Nearly 4.5 million years ago, two large, hot stars brushed tantalizingly close to Earth’s sun. They left behind a trace in the clouds of gas and dust that swirl just beyond our solar system—almost like the scent of perfume after someone has left the room.
That’s one finding from new research led by Michael Shull, an astrophysicist at the University of Colorado Boulder, and published Nov. 24 in The Astrophysical Journal.
The study sheds new light on the details of Earth’s neighborhood in space.
An international team of researchers has unveiled a spacecraft attitude control system that can guarantee precise stabilization and maneuvering within a predefined time, even under extreme and unpredictable space disturbances.
Published in IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, the study titled “Predefined-Time Disturbance Observer-Based Attitude Tracking Control for Spacecraft: A Solution for Arbitrary Disturbances” was led by Dr. Nguyen Xuan-Mung of Sejong University (South Korea), alongside colleagues from China and Taiwan.
In a quiet control room in northern Chile, a dozen people held their breath at the same time.
The monitors glowed a cold blue, showing a disc of dust and gas 625 light-years away, circling a young star known as PDS 70. At first glance, it looked like so many other protoplanetary disks astronomers have seen before. But then the data sharpened, the patterns cleared, and something jumped out that nobody had *ever* seen so clearly: a place where moons are being born in real time.
The room didn’t erupt in shouts. It was slower than that. A whispered “no way”, a chair rolling back, someone rubbing their forehead like they’d been staring at the sun too long. On the screen, the “moon factory” came into focus: a ring of material around a newborn planet, turning raw space dust into future worlds. Everyone present knew they were staring at a first in human history.
Mosses thrive in the most extreme environments on Earth, from the peaks of the Himalayas to the sands of Death Valley, the Antarctic tundra to the lava fields of active volcanoes. Inspired by moss’s resilience, researchers sent moss sporophytes—reproductive structures that encase spores—to the most extreme environment yet: space.
Their results, published in the journal iScience on November 20, show that more than 80% of the spores survived nine months outside of the International Space Station (ISS) and made it back to Earth still capable of reproducing, demonstrating for the first time that an early land plant can survive long-term exposure to the elements of space.
“Most living organisms, including humans, cannot survive even briefly in the vacuum of space,” says lead author Tomomichi Fujita of Hokkaido University. “However, the moss spores retained their vitality after nine months of direct exposure. This provides striking evidence that the life that has evolved on Earth possesses, at the cellular level, intrinsic mechanisms to endure the conditions of space.”
On Mars, winds constantly stir up whirlwinds of fine dust. It was at the center of two of these dust devils that the SuperCam instrument’s microphone, the first ever to operate on Mars, accidentally recorded particularly strong signals.
Analyses carried out by scientists at the Institut de recherche en astrophysique et planétologie (CNES/CNRS/Université de Toulouse) and the laboratoire Atmosphères et observations spatiales (CNRS/Sorbonne Université/Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines) showed that they were the electromagnetic and acoustic signatures of electric discharges comparable to the small static electricity shocks that can be experienced on Earth when touching a door handle in dry weather. Long theorized, the existence of electric discharges in the Martian atmosphere has now been confirmed by observation for the first time.
The findings are published in the journal Nature.
The study was led by Emily McDougall, an astrophysicist who conducted the work while at the University of New Hampshire. McDougall’s research focuses on a phenomenon called magnetic reconnection, in which nearby magnetic fields—like those of the Earth and the Sun—interact and release huge amounts of energy. These energy releases, far from our planet, kickstart processes that produce phenomena here on Earth, such as dramatic auroras.
Switchbacks are kink-shaped plasma structures that form out of reconnection events. Switchbacks have been previously found near the Sun, by missions like the Parker Solar Probe, but not near Earth.
One of the most elegant theories about the origins of life on our planet is that it was kick-started by a delivery from outer space. This idea suggests that prebiotic molecules—the building blocks of life—were transported here by asteroids or other celestial bodies. While these molecules have been found in meteorite samples that have crash-landed on Earth, the findings have been complicated by the possibility of contamination from our environment.
But now these building blocks have been found on an ancient asteroid untouched by Earth’s environment. That asteroid is called Bennu, a primitive object that hasn’t changed much since the birth of our solar system around 4.6 billion years ago. It last swung by our neighborhood in 2020, when a NASA spacecraft landed on its surface, scooped up some samples, and brought them back home.
