New research from a Western University postdoctoral fellow shows the early lunar crust, which makes up the surface of the moon, was considerably enriched in water more than 4 billion years ago, counter to previously held understanding. The discovery is outlined in a study published today (Jan. 15) in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Working with a meteorite she classified as one that came from the moon while a graduate student at The Open University (U.K.), Tara Hayden identified, for the first time, the mineral apatite (the most common phosphate) in a sample of early lunar crust.

The research offers exciting new evidence that the moon’s early crust contained more water than was originally thought, opening new doors into the study of lunar history.

To combat the issue of space debris, Australia’s EOS Space and Japan’s EX-Fusion will develop a laser system to remove it from Earth’s orbit.

EX-Fusion, a startup based in Osaka, is attempting to remove tiny pieces of space debris by firing laser beams from the ground.

Scientists have discovered a massive ring-shaped structure in space that challenges our understanding of the universe.

The cosmic megastructure, dubbed the Big Ring, has a diameter of about 1.3 billion light-years and is among the largest structures ever observed. It appears to be roughly the size of 15 moons in the night sky as seen from Earth.

The Big Ring is so large that it challenges the cosmological principle. This fundamental cosmological assumption says that the universe is homogeneous on a large scale and looks the same in all directions.

Astronomers have recently discovered the most massive neutron star to date, nearly at the theoretical limit for such stars. But it’s only about the size of a small city.

But by analyzing data taken from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which studies galaxies illuminated by powerful quasars bursts, the researchers teased apart the evidence for a ring far bigger than the theoretical upper size limit — a stunning coil-like structure aligned face-on with Earth.

“The Big Ring and Giant Arc are the same distance from us, near the constellation of Boötes the Herdsman, meaning they existed at the same cosmic time when the universe was only half of its present age,” Lopez said. “They are also in the same region of sky, at only 12 degrees apart when observing the night sky … [This] raises the possibility that together they form an even more extraordinary cosmological system.”

Although the cause of the gigantic structure is unclear, the researchers first speculated that it could be a remnant of a baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO), a type of sound wave that rippled through the hot plasma of the early universe. Yet further analysis found that the Big Ring was too large and, due to its corkscrew shape, not spherical like BAOs. Alternative explanations suggest that it could possibly be a cosmic string, a hypothetical clumping of matter created in the early universe, or a remnant of something else that could demand an entirely new model to explain it.

Now, astronomers led by Northwestern University have pinpointed the extraordinary object’s birthplace — and it’s rather curious, indeed.

Using images from NASA ’s Hubble Space Telescope, the researchers traced the FRB back to not one galaxy but a group of at least seven galaxies. The galaxies in the collection appear to be interacting with one another — perhaps even on the path to a potential merger. Such groups of galaxies are rare and possibly led to conditions that triggered the FRB.

The unexpected finding might challenge scientific models of how FRBs are produced and what produces them.

Astronomers have completed the largest and most detailed study of what triggers stars to form in the universe’s biggest galaxies, using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes. They were surprised to find that the conditions for stellar conception in these exceptionally massive galaxies have not changed over the last ten billion years.

“What’s surprising here is that there are lots of things that could have affected star formation over the last ten billion years,” said Michael Calzadilla of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who led the study. “In the end, however, the main driver of star formation in these huge galaxies really comes down to one thing—whether or not the hot gas surrounding them can cool off quickly enough.”

Clusters of galaxies are the largest objects in the universe held together by gravity and contain huge amounts of hot gas seen in X-rays. The mass of this hot gas is several times the total mass of all the stars in all the hundreds of galaxies typically found in galaxy clusters.