Four secondary school students from Italy, France and Germany have been recognised for their achievements in space science at the Opening Reception of the 46th COSPAR Scientific Assembly in Florence, marking an inspiring culmination of the three-year Erasmus+ Students As Planetary Defenders (StAnD) project.

In the Journal of Applied Physics, researchers explore an eggshell-inspired design as a potential spacecraft protection material. It may seem counterintuitive to use eggshells as a blueprint for strength, but they found that organizing water-filled aluminum eggshells into an array adds useful material properties when placed blunt side down between two aluminum impact plates. Rather than being concentrated within a single eggshell, the energy from an impact gradually dissipates through the material, allowing each shell to sequentially collapse and deform.

A team led by researchers from Nagoya University in Japan has found a way to check for black hole hair using changes in ringdown waves. They found that hidden matter does not affect these waves uniformly; the frequency and fade-out speed of the waves respond differently. This difference may show us if hidden matter is present, and how its pressure is arranged around a black hole.  

For spinning black holes, hidden matter affects ringdown differently, depending on whether the waves move with or against the black hole’s spin. Published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, the study tells us what pattern in the gravitational wave signal would be a clue that hidden hair is present and may help future observations tell a hairy black hole apart from an ordinary one.