Space science and discovery from Cosmic Herald — planetary science, cosmology, astrobiology, and the search for life beyond Earth.
MIT chemists soaked three short peptides in 98% sulfuric acid, the stuff of Venus's upper clouds, and found they held together for weeks and folded into the same defined loop, with the acid itself acting as scaffold.
Read the story →A new theoretical model suggests Sagittarius A* accelerates neutrons to PeV energies via the magnetic Penrose process, while a companion UCLA astrometry paper pins down the black hole's motion and rules out a hidden intermediate-mass companion.
A slipped launch window cost NASA's flagship Uranus mission its Jupiter gravity assist, so a new Planetary Science Journal paper swaps in solar electric propulsion to still reach the ice giant in about 13 years.
Days after launching on a Falcon Heavy, NASA's Roman Space Telescope switched on its Coronagraph Instrument on September 1, kicking off months of calibration before it attempts to directly image planets around nearby stars.
Nearly a mile beneath South Dakota, the LZ detector caught one particle recoil it can't explain — a 2.6-sigma whisper of dark matter that's exciting physicists without convincing them.
On Sept. 3, ESA's Mercury Transfer Module separates from BepiColombo's two science orbiters, opening a sequence ESA calls among the most demanding it has ever run before November's orbit insertion.
A gravity-based "tidal tomography" study in Nature finds the interior under Mars's south finds runs 200–400°C hotter than the north and may be partly molten, reshaping ideas about the planet's lopsided magnetism and ancient water.
A Stanford model shows sloshing molten rock on scorched, close-in super-Earths can outgas fast enough to replenish atmospheres that stellar radiation is simultaneously stripping away.
A new hydrodynamical simulation called SMUGGLE-Ring finds that a Milky Way-mass galaxy's nuclear star cluster and surrounding nuclear stellar disk are built by the same bar-driven gas inflow, not by separate, unrelated processes.
A Syracuse-led study explains why some stars survive repeated brushes with a supermassive black hole while their flares dim each time: they were already spinning fast before capture.
Five clean JWST transits of TRAPPIST-1 f show no starspot contamination and rule out a thick hydrogen/helium atmosphere, sharpening the hunt for air on the seven-planet system's outer habitable-zone world.
New spectra from AT2024wpp, a black hole's 400-billion-Sun star-shredding flare, show helium gas racing away at over 6,000 km/s months later — hinting a dense clump of the star, or a companion object, made it out alive.
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