A team of astronomers has taken the sharpest-ever picture of the unexpected interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS using the crisp vision of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble is one of many missions across NASA’s fleet of space telescopes slated to observe this comet, together providing more information about its size and physical properties. While the comet poses no threat to Earth, NASA’s space telescopes help support the agency's ongoing mission to find, track, and better understand near-Earth objects.

 

A piece of GSI/FAIR’s cutting-edge research is scheduled to be launched into space next year: the Biophysics department will be involved in one of the next scientific missions on the International Space Station (ISS) with a highly innovative research project. The “HippoBox” project was successfully reviewed by the German Space Agency at DLR and recently selected for participation in the CELLBOX-4 mission on the ISS. The aim of the project is to use brain organoids (“mini-brains”) to investigate neuroplastic changes in a specific area of the brain, the hippocampus – a question that is highly relevant for the medical preparation of future long-term missions in space.

A research paper titled "AP2-domain transcription factor WRI5a-regulated MtABCB1 promotes arbuscule development in mycorrhizal symbiosis" was published in Science Bulletin by the research teams of Ertao Wang from the Center of Excellence in Molecular Plant Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Nan Yu from Shanghai Normal University. The study discovered that the ABCB family transporter MtABCB1 regulates arbuscule development, potentially through directly exporting auxin into the periarbuscular space.

University of Warwick astronomers have uncovered compelling evidence that a nearby white dwarf is in fact the remnant of two stars merging — a rare stellar discovery revealed through Hubble Space Telescope ultraviolet observations of carbon in the star’s hot atmosphere. 

Kyoto, Japan -- The region of space dominated by Earth's magnetic field is the magnetosphere. Observations have shown that, within this region, an electric force acts from the morning side to the evening side as seen from Earth. This large-scale electric field is known to be a key driver of various disturbances such as geomagnetic storms.

Since electric forces act from positive charge to negative, it has been thought by some that the magnetosphere is positively charged on the morning side and negatively charged on the evening side. Yet recent satellite observations have revealed that this polarity is actually the opposite.

This discovery prompted a team of researchers from the universities of Kyoto, Nagoya, and Kyushu to reexamine the underlying mechanisms of the magnetosphere.