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.

In the first study of its kind, researchers at the RIKEN Center for Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences (iTHEMS) in Japan have used artificial intelligence to dramatically speed up the processing time when simulating galaxy evolution coupled with supernova explosion. This approach could help us understand the origins of our own galaxy, particularly the elements essential for life in the Milky Way.

Researchers discover high-velocity clouds in the nearby spiral galaxy M83. These clouds are moving at speeds significantly different to the galaxy’s overall speed of rotation. The findings suggest that these clouds likely originated outside the galaxy, offering new insights into how galaxies acquire fresh gas and sustain star formation over billions of years. This hints at how our own galaxy evolved and may evolve in the future.

An unexpectedly strong solar storm rocked our planet on April 23, 2023, sparking auroras as far south as southern Texas in the U.S. and taking the world by surprise. 

Two days earlier, the Sun blasted a coronal mass ejection (CME) — a cloud of energetic particles, magnetic fields, and solar material — toward Earth. But the CME wasn’t especially fast or massive, suggesting the storm would be minor. But it became severe.

Using NASA heliophysics missions, new studies of this storm and others are helping scientists learn why some CMEs have more intense effects — and better predict the impacts of future solar eruptions on our lives.