News & Views

Elucidating the origin of recent tensions between probes of the early and late Universe could lead to a new understanding of gravity on the largest scales.

The Earth is a rocky planet in the so-called classical habitable zone (HZ), with a surface ocean taking up just ~10^–4 of its total mass. A study suggests that 5–10% of Earth-sized planets in the HZ around red dwarfs are ‘Earth-like’: rocky, with a small but non-zero amount of water on their surface.

A deep learning method accurately measures galaxy cluster mass with the aid of real galaxy clusters detected by the Planck satellite.

The coda correlation wavefield technique provides a powerful tool for surveying planetary interiors using only data from a single station. Its application to the SEIS seismometer on the InSight lander, which has been providing unique data on the interior of Mars since 2018, is a promising example of what it can bring to planetary seismology studies.

Preliminary observations from the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer of a well-studied X-ray pulsar are discordant with theoretical expectations, prompting a reassessment of our understanding of the accretion process.

The precise location of megamaser emission regions in galactic accretion disks has been challenging to pinpoint. Now with interferometric observations leveraging baselines larger than the Earth’s diameter, the missing information is getting closer and closer.

A unified theory of particle transport by wind can explain the observations of aeolian features, like dunes, across the Solar System rocky bodies with atmospheres.

Conflicting results in measurements of the global spectrum of the hydrogen 21-cm line may indicate that there are large systematic errors. A different experimental approach to reach the redshifted signal from cosmic dawn assesses possible systematic errors together with the signal.

Certain types of strongly star-forming galaxies have long been thought to lie outside the usual trends in metal abundances followed by other galaxies. A study now reveals the significant effect of dust on observations, bringing these galaxies back into line with models.

Recent advances in plasma turbulence theory have led to a new way of explaining the heating of the solar corona and many of the observed features of the solar wind.

The Rosetta mission to comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko found unexpectedly high concentrations of molecular oxygen in its atmosphere. New results show that these concentrations are enhanced by a cycle of trapping and releasing of molecular oxygen just below the comet’s surface.

Machine-learning methods are used to provide a more unified picture of mathematical degeneracies in light curves of planetary microlensing events.

Accretion is the process that dictates the mass, and therefore final fate, of a forming star. Now, it seems that the number of stars forming in a system can affect and even induce accretion throughout the star-formation process.

It has been generally thought that small icy bodies in the outer Solar System were chemically inactive due to its coldness. Laboratory experiments change this view by showing that water–rock interactions occur even in ice–rock mixtures.