Astronomy and Planetary Science Thread

NASA’s Juno Measures Thickness of Europa’s Ice Shell

Data from NASA’s Juno mission has provided new insights into the thickness and subsurface structure of the icy shell encasing Jupiter’s moon Europa. Using the spacecraft’s Microwave Radiometer (MWR), mission scientists determined that the shell averages about 18 miles (29 kilometers) thick in the region observed during Juno’s 2022 flyby of Europa. The Juno measurement is the first to discriminate between thin and thick shell models that have suggested the ice shell is anywhere from less than half a mile to tens of miles thick.
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…

“The 18-mile estimate relates to the cold, rigid, conductive outer-layer of a pure water ice shell,” said Steve Levin, Juno project scientist and co-investigator from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which manages the mission. “If an inner, slightly warmer convective layer also exists, which is possible, the total ice shell thickness would be even greater. If the ice shell contains a modest amount of dissolved salt, as suggested by some models, then our estimate of the shell thickness would be reduced by about 3 miles.”
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https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-juno-measures-thickness-of-europas-ice-shell/
 
A short video about whether or not we will get to see the theorised Population III stars AKA the First Stars:


Hi Spacecats, I'm Dr Maggie Lieu and welcome to my channel, where you can find all things space, astronomy and physics! The James Webb Space Telescope was supposed to find the first Light, the Population III stars—the massive, metal-free giants that ended the Cosmic Dark Ages. But instead of lonely first stars, we're finding "Impossible Galaxies" and "Little Red Dots" that are far too mature for their age. Did we get the timeline of the Big Bang wrong, or are the first stars hiding in plain sight?​
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Pluribus and the Alien Trojan Horse: Is SETI Dangerous?

Pluribus is fiction, but its basis in fact is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), in which astronomers routinely listen for artificial signals from space. Pluribus plays on the concern that such a signal could be used as a kind of interstellar Trojan horse, through which something harmful to humanity could be downloaded. So this raises the question, should we be worried about SETI?

“I think the concern is legitimate,” says Michael Garrett, who is the Sir Bernard Lovell Chair of Astrophysics at the University of Manchester, the Director of the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics and vice-chair of the IAA’s Permanent SETI Committee. However, a concern being legitimate doesn’t mean it should override everything else.
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New research measures Jupiter’s dimensions with unprecedented precision

The new findings show that Jupiter is slightly smaller than previously estimated – it’s about 8 km less wide at the equator and 24 km flatter at the poles. In other words, it’s more flattened compared to previous assessments. “Textbooks will need to be updated,” Kaspi says. “The size of Jupiter hasn’t changed, of course, but the way we measure it has.”

“These few kilometers matter,” Galanti explains. “Shifting the radius by just a little lets our models of Jupiter’s interior fit both the gravity data and atmospheric measurements much better.” This implication was tested by another PhD student in Kapsi’s group, Maayan Ziv. “We were in a unique position to use our state-of-the-art models for the interior density structure of Jupiter to show that the refined shape helps bridge the gap between the models and the measurements,” Ziv says. This study also has broader implications for understanding the structure of gas planets in general, since Jupiter serves as a standard reference for the study of gas giants within the solar system and beyond.
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https://wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il/space-physics/giant-planet’s-slimmer-profile
Related paper:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-026-02777-x
 
Further to my blithering about possibilities for retinal-based photosynthesis. It turns out that purple bacteria and archaea have very versatile metabolisms and produce a wide variety of products, from pure heat through hydrogen, hydrocarbons, water, sulphur, sugars, plastics... A lot of it very energising for any organism or organelle clever enough to to gobble it up. They're very popular with biotech start-ups.

There's a lot there you can google.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/11/181113080903.htm
https://www.openaccessgovernment.or...ria-and-their-less-known-applications/175072/
https://www.agro-chemistry.com/news...-waste-into-plastics-cellulose-and-cosmetics/
https://www.anthropocenemagazine.or...eria-convert-human-waste-into-renewable-fuel/
https://physicsworld.com/a/purple-bacteria-produce-hydrogen-from-wastewater/
https://purple4life.eu/what-are-purple-non-sulphur-bacteria-pnsb-and-why-do-they-matter/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_sulfur_bacteria
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_bacteria#Taxonomy

Anyway, the point is that they're versatile little beasties that can produce a wide variety of products and form complex symbiotic or commensal relations with other beasties. If chlorophyll a is noncompetitive because of a lack of visible light, it looks like retinal-using organisms will have niches to fill and products to fuel complex organisms too. Just not oxygen. Even in the absence of abundant visible light, it's just not plausible that evolution's going to hit a brick wall with mats of purple goo.

And, as it turns out chlorophyll d and f can make use of near-infrared too!

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/...sforming-our-search-for-extraterrestrial-life
https://enviromicro-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1462-2920.14774

(The paper is limited access, so you can read it but not download it.)
 
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Here's an interesting video from Anton Petrov concerning the use of AI to discover hidden anomalies in old HST data files:


Hello and welcome! My name is Anton and in this video, we will talk about strange anomalies found in old Hubble telescope data
Links:
https://esahubble.org/news/heic2603/?...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...ahubble.org/news/heic2603/?lang&v=KX0QN1FmK_g
https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/pdf...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...s/aa/pdf/2025/12/aa55512-25.pdf&v=KX0QN1FmK_g
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.03509v1https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...ps://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.03509v1&v=KX0QN1FmK_g
Space hamburgers: • Largest Known Planetary Nursery With a Wei... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3U9xHShFwZk&pp=0gcJCR0AztywvtLA
#hubble #anomaly #astronomy
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0:00 Too much data?
1:02 Anomalies found in old data
1:40 Why this is important - bizarre objects and peculiar galaxies
4:10 How this was done - Anomalymatch
6:00 Here's what was found
9:55 Implications and what's next?
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Light is the fastest phenomenon in the universe, clocking in at just under 300,000 kilometers per second. The telescopes that observe that light, from radio waves to gamma rays, are built at rather slower speeds.

Take, as one example, the James Webb Space Telescope. NASA began feasibility studies for the mission in the mid-1990s and selected contractors to design and build it in 2002. However, JWST did not launch until the end of 2021, after major cost and schedule overruns.

Now, NASA wants to accelerate that pace. The agency wants to prove it can build and launch major astrophysics missions faster and more predictably. From bringing the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope to the launch pad months ahead of schedule to reimagining smaller missions, NASA is rethinking how it develops space observatories.
And it’s doing so while a team building a privately funded space telescope aims to outpace the government and move faster still.
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https://spacenews.com/space-telescopes-at-light-speed/
 
New comet discovered--called C/2026 A1 (MAPS):

https://phys.org/news/2026-02-comet-visible-broad-daylight.htmlAt the time of its discovery, comet MAPS was farther from the sun than any previous newly discovered sungrazer.

That suggests it might be a larger-than-usual fragment—perhaps.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C/2026_A1_(MAPS)
On black holes
https://phys.org/news/2026-02-dark-black-hole-power-milky.htmlhttps://phys.org/news/2026-02-supermassive-black-holes-eye-storms.htmlhttps://phys.org/news/2026-02-gravitational-merging-black-holes.html
Please...please no....
https://phys.org/news/2026-02-jetty-mcjetface-star-shredding-black.html
 
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This is problematic
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykObAiS4ugg

0:00 Time - what is it?
1:20 Time in general relativity (Einstein)
2:10 Quantum mechanics time
2:40 The problem of time
3:30 Page Wootters mechanism - is time emergent?
5:00 Experiments and possible proofs - entropy and quantum dots
7:40 Large scale system
8:30 What this suggests and how black holes can help
9:50 Conclusions
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what is so problematic ?
Time is needed in equation to determine the mass of Elementar particle
It can even better determine with Time in three dimension !

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjcNpGNu-Q8

0:00 New model explains the universe with time dimensions
0:55 Spacetime history
2:00 Theory of everything problem
2:30 New proposition - can we have 3 dimensions of time?
4:10 Explanations in the model and predictions
6:10 Previous models with multiple dimensions
7:10 What these arrows of time are
8:00 How we could test this and why it matters
9:00 Criticisms
11:10 Conclusions
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Burkhard Heim work on mass of Elementar particle include Time as dimension, plus 2 additional dimension.
Those two defined how evolve something in time and how complex this become.
(This could view also as 3 dimensional Time )

however...
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWzK6nITCK0
 
Study reveals two huge hot blobs of rock influence Earth’s magnetic field

In a study published in Nature Geoscience, research led by the University of Liverpool has identified magnetic evidence that two immense, ultra-hot rock structures located at the base of Earth’s mantle, around 2,900 kilometres beneath Africa and the Pacific, affect the underlying liquid outer core.

The study shows that these enormous blobs of solid, superheated material — encircled by a pole-to-pole ring of cooler rock — have been shaping Earth’s magnetic field for millions of years.
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https://news.liverpool.ac.uk/2026/0...lobs-of-rock-influence-earths-magnetic-field/
 
According to a new study asteroid mining may not be possible, from Anton Petrov:


Hello and welcome! My name is Anton and in this video, we will talk about asteroid mining and if it's actually feasible
Links:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas...
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2221345120&v=DMvBXjmT9w4
https://theconversation.com/nasas-rob...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...miners-to-follow-someday-214917&v=DMvBXjmT9w4
https://www.nature.com/articles/s4159...
https://www.karmanplus.com/https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...w&q=https://www.karmanplus.com/&v=DMvBXjmT9w4
https://transastra.com/https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...Et6OA&q=https://transastra.com/&v=DMvBXjmT9w4
https://www.astroforge.io/
https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...QQ&q=https://www.astroforge.io/&v=DMvBXjmT9w4
#asteroidmining #asteroids #solarsystem

0:00 Space mining and The Expanse
3:20 Why asteroid mining is exciting on paper
4:30 Technology is still in infancy though
5:00 Astroforge claims and failures
7:05 Study provides a reality check and explains types of asteroids
8:55 Water mining is a different story
10:00 Challenges of mining in space
11:30 Conclusions and what's next?
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An unusual dust storm on Mars reveals how the red planet lost some of its water

For the first time, researchers demonstrated that an anomalous, intense, but localized dust storm was able to drive the transport of water to the upper layers of the Martian atmosphere during the Northern Hemisphere summer - a time when this process was previously considered to be irrelevant.
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…

While dust storms have long been recognized as important for Mars' water escape, previous discussions have mostly focused on large, planet-wide dust events. In contrast, this study shows that smaller, regional storms can also strongly enhance water transport to high altitudes, where it can be more easily lost to space. Furthermore, previous research has focused on the warm, dynamic summers of the Southern Hemisphere, since it is typically the main period of water loss on Mars.
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https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1115239
Related paper:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-03157-5
 
An incredibly energetic "impossible" particle that hit Earth in 2023 may have been debris from an exploding primordial black hole formed during the Big Bang. If that is the case, then it could prove the existence of primordial black holes, which could then help explain what the universe's most mysterious "stuff," dark matter, is made of.
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The particle in question was a neutrino with an energy 100,000 times greater than that of the highest-energy particles produced by the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In fact, the particle was so energetic that scientists aren't aware of any natural cosmic phenomena powerful enough to create it.

Now, a team of researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst suggests that a particle like this could be blasted out when a so-called "quasi-extremal primordial black hole" explodes.
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https://www.space.com/astronomy/bla...e-particle-that-hit-earth-in-2023-may-tell-us
 
A short video on the origin of Gold on Earth:


Gold's origin is quite fascinating. Incredibly rare and valuable, the vast majority of all gold originated in one of the universe's most explosive phenomena. But at the same time, other gold formed in low mass stars. Today's video discusses the 3 main ways elemental gold was formed from other elements.
https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...rg/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode&v=O3RKsd1txlI
Sources/Citations:
[1] NASA
[2] ESA
[3] https://blog.sdss.org/2017/01/09/orig...
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0:00 Alaska Gold
0:16 Highly Explosive Source
1:03 Source of All Gold
1:32 RadiaCode Sponsorship
3:10 Neutron Star
4:16 Radioactive Decay Types
5:01 Neutron Star, Continued
5:40 R-Process
7:28 Supernovae
7:53 Asymptotic Giant Branch Stars
8:19 S-Process
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Several videos here concerning new findings about the KT extinction event:
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Previous video (what we 'know' or are pretty sure about so far): • New Research Findings Rewrite the KPg Exti... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTyhl4rWsTY
References & resources:
Lowery et al., 2025 (Field Guide from our Field Trip): https://doi.org/10.1130/2025.0074(02)
Gulick et al., 2026: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.margeo.2025...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...rg/10.1016/j.margeo.2025.107661&v=noB6aJHAyYI
Link to the core images from Exp. 364: https://publications.iodp.org/proceed...
Link to Exp. 364 webpage that has tons of helpful reports: https://publications.iodp.org/proceed...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...g/proceedings/364/364title.html&v=noB6aJHAyYI
Exp. 364 summary paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...e/article/pii/S0025322725001860&v=noB6aJHAyYI
Senel et al., 2023: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-023-01...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev....org/10.1038/s41561-023-01290-4&v=noB6aJHAyYI
Press release recent paper on the dust-driven impact winter: https://www.vub.be/en/news/vub-resear...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...ine-dust-heralded-end-dinosaurs&v=noB6aJHAyYI
Great summary of the current state of our knowledge of the drivers of the extinction in the marine realm and the role of impact vs. volcanism (Hull et al.,2020): https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aay5055https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...doi.org/10.1126/science.aay5055&v=noB6aJHAyYI
Link to paper about classic impact hypothesis (Schulte et al., 2010): https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1177265
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References & resources:
Lowery et al., 2025 (Field Guide from our Field Trip): https://doi.org/10.1130/2025.0074(02)
Gulick et al., 2026: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.margeo.2025...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...rg/10.1016/j.margeo.2025.107661&v=noB6aJHAyYI
Link to the core images from Exp. 364: https://publications.iodp.org/proceed...
Link to Exp. 364 webpage that has tons of helpful reports: https://publications.iodp.org/proceed...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...g/proceedings/364/364title.html&v=noB6aJHAyYI
Exp. 364 summary paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...e/article/pii/S0025322725001860&v=noB6aJHAyYI
Senel et al., 2023: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-023-01...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev....org/10.1038/s41561-023-01290-4&v=noB6aJHAyYI
Press release recent paper on the dust-driven impact winter: https://www.vub.be/en/news/vub-resear...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...ine-dust-heralded-end-dinosaurs&v=noB6aJHAyYI
Great summary of the current state of our knowledge of the drivers of the extinction in the marine realm and the role of impact vs. volcanism (Hull et al.,2020): https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aay5055https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...doi.org/10.1126/science.aay5055&v=noB6aJHAyYI
Link to paper about classic impact hypothesis (Schulte et al., 2010): https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1177265
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New Paper- Lowery et al., 2026- New species evolved within a few thousand years of the Chicxulub Impact: https://doi.org/10.1130/G53313.1https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...ttps://doi.org/10.1130/G53313.1&v=Q945mGoneUY
https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...A%20News%20Release%2026-04.aspx&v=Q945mGoneUY
Previous videos from the 2025 KPg Boundary of TX Field Trip:
What we 'know' or are pretty sure about so far: • New Research Findings Rewrite the KPg Exti... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTyhl4rWsTY
What we still don't know: • What We Still Don't Know About The KPg Ext...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noB6aJHAyYI
References & resources:
Lowery et al., 2025 (Field Guide from our Field Trip): https://doi.org/10.1130/2025.0074(02)
Gulick et al., 2026: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.margeo.2025...
Link to the core images from Exp. 364: https://publications.iodp.org/proceed...
Link to Exp. 364 webpage that has tons of helpful reports: https://publications.iodp.org/proceed...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...g/proceedings/364/364title.html&v=Q945mGoneUY
Exp. 364 summary paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...e/article/pii/S0025322725001860&v=Q945mGoneUY
Senel et al., 2023: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-023-01...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev....org/10.1038/s41561-023-01290-4&v=Q945mGoneUY
Press release recent paper on the dust-driven impact winter: https://www.vub.be/en/news/vub-resear...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...ine-dust-heralded-end-dinosaurs&v=Q945mGoneUY
Great summary of the current state of our knowledge of the drivers of the extinction in the marine realm and the role of impact vs. volcanism (Hull et al., 2020): https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aay5055https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...doi.org/10.1126/science.aay5055&v=Q945mGoneUY
Link to paper about classic impact hypothesis (Schulte et al., 2010): https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1177265https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...doi.org/10.1126/science.1177265&v=Q945mGoneUY


0:00 When did life recover after the KPg impact?
1:14 Conditions in the crater after impact
1:49 What counts as 'recovery of life'?
2:20 Problem with previous estimates
3:12 What kind of life was it that recovered so fast?
3:49 Hydrothermal oasis for life?
4:28 Why this matters for us today
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Researchers Announce Discovery of a Possible Pulsar in the Milky Way’s Center

Researchers from Columbia University and Breakthrough Listen, a scientific research program aimed at finding evidence of civilizations beyond Earth, have published new results from the Breakthrough Listen Galactic Center Survey, one of the most sensitive radio searches ever conducted for pulsars in the dynamically complex central region of the Milky Way Galaxy. The study, led by recent Columbia PhD graduate Karen I. Perez, was published in The Astrophysical Journal.

The survey identified an intriguing 8.19-millisecond pulsar (MSP) candidate near the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*, which is at our galaxy’s center.

Detecting, confirming, and carefully measuring the arrival of a pulsar in this region of the Milky Way would enable unprecedented tests of General Relativity, including precision measurements of the space-time around a supermassive black hole.
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https://news.columbia.edu/news/researchers-announce-discovery-possible-pulsar-milky-ways-center
 
Flyaway said:
Researchers Announce Discovery of a Possible Pulsar in the Milky Way’s Center



https://news.columbia.edu/news/researchers-announce-discovery-possible-pulsar-milky-ways-center
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I wonder how long it will be before Sagittarius A* eats this pulsar?

Flyaway said:
Decoding the secrets of the Antikythera mechanism:

View: https://youtu.be/XNEHP6qFeCs


Makes the argument that analogue computers are both more efficient and real than their digital equivalents. And that are some looking to use analogue technology to make digital computers more efficient.
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For example in addition to FPGAs there are FPAAs.
 

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