For centuries, lenses have worked the same way: curved glass or plastic bending light to bring images into focus. But traditional lenses have a major drawback—the more powerful they need to be, the bulkier and heavier they become.

Scientists have long searched for a way to reduce the weight of lenses without sacrificing functionality. And while some slimmer alternatives exist, they tend to be limited in their capacity and are generally challenging and expensive to make.

New research from University of Utah engineering professor Rajesh Menon and colleagues at the Price College of Engineering offers a promising solution applicable to telescopes and astrophotography: a large aperture flat lens that focuses light as effectively as traditional curved lenses while preserving accurate color.

The northern lowlands of early Mars could have contained a significant quantity of liquid water. However, the ocean hypothesis remains controversial due to the lack of conclusive evidence from the Martian subsurface. We use data from the Zhurong Rover Penetrating Radar on the southern Utopia Planitia to identify subsurface dipping reflectors indicative of an ancient prograding shoreline. The reflectors dip unidirectionally with inclinations in the range 6° to 20° and are imaged to a thickness of 10 to 35 m along an uninterrupted 1.3 km northward shoreline-perpendicular traverse. The consistent dip inclinations, absence of dissection by fluvial channels along the extended traverse, and low permittivity of the sediments are consistent with terrestrial coastal deposits—and discount fluvial, aeolian, or magmatic origins favored elsewhere on Mars.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), an international team of astronomers has explored the atmosphere of a nearby brown dwarf binary designated WISE J045853.90+643451.9. As a result, they detected hydrogen cyanide and acetylene in the atmosphere of this binary, marking the first time these two species have been identified in the atmosphere of a brown dwarf. The finding was reported Feb. 19 on the arXiv pre-print server.

Brown dwarfs are intermediate objects between planets and stars. Astronomers generally agree that they are substellar objects occupying the mass range between 13 and 80 Jupiter masses. One subclass of brown dwarfs (with effective temperatures between 500 and 1,500 K) is known as T-dwarfs, and represents the coolest and least luminous substellar objects so far detected.

Located just 30.1 light years away, WISE J045853.90+643451.9 (or WISE-0458) is a binary composed of two T-dwarfs of spectral type T8.5 and T9, with effective temperatures of 600 and 500 K, respectively. The pair has a semi-major axis of approximately 5.0 AU.

A pioneering thermal imaging camera built by the University of Oxford.

The University of Oxford is a collegiate research university in Oxford, England that is made up of 39 constituent colleges, and a range of academic departments, which are organized into four divisions. It was established circa 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the world’s second-oldest university in continuous operation after the University of Bologna.

PUNCH Mission Prepares for Launch

Four small spacecraft, each about the size of a suitcase, are set to launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California no earlier than February 28. Designed and built by the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in San Antonio, these spacecraft are part of NASA’s Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission. They will share a ride into space with NASA’s Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx) observatory.

A study published in Science Advances sheds new light on the mysterious origins of free-floating planetary-mass objects (PMOs)—celestial bodies with masses between stars and planets.

Led by Dr. Deng Hongping of the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, an international team of astronomers, used advanced simulations to uncover a novel formation process for these enigmatic objects. The research suggests that PMOs can form directly through violent interactions between circumstellar disks in young star clusters.