Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
Secondary gas disks around main sequence stars may regenerate planetary atmospheres, potentially transforming desiccated rocky worlds into gas-enveloped sub-Neptunes that feature high metallicities and enhanced atmospheric C/O ratios.
Long believed to be a primitive body, Ceres is now an ocean world with deep brines at a regional and potentially global scale. Further studies at Ceres’s conditions and — above all — a follow-up mission are needed to study its evolution and potential habitability.
The LIGO/Virgo collaboration recently announced the detection of an unusual compact binary merger including either the most massive neutron star or the least massive black hole known. The formation path of such a binary system is still up for debate.
A map of the helium abundance across much of the solar corona will allow us to connect in situ solar wind measurements to their sources and improve our understanding of the origins of the solar wind.
The measure of Titan’s incredibly large migration speed away from Saturn reveals that tidal dissipation depends on the orbital frequency. This new paradigm has many implications for the internal structure of Saturn and the history of its satellite system.
Key questions about ice on the red planet, its climate record and its potential for habitability were the subject of the seventh edition of the International Conference on Mars Polar Science and Exploration, held for the first time in the Southern Hemisphere.
The discovery of four bright fast radio bursts with accurate localization on the sky and association with nearby galaxies enabled a statistical estimate of the baryon content in the intergalactic medium and intervening galaxy halos by measuring the amount of ionized gas towards these sources.
The detection of a ring galaxy at a redshift of z = 2.2, potentially a product of a past collision with a companion galaxy, provides new insights on ring formation and the evolution of disk galaxies in the early Universe.
The cosmic origin of the heaviest elements in the periodic table remains a mystery. Estimates of the physical locations of element-producing events within small galaxies that formed in the early Universe are now providing new clues.
The Curiosity rover is unveiling the persistence of habitable environments more than three-billion years ago at Gale crater, Mars. New analyses of Gale’s ancient sediments show that chemical processing of organic material occurred on a liquid-water rich and freezing early Mars.
The Spitzer Space Telescope launched when the study of exoplanets was in its infancy, and yet it was remarkably successful in characterizing both exoplanet and brown dwarf systems through their mid-infrared emissions. This Review collates the highlights of Spitzer-based research in these fields.
Spitzer revealed the properties of luminous and ultraluminous infrared galaxies, the role of starbursts and actively accreting supermassive black holes in powering these sources and found evidence for energetic feedback on their interstellar gas and dust.
The Spitzer Space Telescope accurately measured stellar masses, ages and star formation rates for a large sample of typical galaxies at high redshifts, allowing an initial exploration of some of the key science drivers of the James Webb Space Telescope.
In the event of accidental transmission of microbes to other planets, we must consider whether the local conditions would allow their proliferation. Whereas temperatures on Mars are usually hostile to life, liquid water is available from deliquescing salts.
Measurements with a CubeSat gas pixel detector reveal a change in the Crab pulsar polarization after a glitch in the spin period, suggesting that starquakes alter the magnetosphere.
A recent trial of distributed peer review for telescope time allocation at the European Southern Observatory echoes the findings of a similar scheme in place at Gemini Observatory since 2015, with both procedures reducing the time invested, financial costs and reviewer burden.
One way for a relativistic jet to decelerate is by instabilities developing on its boundary, which are likely to be caused by continuous bombardment by stars from the host galaxy of the radio jet.
The Spitzer Space Telescope made huge advances in the study of debris disks around main-sequence stars and white dwarfs, increasing their number by an order of magnitude, and leading the way for the next generation of space-based infrared missions.
