8.5B Year Old Cosmic Burst Found

🌌 Colliding galaxies yield heavy elements

☄️ ESA tracks Europe fireball

🚀 Artemis II flight review update

🪐 New multiplanet system found

🛰️ Smile mission reaches spaceport

An international team led by Penn State scientists investigated a peculiar short gamma-ray burst, GRB 230906A, originating from the collision of two neutron stars within a distant group of colliding galaxies.

The team used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope to pinpoint the burst's origin to a faint galaxy group approximately 8.5 billion light-years away, located within a tidal tail.

Lead author Simone Dichiara states these kilonova emissions are a primary site for heavy element production, potentially explaining the enhanced creation rate of gold and platinum within the halos of interacting galaxies.

ESA’s (European Space Agency) Planetary Defence team is analyzing a bright fireball observed over five European countries that fragmented in the atmosphere, resulting in small meteorite impacts on the ground.

The object, estimated up to a few meters in diameter, glowed for approximately six seconds before fracturing, with at least one house in Koblenz-Güls, Germany, reportedly struck by small meteorites.

ESA officials note that objects this size are often missed by sky surveys, highlighting the urgent need for improved detection capabilities like the Flyeye asteroid survey telescope to increase impact warning times.

NASA officials will highlight progress on the Artemis II crewed mission around the Moon, following a comprehensive Flight Readiness Review to assess the mission's status ahead of its planned circumlunar flight.

NASA engineers are completing work on the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft inside Kennedy's Vehicle Assembly Building, preparing for a second rollout ahead of a potential April launch.

NASA states these increasingly difficult Artemis missions will enable more lunar scientific discovery and economic benefits, ultimately building the foundation required for the first human-crewed expeditions to the planet Mars.

The RedDots collaboration astronomers reanalyzed the nearby M dwarf star GJ 887, confirming a four-planet system that includes two newly discovered exoplanets, one being a super-Earth in the habitable zone.

The team analyzed 101 new HARPS and 12 new ESPRESSO radial velocities, confirming a super-Earth with a 50.77-day orbital period and detecting an Earth-mass planet with a sub-meter-per-second amplitude.

The team states this system is a prime candidate for atmospheric characterization with future missions like the Habitable Worlds Observatory, as the super-Earth is the second closest habitable zone planet known.

The European Space Agency and Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) transported their joint Smile spacecraft to Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana for final launch preparations aboard a Vega-C rocket.

The 2300-kg spacecraft will use its own propulsion to reach a highly elliptical 5,000 km by 121,000 km operational orbit after deployment by the Vega-C rocket’s fourth liquid-propellant upper stage.

ESA states Smile will use four science instruments, including a soft X-ray imager, to study how Earth responds to solar wind, improving our scientific understanding of space weather and geomagnetic storms.