Discover Lockheed Martin’s vision for how a water-based lunar architecture will help us settle permanently and sustainably on the Moon.

Researchers at Nagoya University in Japan have discovered that Cepheid variable stars in our neighboring galaxy, the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), are moving in opposing directions along two distinct axes. They found that stars closer to Earth move towards the northeast, while more distant stars move southwest.

This newly discovered movement pattern exists alongside a northwest-southeast opposing movement that the scientists previously observed in massive stars.

These complex bidirectional movements along two different axes indicate that the SMC is being stretched by multiple external gravitational forces—its larger neighbor, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), in one direction and another currently unknown mechanism in the other. The findings are published in the journal The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

For decades, astronomers have discovered hundreds of protoplanetary disks—structures believed to represent the early stages of our own solar system. However, most of these discoveries lie within our neighborhood, which may not reflect the extreme conditions found in other parts of the Milky Way.

Among the most dynamic and turbulent regions is the Central Molecular Zone (CMZ) near the Milky Way galactic center, where high pressure and density may shape star and planet formation in fundamentally different ways. Studying protoplanetary systems in the CMZ provides a rare opportunity to test and refine our theories of solar system formation.

An international team of researchers have conducted the most sensitive, highest-resolution, and most complete survey to date of three representative molecular clouds in the Milky Way’s CMZ. Their observations revealed over five hundred dense cores—the sites where stars are being born.

We know water in its solid state — ice — exists on moons orbiting Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Telescopes have also spotted frozen water on dwarf planets, comets, and other bits of rock that “hang out” in the Kuiper Belt at the edge of our solar system. But for decades, water ice was not confirmed to exist around other stars.

The James Webb Space Telescope has unequivocally changed that: Data from its NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) confirmed the presence of water ice in a dusty debris disk that surrounds a star known as HD 181327.

Water ice heavily influences the formation of giant planets and may also be delivered by comets to fully formed rocky planets. Now that researchers have detected water ice with Webb, they have opened the door to studying how these processes play out in new ways — in many other planetary systems — for all researchers.