Space

Happy birthday song for Curiosity

The #lunar crash of a Falcon 9 upper stage is expected at 06:35:37.5 UTC +/- a few seconds: https://www.projectpluto.com/25010d.htm#where - find out more in the papers https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14625 and https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23904 and https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.00360 while on https://www.youtube.com/live/9J9-U307w7U and https://www.youtube.com/live/ZfgrV4nmvcg and https://www.youtube.com/live/UKIIMm6TwT8 live views of the Moon at impact time are planned.

...Primordial black holes (PBHs) are only hypothetical, but they generate a lot of interest. If they're real, they formed immediately after the Big Bang from direct collapse of dense clumps of subatomic matter, without the need for any stellar progenitor. Researchers have long thought that they could be the prime component, or even the only component, of dark matter...

This schematic shows a PBH passing through a white dwarf. As it passes through, its gravitational force creates tidal heating in the middle of the white dwarf. Once the material reaches the threshold temperature of <~0.5 billion Kelvin, it triggers uncontrolled nuclear burning. If the region burning is big enough, then thermonuclear runaway will trigger a Type Ia supernova. Image Credit: Kavli IPMU/Gemini AI (Banana Pro)...

...In April 2018, a team led by Oxford planetary physicist Patrick Irwin reported the first clear detection of hydrogen sulfide gas sitting above Uranus’s main cloud deck...

Hydrogen sulfide is the same colorless, toxic gas that gives rotten eggs their smell, and people can detect it at very low concentrations, according to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry...

https://archive.ph/Xp7qa

Warwick University researchers have led an international effort to uncover some of the faintest debris in geosynchronous orbit that have ever been observed, finding fragments as small as 5 cm in size and obtaining valuable data for characterising their behaviour.

link to open access paper https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40295-026-00602-1

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/cosmos/p/1265406/astronomers-find-nearby-planets-to-be-small-strange-and-utterly-uninhabitable

Archived link

Erythrulose, a sugar found in raspberries, kiwis and many red fruits, also apparently exists in a giant molecular cloud of gas and dust near the center of our galaxy, some 26,745 light-years from Earth. This marks the first time a sugar has been seen in interstellar space. The results have been published in Nature Astronomy