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Using the set of first-light observations from the new William Herschel Telescope Enhanced Area Velocity Explorer (WEAVE) wide-field spectrograph, a team of more than 50 astronomers, led by Dr. Marina Arnaudova at the University of Hertfordshire, has presented the first WEAVE scientific results on Stephan’s Quintet in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

This state-of-the-art wide-field spectrograph is a 20-million Euro project that brings together leading experts from around the world. WEAVE is set to revolutionize our understanding of the universe, offering unprecedented detail, as demonstrated in this new study of Stephan’s Quintet.

Stephan’s Quintet, also known as the Hickson Compact Group 92, is a nearby galaxy group that consists of five galaxies (NGC 7,317, NGC 7318a, NGC 7318b, NGC 7,319 and NGC 7320c). Ever since its discovery in 1877, it has captivated astronomers, particularly because it represents a galactic crossroad where past collisions between galaxies have left behind a complex field of debris.

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The planet, a very young gas giant, is about 521 light-years away from Earth. Its strange orbit also enables researchers to get exciting information as it transits in front of its parent star with little to no obstructions to Earth-based instruments, like NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which made the discovery.

IRAS 04125+2902 b is roughly the same age as its parent star, which is far too brief in cosmic terms under our current understanding of planet formation.

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New Curtin University-led research has uncovered what may be the oldest direct evidence of ancient hot water activity on Mars, revealing the planet may have been habitable at some point in its past.

The study analyzed a 4.45 billion-year-old zircon grain from the famous Martian meteorite NWA7034, also known as Black Beauty, and found geochemical “fingerprints” of water-rich fluids.

Study co-author Dr. Aaron Cavosie from Curtin’s School of Earth and Planetary Sciences said the discovery opened up new avenues for understanding ancient Martian hydrothermal systems associated with magmatism, as well as the planet’s past habitability.

A massive collision of galaxies sparked by one traveling at a scarcely-believable 2 million mph (3.2 million km/h) has been seen in unprecedented detail by one of Earth’s most powerful telescopes.

The dramatic impact was observed in Stephan’s Quintet, a nearby galaxy group made up of five galaxies first sighted almost 150 years ago.

It sparked an immensely powerful shock akin to a “sonic boom from a jet fighter”—the likes of which are among the most striking phenomena in the universe.

Returning to those Red Monsters, the new JWST data showed that these galaxies produce stars at about two to three times more efficiently than galaxies in the later universe.

The stellar masses of these three galaxies are so large that they require a stellar-mass conversion efficiency of about 50%, higher than the typical efficiency observed in galaxies today. For example, most galaxies at later times convert only about 20% of their available gas into stars. These findings suggest that the early universe may have had a different set of conditions that allowed for much faster and more efficient galaxy growth.

“Our research is transforming our understanding of early galaxy formation,” Mengyuan Xiao, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher at the UNIGE Faculty of Science, said in the statement.

The sun is once again extremely active. A massive sunspot is slowly turning towards Earth and is expected to spew out solar flares directly at us, leading to not just auroras but also radio blackouts. Named AR3901, the sunspot has already released some flares, with more expected in the coming days.

On Monday, the sun fired nine M-class solar flares, most of them originating from this active sunspot. Earth was not in the firing line of these flares, but when the spot turns towards the planet, things might go a little awry.

“Solar flare activity has remained at high levels with 10 M-Class, R1 (Minor) level flares over the period. Much of the activity has stemmed from Region 3,901 (S07E63, Dai/beta-gamma) which remains difficult to analyse due to foreshortening near the east limb,” NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) said in a forecast discussion.

However, Hassabis’ true breakthrough came just a month ago, when he and two colleagues from DeepMind won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their development of AlphaFold, an AI tool capable of predicting the structure of the 200 million known proteins. This achievement would have been nearly impossible without AI, and solidifies Hassabis’ belief that AI is set to become one of the main drivers of scientific progress in the coming years.

Hassabis — the son of a Greek-Cypriot father and a Singaporean mother — reflects on the early days of DeepMind, which he founded in 2010, when “nobody was working on AI.” Over time, machine learning techniques such as deep learning and reinforcement learning began to take shape, providing AI with a significant boost. In 2017, Google scientists introduced a new algorithmic architecture that enabled the development of AGI. “It took several years to figure out how to utilize that type of algorithm and then integrate it in hybrid systems like AlphaFold, which includes other components,” he explains.

“During our first years, we were working in a theoretical space. We focused on games and video games, which were never an end in themselves. It gave us a controlled environment in which to operate and ask questions. But my passion has always been to use AI to accelerate scientific understanding. We managed to scale up to solving a real-world problem, such as protein folding,” recalls the engineer and neuroscientist.

Evidence suggests Mars could very well have been teeming with life billions of years ago. Now cold, dry, and stripped of what was once a potentially protective magnetic field, the red planet is a kind of forensic scene for scientists investigating whether Mars was indeed once habitable, and if so, when.

The “when” question in particular has driven researchers in Harvard’s Paleomagnetics Lab in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. A new paper in Nature Communications makes their most compelling case to date that Mars’ life-enabling magnetic field could have survived until about 3.9 billion years ago, compared with previous estimates of 4.1 billion years—so hundreds of millions of years more recently.

The study was led by Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences student Sarah Steele, who has used simulation and computer modeling to estimate the age of the Martian “dynamo,” or global magnetic field produced by convection in the planet’s iron core, like on Earth. Together with senior author Roger Fu, the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Natural Sciences, the team has doubled down on a theory they first argued last year that the Martian dynamo, capable of deflecting harmful cosmic rays, was around longer than prevailing estimates claim.