Articles

James Webb Space Telescope observations of Jupiter have unveiled the presence of a narrow and intense atmospheric jet in the equator of the planet near the tropopause. The jet’s speed of 500 km h⁻¹ doubles the speed of the lower clouds. This new jet aligns with temperature and wind oscillations in Jupiter’s stratosphere.

A South China Sea expedition in 2021 identified a 3.5-km-deep site close to the Equator for a next-generation neutrino telescope: TRIDENT. A large array of advanced detectors will be arrayed on the seabed to probe fundamental physics and explore the extreme Universe.

The H.E.S.S. gamma-ray observatory has observed gamma rays with energies of at least 20 TeV from a pulsar, an energy regime that is hard to reconcile with the existing theories of gamma-ray production for such objects.

A statistical study of the ~2.7 µm hydration band in the Ryugu samples shows that Ryugu’s immediate subsurface has not been exposed to space weathering and that even the pristine CI chondrites exhibit terrestrial contamination, making the Hayabusa2 samples a reference for primitive water abundance in carbonaceous asteroids.

A large-scale analysis of quasars reveals that on average, the intrinsic brightness is uniform from the optical to the extreme ultraviolet and is less than expected in the extreme ultraviolet, suggesting prevalent winds that affect black hole growth.

A purpose-built instrument to detect the faint emission lines of the Lyman-α forest provides evidence of filaments that connect galaxies and trace the cosmic web.

Galaxies that formed during the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang have physical properties that deviate from later galaxies, due to substantial gas infall from the intergalactic medium that dilutes the observed chemical enrichment.

Han, Conroy and Hernquist propose a solution to an old problem: the origin of the warp in the Galactic disk. Adopting a dark halo model that is tilted with respect to the disk, the authors reproduce the warp and flare of the disk in the observed direction and magnitude.

The interstellar chemistry of carbon atoms is crucial to chemical complexity in the Universe. This experimental work suggests that C-atom reactions on interstellar ice surfaces contribute to C–C bond formation and chemical evolution towards complex organic species.

In our Solar System, whistler-mode chorus waves had been confirmed for all magnetized planets except Mercury. Finally, the first and second Mercury flybys in 2021 and 2022 by the BepiColombo/Mio spacecraft revealed chorus waves in the dawn sector.

Measurements of the abundance of nearside lunar surface water at various positions of the Moon during the crossing of Earth’s magnetotail bring evidence of the existence of processes of water formation linked to the plasma sheet.

Archival X-ray data reveal quasi-periodic eruptions (QPEs) in binary systems on timescales of several hours to several months. The discovery of QPEs in Swift J0230 data with periods of weeks may help bridge the gap in our understanding of their origins and timescales.

Alfvén wave turbulence can power the atmospheres of solar-like stars. Here the authors estimate the effective outer scale of the turbulence at the base of corona. This scale is key in determining energy deposition and is found to be comparable to supergranulation scales.

The warm Earth-sized planet LHS 475 b is validated and characterized with two transits observed by the JWST. The absence of evident spectroscopic features excludes a substantial hydrogen envelope and indicates that LHS 475 b has either little or no atmosphere or an optically thick cloud deck at high altitudes.

The visible–near-infrared spectrum of the dark spot that appeared on Neptune in 2018 indicates the presence of material that makes the aerosol layer at 5 bar darker at visible wavelengths. Such material can come from deeper layers via upwelling or by sublimation of H₂S ice that reveals the darker condensation nuclei.

This Article explores the evolutionary paths of galaxies on the black-hole mass–stellar mass plane in the nearby Universe, linking the properties of star formation and black-hole accretion and providing critical constraints for active galactic nuclei feedback.

The intensity of radio emission from a pulsar is shown to relate to the quantity of particles discharging in the magnetosphere rather than to changes of the structure of the magnetic field in the magnetosphere itself.

WD 0032–317B is a 75–88-Jupiter mass companion orbiting a hot white dwarf with a period of 2.3 h. It has a day-side temperature of about 8,000 K and a day–night difference of ~6,000 K. WD 0032–317B is amenable to detailed characterization and can be used as a proxy for strongly irradiated ultra-hot giant planets.

Tides on the star MACHO 80.7443.1718 are so extreme that they crash and break every close passage in the pair of stars’ elliptical orbit. Models show how these breaking tidal waves create a rapidly rotating, shock-heated circumstellar atmosphere every periapse passage.

The Chinese Chang’e-6 mission plans to bring a sample from the lunar farside in 2024. Here the characterization and scientific potential of the three candidate landing sites are presented. They are located around the roughly 4-Gyr-old Apollo crater, located within the South Pole–Aitken basin.