New Neptune-Sized Exoplanet Discovered
A team of astronomers, including Diana Dragomir of the University of New Mexico, has recently discovered a new exoplanet orbiting a nearby star. The newfound alien world, designated TOI-1231 b, is Neptune-sized, with a radius nearly four times greater than that of the Earth.

Meet MOXIE: Perseverance Rover's Little Device Producing Oxygen
The Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment onboard NASA's Perseverance rover is better known as MOXIE. The tool is designed to produce oxygen from the Martian carbon-dioxide atmosphere.

Abastumani Astrophysical Observatory
Abastumani Astrophysical Observatory was founded in 1932 on the territory of the former Soviet Union. It is located on Mount Khanobili, around 240 km from Tbilisi, Georgia, and 30 km in the north-west from Akhaltsikhe, at an altitude of 1700 meters above sea level. The observatory carries out wide-profile research spanning different fields of astronomy and astrophysics and investigations of the upper layers of Earth's atmosphere.

The Perovskite Visuals and Degradation eXperiment
The primary mission of PVDX, which stands for Perovskite Visuals and Degradation eXperiment, will be to test the performance of next-generation perovskite solar cells in the harsh orbital environment. Members of Brown Space Engineering (BSE), a student group, worked for three years to develop a mission plan and proposal for NASA’s Cubesat Launch Initiative, which uses auxiliary cargo space on rockets to send cubesats to space. Sarang Mani, a Brown senior and the group’s project manager and co-president, says the team is thrilled that NASA saw value in their project.

The Billionaires' Space Race
The billionaires Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos have recently successfully reached the edge of space. Mehmet S. Tosun of the College of Business at the University of Nevada, Reno, discusses the impact of these flights on the space economy.

Asteroid Psyche
The widely studied metallic asteroid known as 16 Psyche was long thought to be the exposed iron core of a small planet that failed to form during the earliest days of the solar system. But new University of Arizona-led research suggests that the asteroid might not be as metallic or dense as once thought, and hints at a much different origin story.

The Mysterious Fast Radio Bursts
Ziggy Pleunis of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, tries to uncover the nature of the so-called fast radio bursts (FRBs). FRBs are transient radio pulses of length ranging from a fraction of a millisecond to a few milliseconds, caused by some high-energy astrophysical process not yet understood.

Meet SuperCam: Perseverance Rover's Superhero for Mars Discoveries
The SuperCam on NASA's Perseverance rover examines rocks and soils with a camera, laser and spectrometers to seek organic compounds that could be related to past life on Mars. It can identify the chemical and mineral makeup of targets as small as a pencil point from a distance of more than 20 feet (7 meters).

Understanding Planet Formation
According to a new study led by Anders Johansen, Earth, Venus and Mars were created from small dust particles containing ice and carbon. The discovery opens up the possibility that the Milky Way may be filled with aquatic planets.

Microcomb for Planet Hunters
A microcomb is a photonic device capable of generating a myriad of optical frequencies – colours – on a tiny cavity known as microresonator. Óskar Bjarki Helgason of the Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, presents a game changing microcomb that could bring advanced applications closer to reality. For instance, this device could be used for the calibration of spectrographs used in astronomical observatories devoted to the discovery of Earth-like exoplanets.

Climate Change on Mars
William Rapin of the Research Institute in Astrophysics and Planetology (IRAP) in Toulouse, France, sheds more light on climate changes that occured on Mars. By analyzing the data from NASA’s Curiosity rover, he found how climate on the Red Planet alternated between dry and wetter periods, before drying up completely about 3 billion years ago.

Quadruply Imaged Quasars
Daniel Stern of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory discovers the so-called quadruply imaged quasars, or quads, that can help solve many cosmological puzzles. Quads occur when the gravity of a massive galaxy that happens to sit in front of a quasar splits its single image into four.

CLASP2 Space Experiment
Javier Trujillo Bueno of the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC) leads the CLASP2 experiment to unravel solar mysteries. The extraordinary observations of the polarization of the Sun's ultraviolet light achieved by the CLASP2 mission have made it possible to map the magnetic field throughout the entire solar atmosphere, from the photosphere until the base of the extremely hot corona.

Seismically Active Mars
The SEIS seismometer package from NASA's Mars InSight lander has collected its first continuous Martian year of data, revealing some surprises among the more than 500 marsquakes detected so far. Savas Ceylan of Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich, Switzerland, discusses some of the findings from The Marsquake Service, the part of the InSight ground team that detects marsquakes.

Measuring Tiny Moon Dust Particles
Jay Goguen of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado has developed a method for measuring and computationally analyzing how the moon dust particle shapes scatter light. It is a complex method of measuring the exact three-dimensional shape of 25 particles of moon dust collected during the Apollo 11 mission in 1969.

Baby Boom of New Stars
A simultaneous “baby boom” of new stars has been detected in 36 dwarf galaxies. Charlotte Olsen of Rutgers University–New Brunswick has found that dwarf galaxies far from each other slowed down and then simultaneously accelerated their birth rate of stars.

Valparaíso 1: A Newly Discovered Massive Star Cluster
Valparaíso 1 is a massive star cluster located some 7,000 light years away. It has been recently detected by a team of astronomers led by Ignacio Negueruela of the University of Alicante, Spain. Valparaíso 1 contains at least 15,000 stars.

A Lot Going On In Downtown Milky Way
It turns out that a variety of processes that are taking place in “downtown” Milky Way. New research by University of Massachusetts Amherst astronomer Daniel Wang reveals details of violent phenomena in the center of our galaxy.

Stellar X-Ray Super-Flares
By conducting the largest survey ever of star-forming regions in X-rays, a team of researchers led by Kostantin Getman of the Pennsylvania State University (PSU) has helped outline the link between very powerful flares, or outbursts, from youthful stars, and the impact they could have on planets in orbit.

The Great Dimming Of Betelgeuse
The star Betelgeuse became visibly darker in 2019 and 2020, puzzling astronomers. Miguel Montargès of Paris Observatory in France led the team that revealed what caused the mysterious darkening of this bright orange star in the constellation of Orion.

The Origin Of Supermassive Black Holes
Supermassive black holes, or SMBHs, are black holes with masses that are several million to billion times the mass of our sun. Hai-Bo Yu from the University of California, Riverside, sheds more light on the origin of these massive and mysterious objects.

Changing-Look Blazars
Astronomers from the University of Oklahoma discover a new 'changing-look' blazar - as it transitions from one class to another. A team led by Hora Mishra detected a new object of this type - B2 1420+32.

The Sun's Twisted Magnetic Field
Christopher Prior and colleagues have come up with a new way to measure the entanglement of the magnetic field of the Sun. These twisted magnetic fields rise to the convection zone of the Sun and cause solar flares.

Centaurus A: Into The Darkness
Centaurus is one of the most famous constellations in the southern sky. Within this constellation is the radio galaxy Centaurus A, which can be seen as a faint nebula using only binoculars. Like most galaxies, Centaurus A is also home to a supermassive black hole. With the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), researchers led by Michael Janssen from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfRA) in Bonn and Radboud University Nijmegen, have now zoomed into the heart of this galaxy some 13 million light years away.

What Do We Know About Martian Crust?
Based on the analysis of marsquakes recorded by NASA's InSight mission, the structure of Mars's crust has now been determined in absolute numbers for the first time. Beneath the InSight landing site, the crust is either approximately 20 or 39 kilometres thick. That is the result of an international research team led by geophysicist Dr Brigitte Knapmeyer-Endrun at the University of Cologne's Institute of Geology and Mineralogy.

Kappa 1 Ceti: A Young 'Sun' Nearby
Kappa 1 Ceti is a nearby star thought to resemble our young Sun. A new study of this star led by Vladimir Airapetian of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center could help us better understand what our Sun may have been like when it was young, and how it may have shaped the atmosphere of our planet and the development of life on Earth.