Crater counts on Pluto, Charon show small Kuiper Belt objects surprisingly rare

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Using New Horizons data from the Pluto-Charon flyby in 2015, scientists have indirectly discovered a distinct and surprising lack of very small objects in the Kuiper Belt. The evidence for the paucity of small Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) comes from New Horizons imaging that revealed a dearth of small craters on Pluto's largest satellite, Charon, indicating that impactors from 300 feet to 1 mile (91 meters to 1.6 km) in diameter must also be rare.
via Science Daily
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Exiled planet linked to stellar flyby 3 million years ago

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Paul Kalas of UC Berkeley was puzzled by the tilted but stable orbit of a planet around a binary star -- an orbit like that of our solar system's proposed Planet Nine. He calculated backwards in time to see if any of the 461 nearby stars ever came close enough to perturb the system. One star fit the bill. The stellar flyby 2-3 million years ago likely stabilized the planet's orbit, keeping it from flying away.
via Science Daily
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Clues to possible Martian life found in Chilean desert

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A robotic rover deployed in the most Mars-like environment on Earth, the Atacama Desert in Chile, has successfully recovered subsurface soil samples during a trial mission to find signs of life. The samples contained unusual and highly specialized microbes that were distributed in patches, which was linked to the scarce availability of water and nutrients. These findings will aid the search for evidence of signs of life during future planned missions to Mars.
via Science Daily
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New NASA mission could find more than 1,000 planets

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A NASA telescope that will give humans the largest, deepest, clearest picture of the universe since the Hubble Space Telescope could find as many as 1,400 new planets outside Earth's solar system, new research suggests.
via Science Daily
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Tiny Neptune moon spotted by Hubble may have broken from larger moon

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After several years of analysis, a team of planetary scientists using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has at last come up with an explanation for a mysterious moon around Neptune that they discovered with Hubble in 2013.
via Science Daily
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Habitable Zone Planet Finder enables discovery of planets around cool stars

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A new astronomical spectrograph provides the highest precision measurements to date of infrared signals from nearby stars, allowing astronomers to detect planets capable of having liquid water on their surfaces that orbit cool stars outside our solar system.
via Science Daily
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Ingredients for water could be made on surface of moon, a chemical factory

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When a stream of charged particles known as the solar wind careens onto the moon's surface at 450 kilometers per second (or nearly 1 million miles per hour), they enrich the moon's surface in ingredients that could make water, scientists have found.
via Science Daily
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LOFAR radio telescope reveals secrets of solar storms

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The team of scientist showed that solar storms can accelerate particles simultaneously in several locations by combining data from the Low Frequency Array, LOFAR, with images from NASA, NOAA and ESA spacecraft.
via Science Daily
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'Astrocomb' opens new horizons for planet-hunting telescope

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The hunt for Earth-like planets, and perhaps extraterrestrial life, just got more precise, thanks to record-setting starlight measurements made possible by the 'astrocomb.'
via Science Daily
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Citizen scientist finds ancient white dwarf star encircled by puzzling rings

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The oldest and coldest known white dwarf -- an Earth-sized remnant of a sun-like star that has died -- could be the first known white dwarf with multiple dust rings. The discovery forces researchers to reconsider models of planetary systems.
via Science Daily
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Carbonaceous chondrites provide clues about the delivery of water to Earth

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Researchers have discovered that carbonaceous chondrites, a class of meteorites, incorporated hydrated minerals along with organic material from the protoplanetary disk before the formation of planets.
via Science Daily
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Weak spots for Mission to Mars revealed

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Researchers are developing a predictive model to help NASA anticipate conflicts and communication breakdowns among crew members and head off problems that could make or break the Mission to Mars.
via Science Daily
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Gravitational waves will settle cosmic conundrum

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Measurements of gravitational waves from approximately 50 binary neutron stars over the next decade will definitively resolve an intense debate about how quickly our universe is expanding, according to new findings.
via Science Daily
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A nearby river of stars

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Astronomers have found a river of stars, a stellar stream in astronomical parlance, covering most of the southern sky. The stream is relatively nearby and contains at least 4000 stars that have been moving together in space since they formed, about 1 billion years ago.
via Science Daily
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Philosophy: What exactly is a black hole?

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What is a black hole? A philosopher shows that physicists use different definitions of the concept, depending on their own particular fields of interest.
via Science Daily
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Spacecraft measurements reveal mechanism of solar wind heating

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A new study describes the first direct measurement of how energy is transferred from the chaotic electromagnetic fields in space to the particles that make up the solar wind, leading to the heating of interplanetary space.
via Science Daily
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NASA's Opportunity rover mission on Mars comes to end

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One of the most successful and enduring feats of interplanetary exploration, NASA's Opportunity rover mission is at an end after almost 15 years exploring the surface of Mars and helping lay the groundwork for NASA's return to the Red Planet.
via Science Daily
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Insulating crust kept cryomagma liquid for millions of years on nearby dwarf planet

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A recent NASA mission to the dwarf planet Ceres found brilliant, white spots of salts on its surface. New research delved into the factors that influenced the volcanic activity that formed the distinctive spots and that could play a key role in mixing the ingredients for life on other worlds.
via Science Daily
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Possibility of recent underground volcanism on Mars

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New research suggests liquid water is present beneath the south polar ice cap of Mars. Now, a new study argues there needs to be an underground source of heat for liquid water to exist underneath the polar ice cap.
via Science Daily
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Earth's magnetic shield booms like a drum when hit by impulses

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The Earth's magnetic shield booms like a drum when it is hit by strong impulses, according to new research.
via Science Daily
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Developing a flight strategy to land heavier vehicles on Mars

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The heaviest vehicle to successfully land on Mars is the Curiosity Rover at 1 metric ton, about 2,200 pounds. Sending more ambitious robotic missions to the surface of Mars, and eventually humans, will require landed payload masses in the 5- to 20-ton range. To do that, we need to figure out how to land more mass. That was the goal of a recent study.
via Science Daily
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Chang'e 4 Rover comes into view

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The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter got a closer look at Chang'e 4 on the lunar far side. This time the small Yutu-2 rover shows up (two pixels) just north of the lander. Also, shadows cast by the lander and rover are now visible.
via Science Daily
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Shedding light on the science of auroral breakups

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Scientists have quantitatively confirmed how energetic an auroral breakup can be. Using a combination of cutting-edge ground-based technology and new space-borne observations, they have demonstrated the essential role of an auroral breakup in ionizing the deep atmosphere. The research furthers our understanding of one of the most visually stunning natural phenomena.
via Science Daily
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A thousand new objects and phenomena in night sky

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The Zwicky Transient Facility, based at the Palomar Observatory, has identified over a thousand new objects and phenomena in the night sky, including more than 1,100 new supernovae and 50 near-Earth asteroids. The alert system informs science teams of possible new objects or changes to known objects in the sky.
via Science Daily
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Promising approach for analyzing atmospheric particles from space

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A new analysis has revealed that advanced satellite-based instrument capabilities are needed for global monitoring of microscopic particles, or aerosols, in the stratospheric layer of the atmosphere.
via Science Daily
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Dynamic atmospheres of Uranus, Neptune

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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered another mysterious dark storm on Neptune and provided a fresh look at a long-lived storm circling around the north polar region on Uranus.
via Science Daily
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New technology helps address big problems for small satellites

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The small size and relatively low cost of CubeSats have made them a popular choices for commercial launches in recent years, but the process to propel such satellites in space comes with a number of problems. Researchers have developed a technology to address one key problem - the uncertainty of ignition system that initiates the propulsion system of the CubeSats. Current ignition systems are unreliable and can be subject to significant and irreversible damage.
via Science Daily
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Massive collision in the planetary system Kepler 107

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Two of the planets which are orbiting the star Kepler 107 could be the result of an impact similar to that which affected the Earth to produce the moon.
via Science Daily
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Bubbles of brand new stars

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This dazzling region of newly forming stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) was captured by the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer instrument (MUSE) on ESO's Very Large Telescope. The relatively small amount of dust in the LMC and MUSE's acute vision allowed intricate details of the region to be picked out in visible light.
via Science Daily
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Scientists study organization of life on a planetary scale

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In astrobiology, there is an increasing interest in whether life as we know it is a quirk of the particular evolutionary history of the Earth or, instead, if life might be governed by more general organizing principles.
via Science Daily
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