Los Angeles CA (SPX) Jan 21, 2026
While Io, the most volcanically active moon in the solar system, appears completely dry and devoid of water ice, its neighbor Europa is thought to harbor a vast global ocean of liquid water beneath an icy crust. A new international study co-led by Aix-Marseille University and Southwest Research Institute finds that this stark contrast in water content was imprinted at birth as the moons formed a

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Jan 21, 2026
A new geophysics study proposes a mechanism that could move life-sustaining nutrients from the battered surface of Europa down into its buried global ocean, improving the odds that the Jovian moon could support microbial life. Europa, one of Jupiters largest moons, holds more liquid water beneath its frozen shell than all of Earths oceans combined, but the ocean is sealed away under thick

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Jan 21, 2026
Quantum mechanics describes a microscopic world in which particles exist in a superposition of states, being in multiple places and configurations at once, encoded in a mathematical object called a wavefunction. But this picture clashes with everyday experience, where objects appear in definite locations and configurations, never in superpositions. To account for this, standard quantum the

Berlin, Germany (SPX) Jan 21, 2026
New experiments show that key molecular building blocks for life can form spontaneously on icy dust grains in deep space long before planets emerge from collapsing gas clouds. In a laboratory at Aarhus University and at the HUN-REN Atomki facility in Hungary, researchers Sergio Ioppolo and Alfred Thomas Hopkinson reproduced the extreme conditions in giant interstellar dust clouds, where te

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Jan 21, 2026
A Simon Fraser University cosmologist reports that new theoretical work on primordial magnetic fields could move researchers closer to resolving the longstanding Hubble tension, the mismatch in measurements of how fast the universe is expanding today. The Hubble tension arises because two precise approaches to determining the Hubble constant give significantly different results, despite dr

Berlin, Germany (SPX) Jan 21, 2026
Astronomers have assembled the most detailed view so far of planetary systems in a long elusive stage between their birth and maturity, using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile. The ALMA survey to Resolve exoKuiper belt Substructures (ARKS) has produced the sharpest images yet of 24 debris discs, the dusty belts that remain once the main phase of planet formation is

Atlantic Council report urges shift toward resilient satellite architectures to blunt potential Russian attacks

The post U.S. vulnerable to Russian escalation in space, new report warns appeared first on SpaceNews.

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Some stars appear to defy time itself. Nestled within ancient star clusters, they shine bluer and brighter than their neighbours, looking far younger than their true age. Known as blue straggler stars, these stellar oddities have puzzled astronomers for more than 70 years. Now, new results using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope are finally revealing how these 'forever young' stars come to be and why they thrive in quieter cosmic neighbourhoods.