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Categories: Paleontology: Fossils, Space: Exploration

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Last year, JWST made spectral observations of Ganymede and infrared observations of Io. Absorption lines of hydrogen peroxide at Ganymede's poles indicate radiolysis of water ice by charged particles funneled by the moon's magnetic field. Io had two major eruptions, one associated with a forbidden emission line of sulfur monoxide. The latter supports a theory that SO is produced at volcanic vents in a thin atmosphere that allows forbidden emission before collisions destroy the excited state.

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A young planet whirling around a petulant red dwarf star is changing in unpredictable ways orbit-by-orbit. It is so close to its parent star that it experiences a consistent, torrential blast of energy, which evaporates its hydrogen atmosphere -- causing it to puff off the planet.

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Many people know that stars appear to twinkle because our atmosphere bends starlight as it travels to Earth. But stars also have an innate 'twinkle' -- caused by rippling waves of gas on their surfaces -- that is imperceptible to current Earth-bound telescopes. In a new study, researchers developed the first 3D simulations of energy rippling from a massive star's core to its outer surface. Using these new models, the researchers determined, for the first time, how much stars should innately twinkle.

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An international team of linguists and geneticists has achieved a significant breakthrough in our understanding of the origins of Indo-European, a family of languages spoken by nearly half of the world's population.

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As the next generation of giant, high-powered observatories begin to come online, a new study suggests that their instruments may offer scientists an unparalleled opportunity to discern what weather may be like on far-away exoplanets.

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Young stars are rambunctious! NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has captured the 'antics' of a pair of actively forming young stars, known as Herbig-Haro 46/47, in high-resolution near-infrared light. To find them, trace the bright pink and red diffraction spikes until you hit the center: The stars are within the orange-white splotch. They are buried deeply in a disk of gas and dust that feeds their growth as they continue to gain mass. The disk is not visible, but its shadow can be seen in the two dark, conical regions surrounding the central stars.

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Astronomers have discovered new evidence of how planets as massive as Jupiter can form.

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An international team of scientists, including astrophysicists, report on a dedicated observational campaign on the Galactic microquasar dubbed GRS 1915+105. The team revealed features of a microquasar system that have never before been seen. Using the massive Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) in China, astronomers discovered a quasi-periodic oscillation (QPO) signal in the radio band for the first time from any microquasar systems.

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The spiral galaxy NGC 1532, also known as Haley's Coronet, is caught in a lopsided tug of war with its smaller neighbor, the dwarf galaxy NGC 1531.

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Miyako Islands are home to various native species of snake and lizards. How these species came to call these islands home has long puzzled scientists. A group of researchers have compiled the latest geological and biological data, proposing that an island once facilitated migration between Okinawa and Miyako Islands.

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Astronomers have gained new clues about how planets as massive as Jupiter could form. Researchers have detected large dusty clumps, close to a young star, that could collapse to create giant planets.

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Newly identified plant fossils found in Argentina suggest that a group of spurges long thought to have Asian origins may have first appeared in Gondwanan South America.

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Water is essential for life as we know it. However, scientists debate how it reached the Earth and whether the same processes could seed rocky exoplanets orbiting distant stars. New insights may come from the planetary system PDS 70, located 370 light-years away. The star hosts both an inner disk and outer disk of gas and dust, separated by a 5 billion-mile-wide (8 billion kilometer) gap, and within that gap are two known gas-giant planets.

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An exquisitely preserved fossil forest from Japan provides missing links and helps reconstruct a whole Eurasia plant from the late Miocene epoch.

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The material record that currently exists on the moon is rapidly becoming at risk of being destroyed if proper attention isn't paid during the new space era, scientists say. They propose a new scientific subfield: planetary geoarchaeology, the study of how cultural and natural processes on Earth's moon, on Mars and across the solar system may be altering, preserving or destroying the material record of space exploration.

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Sabertooth cats make up a diverse group of long-toothed predators that roamed Africa around 6-7 million years ago, around the time that hominins -- the group that includes modern humans -- began to evolve. By examining one of the largest global Pliocene collections of fossils in Langebaanweg, north of Cape Town in South Africa, researchers present two new sabertooth species and the first family tree of the region's ancient sabertooths. Their results suggest that the distribution of sabertooths throughout ancient Africa might have been different than previously assumed, and the study provides important information about Africa's paleoenvironment.

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A team has modeled the early impact history of Venus to explain how Earth's sister planet has maintained a youthful surface despite lacking plate tectonics. The team compared the early collision histories of the two bodies and determined that Venus likely experienced higher-speed, higher-energy impacts creating a super-heated core that promoted extended volcanism and resurfaced the planet.

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Researchers look at water in galaxies, its distribution and in particular its changes of state from ice to vapor, as important markers indicating areas of increased energy, in which black holes and stars are formed. A new study has now revealed the distribution of water within the J1135 galaxy, which is 12 billion light years away and formed when the Universe was a 'teenager', 1.8 billion years after the Big Bang . This water map, with unprecedented resolution, is the first ever to be obtained for such a remote galaxy. The map can help scientists to understand the physical processes taking place within J1135 and shed light on the dynamics, still partially unclear, surrounding the formation of stars, black holes and galaxies themselves.

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In a first for white dwarfs, the burnt-out cores of dead stars, astronomers have discovered that at least one member of this cosmic family is two faced. One side of the white dwarf is composed of hydrogen, while the other is made up of helium.

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Astronomers used the state-of-the-art capability of VERA, a Japanese network of radio telescopes, to uncover valuable clues about how rapidly growing 'young' supermassive black holes form, grow, and possibly evolve into more powerful quasars.