorgeous Hubble imagery, this study shows the power of observing atmospheric systems over long periods of time. You need that sort of monitoring to spot these patterns, and it’s clear that the longer you watch, the more structure you see in the chaotic weather.”

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  • Saturday could be the best chance to see the northern lights in the Philadelphia area

    Saturday could be the best chance to see the northern lights in the Philadelphia area

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    The most powerful eruption on the sun in years is extending the range in which the northern lights will be visible to possibly as far south as Pennsylvania – maybe even into the Philadelphia region – and the best chance to see the colorful auroras is predicted to be Saturday night. 

    The explosion, known as a coronal mass ejection, occurred Thursday. Scientists say it is strongest CME recorded since 2017, and it flung clouds of magnetized plasma into the solar system, creating a geomagnetic storm headed towards Earth.

    MORE: Earth will gain a ‘mini moon’ for two months in the form of a tiny asteroid

    The charged particles emitted from the sun interact with the Earth’s magnetic field, creating the array for colors in the night sky known as the northern lights or aurora borealis. In normal conditions the northern lights are only visible within the range of about 1,500 miles from the North Pole. Because of the power of this CME the aurora will be more intense, pushing the viewable range of the lights much further south.

    But predicting when and where the northern lights will appear is difficult, even for experts. 

    “The challenge is actually understanding how severe the eruption is on the sun,” Derrick Pitts, chief astronomer at the Franklin Institute, said, “and how far down it will reach from the poles of the planet, down towards the mid-latitudes.”

    Thursday’s eruption was the second CME this week. Both were accompanied by solar flares that emitted intense bursts of electromagnetic radiation traveling at the speed of light that reached the Earth about 8 minutes after each occured.

    The magnetized plasma from the CME travels slower and can take 15 hours to several days to reach the Earth’s magnetic field, which results in the delay between Thursday’s eruption and the peak of the expected celestial event. It also makes it difficult to predict precisely when the northern lights will become more intense.

    The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center maintains an aurora dashboard on its website. It has maps that show nightly predictions of the range of the aurora, other maps that forecast where the aurora will be visible in the next few minutes and more information. 

    There had been a chance the northern lights would be visible in the region on Friday night but cloudy skies interfered.

    On Saturday night, the geomagnetic energy will be stronger and the National Weather Service predicts the sky over Philadelphia will be mostly clear.

    The best opportunity to see the northern lights will be as far away from light pollution as possible. Pitts suggested going at least 60 miles north of Philadelphia to get away from the city’s lights – the closer to the Pennsylvania-New York border, the better. 

    Shawn Dahl, coordinator of NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center, said it’s a good idea to stake out the night sky around midnight.

    “Usually we’re talking about a four-hour window – two hours before midnight, two hours after midnight – but that window of time can broaden the stronger the activity,” Dahl said. “The less strong the activity, that window can shorten up, but still a good time to start looking is a couple hours after dark, especially if conditions are favorable.” 

    Look low on the horizon for the aurora, Dahl said. If you can’t see anything, try taking a picture with a smartphone and other digital camera, both sometimes can pick up the lights better than the naked eye.

    Autumn and spring are the best seasons for the aurora borealis because of the greater tendency for geomagnetic storms. This year, it also is a particularly active time because of the sun’s solar cycle: Every 11 years the sun’s magnetic poles flip and ahead of this happening there are more frequent CMEs, solar flares and sunspots.

    The solar cycle will peak between the end of this year and early 2026. This period is called a solar maximum, Dahl said, which means the sun gets a little more “stressed out” and releases more energy. 

    So there could be more opportunities to see the northern lights during the next 18 months, but it’s impossible to say for sure. Pitts noted that not only do do the eruptions have to occur, they also have to be directed towards Earth so the geomagnetic storm collides with the Earth’s magnetic field.

    Managing Editor Jon Tuleya contributed to this article.

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    Michaela Althouse

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  • Earth’s Magnetic Shield Twisted Out of Shape by Colossal Solar Burst

    Earth’s Magnetic Shield Twisted Out of Shape by Colossal Solar Burst

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    Our Sun is a dynamic star, constantly bombarding our planet with charged particles that cause aurorae and geomagnetic storms. Now, a team of researchers found that an energetic outburst by our star disrupted our planet’s magnetic field for two hours in 2023.

    The event occurred on April 24, 2023, when a coronal mass ejection (CME)—a burst of solar radiation from the Sun—swept over our planet. CMEs are generally faster than the Alfvén speed, or the speed of magnetic field lines through plasma.

    But that wasn’t the case in late April of last year, when NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale mission observed an Alfvén speed faster than the CME that swept towards our planet. The mission detected electron and ion energy fluxes, and changes in electron density, as the solar event passed through. The CME caused Earth’s bow shock—the shockwave that typically forms when a CME hits Earth’s magnetic field—to disappear for two hours, from approximately 8:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. ET. The team’s analysis of the surprising solar event was published last week in Geophysical Research Letters.

    “The terrestrial bow shock disappears, leaving the magnetosphere exposed directly to the cold CME plasma and the strong magnetic field from the Sun’s corona,” the study authors wrote in the paper. “Our results show that the magnetosphere transforms from its typical windsock-like configuration to having wings that magnetically connect our planet to the Sun.”

    These structures—called Alfvén wings—acted as a highway transporting plasma between the Sun and Earth’s magnetosphere, according to an American Geophysical Union release. The team noted that Alfvén wing aurorae could occur on Earth, and could be observed in future studies.

    “The wings are highways for Earth’s plasma to be lost to the Sun, and for the plasma from the foot points of the Sun’s erupted flux rope to access Earth’s ionosphere,” the team added. “Our work indicates highly dynamic generation and interaction of the wing filaments, shedding new light on how sub-Alfvénic plasma wind may impact astrophysical bodies in our solar and other stellar systems.”

    CMEs should not be confused with solar flares, the brilliant events that can cause geomagnetic storms on Earth. As explained by EarthSky, both solar flares and CMEs are caused by realignments of the Sun’s magnetic fields, pushing energy out into space. Solar flares are bright flashes on the Sun’s surface, but CMEs launch magnetized particles into space, sometimes in Earth’s direction.

    The team added that “Sun-Earth connection through Alfvén wings is analogous to the Jupiter-Ganymede connection,” indicating that aurorae on Jupiter’s moon Ganymede may be forged by similar Alfvén wing pathways.

    More observations could reveal how the Sun’s powerful outbursts affects other heavenly bodies in our cosmic neighborhood. But as far as Earth’s magnetic field is concerned, everything is back to normal…for now!

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    Isaac Schultz

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  • NASA finally figures out how to open a $1-billion canister

    NASA finally figures out how to open a $1-billion canister

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    Late last year, a spacecraft containing samples of a 4.6-billion-year-old asteroid landed safely in the desert after a 1.2-billion mile journey. There was only one little problem: NASA couldn’t get the canister containing its prized rocks open.

    After months of tinkering, scientists at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston finally dislodged two stuck fasteners that had kept the pieces of the asteroid Bennu out of researchers’ hands.

    “It’s open! It’s open!” NASA’s Planetary Science Division posted Friday on X, along with a photograph of the slate-colored bounty of dust and small rocks inside the canister.

    Scientists had to switch course on the canister opening effort in mid-October after it became clear that none of the items in NASA’s box of approved tools could force open the last two of 35 fasteners sealing the canister.

    To prevent the sample from being contaminated by Earthly air, it has been stored in a clean room in the Houston facility where hazmat-suited curators delicately dismantled the canister. The team custom-designed new tools to pry open the final latches.

    The agency will now finish extracting the approximately 9-ounce sample, which will be weighed and chemically analyzed. Much of the payload from OSIRIS-REx (an acronym for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-Regolith Explorer) will then be frozen and carefully preserved so that future generations of scientists will be able to study it with advanced technologies.

    “We are overjoyed with the success,” NASA’s chief OSIRIS-REx sample curator, Nicole Lunning, said in a statement.

    It took more than seven years and roughly $1 billion to bring back a sample from Bennu, a space rock formed during the earliest days of the solar system. The asteroid samples found on Earth have essentially been cooked by their searing journey through the atmosphere, which limits what scientists can learn from them.

    With OSIRIS-REx, “the objective is to bring back an ancient piece of the early solar system that is pristine,” NASA astrobiologist Jason Dworkin told The Times in September. “You can use these leftovers of the formation of the solar system to construct what happened in that formation.”

    The spacecraft that collected the sample in 2020 and released it toward Earth in September is now heading on to its next mission. The craft, now named OSIRIS-APophis EXplorer, or OSIRIS-APEX, is on its way to a peanut-shaped asteroid named Apophis.

    For a short (but alarming) time, astronomers thought Apophis might be on track to smash disastrously into Earth. Now that that worrying possibility has been ruled out, scientists are eagerly looking ahead to 2029, when the asteroid will pass closer to Earth than any object of its size ever has.

    “It’s something that almost never happens, and yet we get to witness it in our lifetime,” JPL navigation engineer Davide Farnocchia said last year. “We usually send spacecraft out there to visit asteroids and find out about them. In this case, it’s nature doing the flyby for us.”

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    Corinne Purtill

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  • True face of Neptune revealed debunking image that “bedeviled for decades”

    True face of Neptune revealed debunking image that “bedeviled for decades”

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    Neptune, one of our most distant planetary neighbors, may not be the color we’ve always thought it was.

    Previous images of far-off planets showed Neptune as being a deep electric blue, while Uranus appeared a sea-foam green. However, new images have revealed that the two planets are, in fact, much more similar in color to each other.

    Both planets are instead a similar shade of green-blue, according to a new paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

    “The misperception of Neptune’s color, as well as the unusual color changes of Uranus, have bedeviled us for decades. This comprehensive study should finally put both issues to rest,” Heidi Hammel, a Neptune and Uranus researcher at the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) who did not contribute towards the study, said in a statement.

    Images of Uranus and Neptune released after the Voyager 2 flybys in 1986 and 1989 compared with a reprocessing of the individual filter images in this study.
    Patrick Irwin

    The common misconception that Neptune was blue and Uranus green arose thanks to images taken by the NASA Voyager 2 mission, which snapped the two planets as it flew past the outer solar system. Voyage 2 took a variety of pictures of each planet in several separate colors, which were then combined to make composite color images.

    However, these composites were not accurately balanced to represent the “true” color of the planets, with Uranus appearing a pale green but Neptune seeming much too blue, exacerbated by increased contrast on the Neptune images.

    Astronomers have known for decades that the two planets were similar shades: both more similar to the traditional color of Uranus.

    “Although the familiar Voyager 2 images of Uranus were published in a form closer to ‘true’ color, those of Neptune were, in fact, stretched and enhanced, and therefore made artificially too blue,” Patrick Irwin, co-author of the paper and professor of astronomy at the University of Oxford, said in a statement.

    “Even though the artificially-saturated color was known at the time amongst planetary scientists – and the images were released with captions explaining it – that distinction had become lost over time,” he said. “Applying our model to the original data, we have been able to reconstitute the most accurate representation yet of the colour of both Neptune and Uranus.”

    neptune
    Voyager 2/ISS image of Neptune released shortly after the Voyager 2 flybys in 1989. Neptune is actually more similar to Uranus in color.
    Patrick Irwin

    The new paper revealed the true colors of the planets in images created using data from Hubble Space Telescope’s Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) and the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope.

    The pictures show that the planets are very similar in hue, with Neptune having only a slight blue tinge as a result of the planet having a thinner layer of haze than Uranus.

    The study has also revealed why Uranus’s color appears to change somewhat during the course of its 84-year orbit of the sun. Between 1950 and 2916, Uranus has been spotted appearing more green during its summer and winter solstices, when its poles point more towards the sun, and more blue during its equinoxes.

    This is because of Uranus’s strange spin, almost on its side with its axis at nearly a right angle to our planet’s. Therefore, during the solstice, the poles are pointing nearly directly at the sun.

    This study describes a model that was developed to compare the light spectra of Uranus’s polar regions to its equatorial regions, showing how the reflectiveness of the regions differed and, thus, why the planet appears as being different colors during different periods of the orbit.

    The model reveals that Uranus’s polar regions reflect more green and red wavelengths than the equator due to the greater presence of methane—which absorbs red light rather than reflecting it—at the equator than the poles. Additionally, a haze of icy methane particles may also play into this color change.

    “This is the first study to match a quantitative model to imaging data to explain why the color of Uranus changes during its orbit,” Irwin said.

    “In this way, we have demonstrated that Uranus is greener at the solstice due to the polar regions having reduced methane abundance but also an increased thickness of brightly scattering methane ice particles.”

    Do you have a tip on a science story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about Neptune? Let us know via science@newsweek.com.