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What are these bubbles frozen into Lake Baikal?

A December Winter Night

No sudden, sharp boundary marks the passage of day into night in

Viewed face-on,

Why is there a huge eye in the sky?

What do the following things have in common:

It was December and the sky lit up like a Christmas tree.

The stars are not alone.

A Year in Sunsets

On the night of December 15, the

A study introduces a novel thermodynamic concept called the 'centotectic' and investigates the stability of liquids in extreme conditions -- critical information for determining the habitability of icy moons like Europa.

One of the biggest mysteries in science -- dark energy -- doesn't actually exist, according to researchers looking to solve the riddle of how the Universe is expanding. For the past 100 years, physicists have generally assumed that the cosmos is growing equally in all directions. They employed the concept of dark energy as a placeholder to explain unknown physics they couldn't understand, but the contentious theory has always had its problems. Now a team of physicists and astronomers are challenging the status quo, using improved analysis of supernovae light curves to show that the Universe is expanding in a more varied, 'lumpier' way.

Messier 2

Researchers have found evidence of magnetic fields associated with a disc of gas and dust a few hundred light-years across deep inside a system of two merging galaxies known as Arp220. They say these regions could be the key to making the centres of interacting galaxies just right for cooking lots of hydrogen gas into young stars.

New studies offer a clearer picture of how the outer solar system formed and evolved based on analyses of trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) and centaurs. The findings reveal the distribution of ices in the early solar system and how TNOs evolve when they travel inward into the region of the giant planets between Jupiter and Saturn, becoming centaurs. TNOs are small bodies, or 'planetesimals,' orbiting the sun beyond Pluto. They never accreted into planets, and serve as pristine time capsules, preserving crucial evidence of the molecular processes and planetary migrations that shaped the solar system billions of years ago. These solar system objects are like icy asteroids and have orbits comparable to or larger than Neptune's orbit. Prior to the new UCF-led study, TNOs were known to be a diverse population based on their orbital properties and surface colors, but the molecular composition of these objects remained poorly understood. For decades, this lack of detailed knowledge hindered interpretation of their color and dynamical diversity. Now, the new results unlock the long-standing question of the interpretation of color diversity by providing compositional information.

Scientists are changing our understanding of climate and weather on Mars and providing critical insights into Earth's atmospheric processes as well.

What kind of strange galaxy is this?

Conventional wisdom assumes the ratio of gases in a planet's atmosphere should match the ratio of gases in the natal disk that birthed it. For the first time, researchers compared gases in a still-forming planet's atmosphere to its natal disk. The team found the planet surprisingly was less carbon-rich than the disk.

Galaxy clusters -- the big cities of the universe -- are home to many giant elliptical galaxies that have completed their growth and are not forming stars. However, it is still unclear what has shut down star formation. In a new study, researchers utilized the James Webb Space Telescope to observe an ancestor of galaxy clusters, revealing the role of supermassive black holes in slowing star formation and allowing them to evolve into giant elliptical galaxies.

Scientists recently led a team that found, for the first time, that Chiron has surface chemistry unlike other centaurs. Its surface it has both carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide ice along with carbon dioxide and methane gases in its coma, the cloud-like envelope of dust and gas surrounding it.