Volume 5 Issue 3, March 2021

Exploring the hypothesis that life is present on Mars today is key to informing planetary protection issues at a pivotal time, with the clock ticking to return pristine samples before humans irrevocably alter the environment.

The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic forced a string of cancelled conferences, causing many organizers to shift meetings online, with mixed success. Seizing the opportunity, a group of researchers came together to rethink how the conference experience and collaboration in general can be improved in a more virtual-centric future.

The Pan-African School for Emerging Astronomers (PASEA) is an innovative short course for African university students, held by an African-led international collaboration. PASEA aims to build a critical mass of astronomers in Africa and exchange ideas about teaching across continents.

Radio observations from the Low Frequency Radio Array suggest that magnetic fields in high-redshift clusters are of similar strength as their local counterparts. This finding implies that magnetic fields evolve differently than predicted by cosmological simulations.

The Mars Subsurface Water Ice Mapping (SWIM) project aims at determining the regions where near-surface ice is most likely to be present, according to the combination of all the available datasets. Focusing on the northern mid-latitudes, they identify in particular Deuteronilus Mensae and Arcadia Planitia as promising sites.

Solar imaging and spectral data indicate that impulsive heating through magnetic reconnection in transition region loops is responsible for observed transient brightenings, consistent with ion cyclotron turbulence due to strong currents at the reconnection sites.

Hayabusa2 created an artificial crater on Ryugu to analyse the subsurficial material of the asteroid. Results show that the subsurface is more hydrated than the surface. It experienced alteration processes that can be traced back to Ryugu’s parent body.

The Milky Way disk is found to be moving with respect to the outer halo of the Galaxy as a result of the gravitational pull of the Large Magellanic Cloud as it falls into the Milky Way. Dynamical models of our Galaxy need to take this effect into account.

The detection of three ultraviolet emission lines from GN-z11 can be interpreted as the [C iii] λ1907, C iii] λ1909 doublet and O iii] λ1666 at z = 10.957 ± 0.001, confirming GN-z11 as the most distant galaxy known to date and revealing the properties of its dense ionized gas.

A peculiar near-infrared transient with an observed duration shorter than 245 s, coincident with the luminous star-forming galaxy GN-z11 at z ≈ 11, might have arisen from a rest-frame ultraviolet flash associated with a long gamma-ray burst in GN-z11.

LOFAR reveals diffuse radio emission in massive high-redshift clusters, whose high radio luminosities indicate magnetic field strengths similar to those in nearby clusters, suggesting fast magnetic field amplification in the early Universe.

Based on laboratory experiments and predictions, the Europa Clipper mission is expected to detect the surface ices on the night side of Jupiter’s moon Europa glowing in the dark, with an intensity that can be used to determine their composition.

The observed oriented directions of galaxy angular momentum vectors correlate with predicted directions based on the initial density field reconstructed from the positions of Sloan Digital Sky Survey galaxies, opening a way to probe fundamental physics in the early Universe.

Pluto’s haze could have a major icy component created by the condensation of organic molecules such as C₄H₂. This is different from Titan whose haze, despite a similar atmospheric composition, is mostly macromolecular aggregates. Triton’s haze, instead, should be dominated by ices, particularly C₂H₄.

Flares from K and M dwarf stars drive change, and sustain an altered atmospheric chemistry, in orbiting rocky planets, according to a suite of three-dimensional climate models. The atmospheres of rocky planets around G dwarfs rapidly return to their pre-flare states, however.

A globular cluster-like system in the Galactic bulge hosts two stellar populations with remarkably different ages, identifying it as a site of recent star formation and providing observational proof for the hierarchical assembly of the Milky Way spheroid.

A massive starburst galaxy at redshift 1.4 is ejecting 46 ± 13% of its molecular gas mass at a rate of ≥ 10,000 M_⊙ yr⁻¹, owing to a merger rather than feedback processes. The implied statistics suggest that similar events are potentially a major quenching channel.

Nāmakanaui, a three-band submillimetre receiver, is currently being commissioned on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, report Instrumentation Specialists Izumi Mizuno and Chih-Chiang Han.