BABAR-ERI: A tiny satellite with giant potential for unlocking cloud and energy flow mysteries
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Updates every hour. Last Updated: 11-Sep-2025 17:11 ET (11-Sep-2025 21:11 GMT/UTC)
A study led by University of Chicago planetary scientist Edwin Kite puts forth a new explanation for why Mars never seems to stay balmy for long. Published July 2 in Nature and based on NASA's Curiosity rover findings, their model suggests that the periods of liquid water we see in the past were initiated by the sun brightening, and that conditions on Mars mean it trends towards desert over time—in contrast to Earth, which has stayed habitable.
Astronomers using the European Space Agency’s Cheops mission have caught an exoplanet that seems to be triggering flares of radiation from the star it orbits. These tremendous explosions are blasting away the planet’s wispy atmosphere, causing it to shrink every year.
This is the first-ever evidence for a ‘planet with a death wish’. Though it was theorised to be possible since the nineties, the flares seen in this research are around 100 times more energetic than expected.
Hadrons are bound by quarks and gluons through the strong interaction. Their properties at low energies are non-perturbative, especially because of the phenomenon of quark confinement. According to quark model, hadrons consist of two or three quarks, called mesons and baryons, respectively. Exotic hadrons, like those formed by four, five or more quarks are allowed by Quantum Chromodynamics, QCD. Since 2003, many exotic mesons have been observed, as the X(3872), Tcc(3875) and so on. Regarding exotic baryons, the \Lambda(1405), discovered in the late 1950s in bubble chamber experiments, has been one of the most controversial states. This is because this resonance has unusual properties as its two-pole structure, which makes it an ideal exotic baryon candidate. To gain insights on the properties of the Lambda(1405), researchers extracted the quark mass dependence of this state from a recent LatticeQCD simulation, or QCD in the discretized space-time, and confirm its two-pole structure.