Volume 7 Issue 7, July 2023

Common ground between human spaceflight and astrobiology can be used as the foundation for a new deal in the exploration of Mars that will allow stakeholders to reach critical astrobiological goals while supporting safer human exploration.

Dennis Sciama has argued that the existence of life depends on many quantities—the fundamental constants—so in a random universe life should be highly unlikely. However, without full knowledge of these constants, his argument implies a universe that could appear to be ‘intelligently designed’.

Why the outer regions of the solar atmosphere are much hotter than the underlying surface is a long-standing question. New high-resolution observations revise the role of waves in the energy transfer and offer an insight into the processes at play.

Observations of scattered X-rays from the Central Molecular Zone suggest that Sagittarius A* was much more active in the past, and moreover provide an approximate map of the location of the illuminated molecular clouds in the Galactic Centre.

A nearby galaxy provides a clue for resolving a long-standing issue in the way we measure elemental abundances from spectra, setting the stage for better interpreting the chemical evolution of galaxies across different cosmic epochs.

The first post-launch science meeting dedicated to the ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter spacecraft met in-person in Belfast nearly two and a half years into the mission, focusing on building new collaborations and rekindling old friendships.

A brief but bright flash of optical radiation has been captured only 30 seconds after the onset of a gamma-ray burst. Produced in the interior of the shocked relativistic jet that powered the burst, the optical flash reveals the jet to be narrow and magnetized.

A method for measuring oxygen abundances using optical and far-infrared emission lines provides absolute metallicities of the interstellar gas in Markarian 71 and could be applied across cosmic history.

Superluminous supernova SN 2017egm has a complex light curve that is well modelled by successive collisions of a shockwave with dense circumstellar shells ejected by its massive progenitor star during the pair-instability pulsation stage. Such a scenario might be responsible for providing a power source for superluminous supernovae in general.

JWST mid-infrared images of the nearby star Fomalhaut reveal a complex system of dusty rings and disks, created as debris from planetesimal collisions. These structures suggest the presence of a complex and probably dynamically active planetary system.

The eROSITA bubbles and their surrounding regions are best described by the same two-temperature model, implying that the shells are bright because they are denser, not hotter. Also reported are non-solar Mg/O and Ne/O ratios, which support the stellar-feedback origin of the bubbles.

Highly abundant hydrocarbons in a very low-mass star’s disk are detected using the JWST. This unique chemical composition is probably due to the destruction of carbon grains, and the resulting high gaseous C/O ratio may have a profound impact on the composition of growing exoplanets.

An observed magnetic flux rope builds and erupts by completely restructuring its magnetic field lines, resulting in marked footpoint migration. This configuration is not predicted by standard flux rope evolution models, highlighting the three-dimensional nature of magnetic reconnection behind these phenomena.

Torsional waves extend into the deep interior of Jupiter where they can modulate the outgoing heat flux and couple with Jupiter’s weather layer to generate the observed quasi-periodic oscillations in the cloud deck. Such waves can be used to explore the interior structure of gas giants.

Isotopic and petrological analysis of nine angrite meteorites shows evidence of impact mixing between the angrite parent body and a ¹⁷O-rich body that occurred 2–3 Myr after Solar System formation, supporting a Grand Tack-like scenario.

A luminous optical flash from GRB 210619B was captured rapidly by robotic telescopes and attributed to an extremely fast, narrow and magnetized jet shocked by propagating into the surrounding medium.

High-resolution observations reveal fibril motions in the chromospheric umbra of a sunspot, providing a potential energy source for coronal heating.

Measurements by the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter reveal a depletion of heavy CO isotopes in Mars’s atmosphere caused by photochemistry-induced fractionation. The observed depletion in heavy C has implications for our understanding of C escape to space and the formation of organic material on Mars’s surface.