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    Category Astronomy/Space

    Earth’s atmosphere may help support human life on the moon

    December 12, 2025, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Illustration of Earth, the sun, and the moon, with atmospheric particles flying about them to illustrate how lunar soil ended up with particles from Earth.
    FLY ME TO THE MOON: Solar wind (yellow-orange trails) strips ions from Earth’s upper atmosphere (sky-blue trails). Some of these particles travel along Earth’s magnetic field lines (solid white curves) and settle on the Moon’s surface. This process may leave lunar soil with a record of Earth’s atmosphere. (University of Rochester illustration / Shubhonkar Paramanick)

    The moon’s surface may be more than just a dusty, barren landscape. Over billions of years, tiny particles from Earth’s atmosphere have landed in the lunar soil, creating a possible source of life-sustaining substances for future astronauts. But scientists have only recently begun to understand how these particles make the long journey from Earth to the moon and how long the process has been taking place.

    New r...

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    Uranus and Neptune are hiding something big beneath the blue

    December 11, 2025, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Uranus and Neptune may not be the icy worlds we’ve long imagined. A new Swiss-led study uses innovative hybrid modeling to reveal that these planets could just as easily be dominated by rock as by water-rich ices. The findings also help explain their bizarre, multi-poled magnetic fields and open the door to a wider range of possible interior structures. But major uncertainties remain, and only future space missions will The Solar System is commonly grouped by planetary composition: four rocky terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars), two massive gas giants (Jupiter and Saturn), and a pair of ice giants (Uranus and Neptune)...

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    NASA-JAXA XRISM finds elemental bounty in supernova remnant

    December 11, 2025, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Observations of the Cassiopeia A supernova remnant by the Resolve instrument aboard the NASA-JAXA XRISM (X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission) spacecraft revealed strong evidence for potassium (green squares) in the southeast and northern parts of the remnant. Grids superposed on a multiwavelength image of the remnant represent the fields of view of two Resolve measurements made in December 2023. Each square represents one pixel of Resolve’s detector. Weaker evidence of potassium (yellow squares) in the west suggests that the original star may have had underlying asymmetries before it exploded.
    NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center; X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI; IR: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/Milisavljevic et al., NASA/JPL/CalTech; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/J. Schmidt and K...
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    Cosmic knots may finally explain why the Universe exists

    December 10, 2025, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    The model suggests a brief “knot-dominated era,” when these tangled energy fields outweighed everything else, a scenario that could be probed through gravitational-wave signals. (Courtesy of Muneto Nitta/Hiroshima University)

    Knotted structures once imagined by Lord Kelvin may actually have shaped the universe’s earliest moments, according to new research showing how two powerful symmetries could have created stable “cosmic knots” after the Big Bang. These exotic objects may have briefly dominated the young cosmos, unraveled through quantum tunneling, and produced heavy right-handed neutrinos whose decays tipped the balance toward matter over antimatter.

    In 1867, Lord Kelvin pictured atoms as tiny knots in an invisible medium called the ether...

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