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Category: space – Page 4

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has captured a cosmic bullseye. The gargantuan galaxy LEDA 1,313,424 is rippling with nine star-filled rings after an “arrow”—a far smaller blue dwarf galaxy—shot through its heart. Astronomers using Hubble identified eight visible rings, more than previously detected by any telescope in any galaxy, and confirmed a ninth using data from the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. Previous observations of other galaxies show a maximum of two or three rings.

“This was a serendipitous discovery,” said Imad Pasha, the lead researcher and a doctoral student at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. “I was looking at a ground-based imaging survey and when I saw a galaxy with several clear rings, I was immediately drawn to it. I had to stop to investigate it.” The team later nicknamed the galaxy the “Bullseye.”

Hubble and Keck’s follow-up observations also helped the researchers prove which galaxy plunged through the center of the Bullseye—a blue dwarf galaxy to its center-left. This relatively tiny interloper traveled like a dart through the core of the Bullseye about 50 million years ago, leaving rings in its wake like ripples in a pond. A thin trail of gas now links the pair, though they are currently separated by 130,000 light-years.

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Leo P, a small galaxy and a distant neighbor of the Milky Way, is lighting the way for astronomers to better understand star formation and how a galaxy grows.

In a study published in the Astrophysical Journal, a team of researchers led by Kristen McQuinn, a scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute and an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the Rutgers University-New Brunswick School of Arts and Sciences, has reported finding that Leo P “reignited,” reactivating during a significant period on the timeline of the universe, producing stars when many other small galaxies didn’t.

By studying galaxies early in their formation and in different environments, astronomers said they may gain a deeper understanding of the universe’s origins and the fundamental processes that shape it.

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The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) constitute the leading global framework for achieving human progress, economic prosperity, and planetary health. This framework emphasizes issues such as public health, education for all, gender equality, zero hunger, adoption of clean and renewable energy, and biodiversity conservation. Yet, despite this comprehensive agenda, questions remain about how different nations navigate their own paths toward these goals.

A recent study, published in Nature Communications provides insights into the trajectories of 166 countries as they have worked toward the SDGs over the past two decades.

By applying and the Product Space methodology, commonly used in the field of complexity economics, the researchers constructed the “SDG Space of Nations.” The elaborate model shows that countries do not simply march in lockstep toward sustainable development; instead, they cluster into distinctive groups, each with its own strengths and specializations, sometimes quite unexpected.

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For the first time, astronomers have succeeded in observing the magnetic field around a young star where planets are thought to be forming. The team was able to use dust to measure the three-dimensional structure “fingerprint” of the magnetic field. This will help improve our understanding of planet formation.

The study is published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Planets form in turbulent disks of gas and called around . It is thought that the first step in planet formation is dust grains colliding and sticking together.

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Veteran comet hunters have called G3 (ATLAS) the “Great Comet of 2025” due to its daytime visibility and spectacular nighttime sightings. In these gorgeous photos from the Paranal Observatory, it’s not hard to see why.

Photographer Yuri Beletsky caught comet G3 (ATLAS) looking almost like a watercolor painting, ESO wrote in a statement accompanying Beletsky’s photo. The scene was captured on Jan. 19 beside one of the auxiliary telescopes that contribute to ESO’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer, a system of four telescopes working in unison.

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Scientists at Goethe University Frankfurt have identified a new way to probe the interior of neutron stars using gravitational waves from their collisions. By analyzing the “long ringdown” phase—a pure-tone signal emitted by the post-merger remnant—they have found a strong correlation between the signal’s properties and the equation of state of neutron-star matter. Their results were recently published in Nature Communications.

Neutron stars, with a mass greater than that of the entire solar system confined within a nearly perfect sphere just a dozen kilometers in diameter, are among the most fascinating astrophysical objects known to humankind. Yet, the in their interiors make their composition and structure highly uncertain.

The collision of two neutron stars, such as the one observed in 2017, provides a unique opportunity to uncover these mysteries. As binary neutron stars inspiral for millions of years, they emit , but the most intense emission occurs at and just milliseconds after the moment of merging.

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Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) reachability is a rigorous mathematical framework that enables robots to simultaneously detect unsafe states and generate actions that prevent future failures. While in theory, HJ reachability can synthesize safe controllers for nonlinear systems and nonconvex constraints.

In practice, it has been limited to hand-engineered collision

Avoidance constraints modeled via low-dimensional state-space representations and first-principles dynamics. In this work, our goal is to generalize safe robot controllers to prevent failures that are hard—if not impossible—to write down by hand, but can be intuitively identified from high-dimensional observations:

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Understanding where Earth’s essential elements came from—and why some are missing—has long puzzled scientists. Now, a new study reveals a surprising twist in the story of our planet’s formation.

A new study led by Arizona State University’s Assistant Professor Damanveer Grewal from the School of Molecular Sciences and School of Earth and Space Exploration, in collaboration with researchers from Caltech, Rice University, and MIT, challenges traditional theories about why Earth and Mars are depleted in moderately volatile elements (MVEs).

MVEs like copper and zinc play a crucial role in planetary chemistry, often accompanying life-essential elements such as water, carbon, and nitrogen. Understanding their origin provides vital clues about why Earth became a habitable world. Earth and Mars contain significantly fewer MVEs than primitive meteorites (chondrites), raising fundamental questions about planetary formation.

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A large team of researchers working on the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer Collaboration, which has been analyzing eleven years’ worth of data from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) aboard the International Space Station, has found trends in the number of particles moving around in the heliosphere and in the way they interact with one another.

The team has published two papers in the journal Physical Review Letters; one describing trends they found surrounding antiproton and elementary particle behavior over a single and the other covering solar modulation of cosmic nuclei behavior, also over a single solar cycle.

Prior research has shown that the sun follows a cycle that repeats itself every 11 years. The AMS has been running for more than 11 years, but the researchers working on both efforts focused on conditions during just one cycle. They wanted to know how the sun impacted energy particles in the and beyond.

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