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Categories: Environmental: Wildfires, Offbeat: Space

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New observations of mud cracks made by the Curiosity Rover show that high-frequency, wet-dry cycling occurred in early Martian surface environments, indicating that the red planet may have once seen seasonal weather patterns or even flash floods.

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A classic movie was once promoted with the punchline: 'In space, no one can hear you scream'. Physicists have now demonstrated, to the contrary, that in certain situations sound can be transmitted strongly across a vacuum region!

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Concentrations of potentially harmful chemical compounds in dust collected from air filtration systems on the International Space Station (ISS) exceed those found in floor dust from many American homes, a new study reveals.

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Researchers found that wildfires are causing a much greater warming effect than has been accounted for by climate scientists. The work, which focuses on the role of 'dark brown carbon' -- an abundant but previously unknown class of particles emitted as part of wildfire smoke -- highlights an urgent need to revise climate models and update approaches for the changing environment.

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Wildfires are an ancient force shaping the environment, but they have grown in frequency, range and intensity in response to a changing climate. Scientists are working on several fronts to better understand and predict these events and what they mean for the carbon cycle and biodiversity.

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A new image of the galaxy cluster known as 'El Gordo' is revealing distant and dusty objects never seen before, and providing a bounty of fresh science. The infrared image displays a variety of unusual, distorted background galaxies that were only hinted at in previous Hubble Space Telescope images.

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Earth is rapidly warming and scientists are developing a variety of approaches to reduce the effects of climate change. An astronomer has proposed a novel approach -- a solar shield to reduce the amount of sunlight hitting Earth, combined with a tethered, captured asteroid as a counterweight. Engineering studies using this approach could start now to create a workable design that could mitigate climate change within decades.

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Scientists have trained a machine learning model in outer space, on board a satellite. This achievement could revolutionize the capabilities of remote-sensing satellites by enabling real-time monitoring and decision making for a range of applications.

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International team reports on a radio pulsar phase of a Galactic magnetar that emitted a fast radio burst in 2020; observations suggest unique origins for 'bursts' and 'pulses,' which adds to FRB formation theory.

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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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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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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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Scientists found that fires in America's dry conifer forests are burning hotter and killing more trees today than in previous centuries. The main culprit? Paradoxically, a lack of fires.

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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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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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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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Researchers have created the first tool to map and visualize the areas where human settlements and nature meet on a global scale. The tool could improve responses to environmental conflicts like wildfires, the spread of zoonotic diseases and loss of ecosystem biodiversity.

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In our modern era of larger, more destructive, and longer-lasting fires -- called the Pyrocene -- plants and animals are evolving quickly to survive. By synthesizing the wide body of research about rapid animal evolution in response to fire, a multidisciplinary team of ecology experts hopes to leverage what we already know to help foster evolution-informed conservation plans. In this way, they suggest, we can try to harness the ways in which fire impacts animals to protect vulnerable species -- working with evolution instead of against it.