There's a cloud on Mars that I find truly fascinating: it's about 1,600 km long, sometimes reaching 1,800 km (about 1/12 of the planet's circumference), appearing almost every morning and then completely disappearing within a few hours.
Scientists call it the Arsia Mons Elongated Cloud (AMEC), because it forms above Arsia Mons, a dormant volcano about 20 km high in the Tharsis region, south of the Martian equator. The Mars Express orbiter of the European Space Agency (ESA) discovered it in 2018, and since then, simulations have yet to reproduce how it comes into existence.
In terms of its shape, the AMEC is an orographic cloud: strong winds push moist air over the high mountain, similar to the Levanter clouds that sometimes form on the Rock of Gibraltar. But the key difference lies elsewhere. On Earth, clouds typically form through heterogeneous nucleation: water vapor condenses into ice around dust particles, salt, pollen, or soot. The Martian atmosphere is full of dust, yet this process doesn't seem to be happening here.
In a paper published on October 7th in Nature Geoscience, a team led by planetary scientist Jorge Hernández-Bernal (University of the Basque Country, Spain) suggests that the water vapor in the AMEC transforms directly into ice crystals without any "nuclei." They call this homogeneous nucleation, a process that has never been observed in the atmosphere of any planet. When they incorporated this mechanism into their Martian weather models, they were able to accurately reproduce the characteristics of the cloud.
The conditions required for this to happen are also quite special: winds blowing up the slopes of Arsia Mons (more than twice the height of Mount Everest) create a rapid updraft, and the temperature can drop by as much as 30 degrees Celsius in just 10 minutes. The water vapor may come from the atmosphere, and partly from the thick layer of frost that covers the mountain peak.
What I find most interesting about this story is that what seems like an "impossible" phenomenon forces us to abandon familiar meteorological principles in order to find an explanation. The Mars Express is one of the few spacecraft that can observe the summit of Arsia Mons during the day, so its data is crucial to this discovery.
Source: VnExpress
Every time I think the ocean can't surprise me anymore, a story like this comes along. A team of scientists recently wrapped up a species-identification workshop in Buenos Aires and, in just two weeks, confirmed 57 brand-new marine species and 5 new genera from samples pulled out of the Mar del Plata Canyon. That's an absurd amount of life no one had ever named before.
What gets me is how fast they did it. They gathered about twenty taxonomists from Latin America and Europe, handed them specimens collected by the research vessel Falkor (too) back in August 2025, and let them work through the material using Ocean Census NOVA, an open platform for logging new species. They found twenty new copepods, twenty-two echinoderms like sea cucumbers, fourteen corals, and a scaphopod mollusc.
The star of the show is "Loki", a deep-sea sea cucumber with little horn-shaped appendages that made everyone think of the Norse god. It was filmed alive on the seafloor at around 2,577 metres, the kind of footage that reminds you how alien our own planet still is.
Honestly, this is why I keep following deep-sea news. The same expedition that turned a bright orange starfish into a viral "Patrick Star" moment is now giving us whole new species. If you want to dig in yourself, the open data lives at oceancensus.org — the researchers are putting everything out there for free.
Source: Schmidt Ocean Institute
A small piece of news from Ifremer has cheered me up lately. Two prototypes of the Argo Deep-6000 float have made their first autonomous dives at sea, north of the Antilles. Since 11 January, each one has already completed five full cycles down to 6,000 metres.
What interests me is the why. About 10% of the total ocean warming happens below 2,000 metres, and the data suggest a strong warming signal exists below 4,000 metres in the Southern Ocean, a signal that then spreads northward. Until now, most floats did not reach that deep. These instruments will measure salinity, temperature, oxygen and pressure almost in real time and send their data by satellite.
Technically, it is quite clever: the body is made of composite material rather than titanium, and the device weighs 40 kg against 20 kg for a conventional float. Each cycle lasts ten days, and the design aims for seven years of service. The prototypes were designed in Plouzané with the company nke Instrumentation, which developed the electronics and software.
France thus becomes, after the United States and China, the third country to design Argo profilers capable of reaching these depths. The stated goal is to operate 30 six-thousand-metre floats by 2028, mainly in the North Atlantic. The Argo programme, launched in 2000, has about 4,000 floats, of which nearly 1,250 can descend below 2,000 metres.
I find it moving that we explore the abyss not with a large, spectacular submarine but with a small, patient object that rises and sinks every ten days for years. It is a quiet kind of exploration, but it is what will tell us how the ocean is really changing.
Source: Ifremer / ANR
Every so often a new James Webb image stops me in front of the screen, and this time it was NGC 7129, a stellar nursery about 3,300 light-years from Earth. The telescope, sensitive to infrared, can look past the dust. The region had already been observed by Spitzer, now retired, but at much lower resolution.
At the centre is LkHα 234, a pre-main-sequence star with between 5 and 8 times the mass of the Sun: the most massive and mature star in the whole area. On the left opens a golden cavity about 3.5 light-years across, carved by the outflows of matter the star ejected in an earlier phase. The colour carries a precise meaning: warm atomic hydrogen appears golden, while colder molecular hydrogen appears red.
Inside the cavity are other pre-main-sequence stars, whose stellar winds carve smaller shock arcs and hollows. At the edges, where hydrogen molecules are split into atoms, a photodissociation region forms. On the right side, younger protostars are wrapped in dense, lumpy matter, and their superheated jets generate shock waves that sometimes overlap.
In the upper left is the detail I liked most: a protostar with a doughnut-shaped disc casts a shadow across a blue nebula, a structure similar to the so-called Bat Shadow already seen by Hubble.
What I find fascinating is that in a single shot you can read several generations of stars, from the most mature to the newborns still hidden in the dust. The image is credited to NASA, ESA, CSA and STScI, with processing by Alyssa Pagan.
Source: Media INAF
I read a piece of news that really caught my attention: astronomers have seen, for the first time, a red dwarf absorbing an object orbiting around it. The system is ZTF J0440+2325, where a brown dwarf orbits a red dwarf. The work was published in Nature Astronomy.
The numbers are impressive. The brown dwarf completes one orbit in 86.65 minutes. For comparison, Mercury, the planet closest to the Sun, takes 88 days for one orbit. Observations in five wavelength ranges revealed a bright, hot spot on the red dwarf with a temperature between five and nine thousand degrees.
The distance to the system is estimated at 326 light-years, with 489 given as an upper limit. This affects the size of the spot: about 6,700 kilometres in the first case and around 10,000 in the second. The only explanation the researchers found that agrees with the observations is matter falling from the brown dwarf onto the red dwarf.
The authors believe this is the first observed case of such a transfer of material. I especially liked the idea that the process could go on for billions of years, like a slow "external digestion" rather than a dramatic explosion. The cosmos is not always spectacular; sometimes it is simply very patient.
On the same day, another paper appeared in the same journal, about the white dwarf HS 0209+0832, near which lies a giant planet formed from the debris of earlier planets. I will definitely come back to that story separately.
Source: Naked Science
This news from the deep sea immediately caught my curiosity. Researchers from the Schmidt Ocean Institute discovered 57 new marine species during an expedition off Argentina. Among them are five new scientific genera, from groups such as corals, sea cucumbers and crustaceans.
The finds come from the Mar del Plata Canyon, an underwater valley off the Argentine coast. The work took place at about 2,500 meters depth, where no sunlight reaches and you can only see anything with robots and cameras.
One find has drawn a lot of attention: the sea cucumber "Loki." The name is of course a little joke, and that is exactly what I like about research. Behind a name like this is years of serious work, but the people in the lab are allowed to smile along the way.
What I find so exciting is that we are not talking about a distant planet, but a place on Earth where a single expedition turns up dozens of previously unknown organisms. It shows me how much we still do not know about our own ocean.
I will keep following the reports on this expedition and will add to this post once more is known about the individual species.
Source: ZDFheute
One of the stories that grabbed me most this week: on the Moon, NASA isn't only looking for scientific answers, it's looking for shelter.
Through its PRISM program, the agency has selected a project called GIMLI to study the Marius Hills Pit. Japan's Kaguya spacecraft spotted the pit in 2009, and ever since, scientists have suspected it could be the entrance to an ancient lava tube stretching underground well beyond its opening.
The plan is for the team to work directly on the lunar surface with three complementary instruments: ground-penetrating radar, seismic sensors and a gravimeter, to find out whether the tube really exists and how big it is. The project is led by the Planetary Science Institute (PSI) together with the Norwegian Space Agency, Honeybee Robotics is preparing the hardware, and the payload will reach the Moon on a lander and rover through the commercial CLPS program.
What I like is the practical side. A natural cave like this could protect astronauts from extreme temperatures, radiation and micrometeorites. As deputy principal investigator Gareth Morgan explains, lava tubes are common in basaltic volcanism on Earth, so finding them on the Moon lets us read its history using what we know about caves here.
The final answer depends on the data GIMLI collects, but the question itself is exciting: will lunar caves become a core part of every future plan to settle the Moon?
Details on the three payloads NASA selected are in its official release:
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-adds-new-science-investigation…
Source: World Press Arabi (وورلد برس عربي)
Image: NASA · Public Domain
Recent news from the expedition of the Schmidt Ocean Institute research vessel left me pensive. On June 13, the team found a shirt at about 3,000 meters depth in the Atlantic Ocean, roughly 1,700 km off the Brazilian coast.
The goal of the voyage was to study fault zones along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, one of the most remote environments on the planet. The scientists expected to find an unexplored environment, but instead they came across human trash. The debris was collected with an ROV, a remotely operated vehicle, and the expedition also used an AUV, an autonomous underwater vehicle.
Researcher Ronaldo Christofoletti of Unifesp, who was on board, said they found "a shirt and a drink can" in a place that may be one of the last untouched parts of the planet. For me, that sentence sums it all up.
I tend to think of the deep sea as the last truly wild territory. Knowing that the marks of our presence have reached that far from any coast is an uncomfortable reminder. At the same time, I am glad that there are expeditions able to get there and show us this with images, rather than leaving the matter to speculation.
Source: CNN Brasil
A research group including JAXA has announced that it has, for the first time in the world, directly imaged low-energy gamma rays coming from the center of the Milky Way, using the same principle as an optical telescope. As I read about it, it struck me as one of those stories that looks modest at first but is actually remarkable, so I'm sharing it.
The target is gamma rays in the 150–600 keV range, energies below 1 MeV. With no high-precision imaging method and heavy background noise, this band has been an unexplored frontier known as the "MeV gap." Until now, researchers apparently had to rely on indirect methods, modeling the noise across the whole sky along with the faint signal to make estimates.
The instrument used was an "Electron-Tracking Compton Camera (ETCC)," which can follow even the tracks of electrons. By analyzing about a day of observations from the large balloon experiment "SMILE-2+," launched from central Australia in 2018, the team captured a significant signal from the direction of the galactic center as an image. I found the explanation easy to follow: with a conventional Compton camera, even a point source spreads out into a ring, whereas with the ETCC it converges to a single point.
The positron-annihilation gamma rays they obtained agree with previous observations within the margin of error, yet are about twice as intense. With emission several times stronger than theoretical predictions now more firmly established, there are hopes it will help test unknown origins such as dark matter or primordial black holes. The results were published in August 2026 in a journal of the American Physical Society and were also featured in a Nature Research Highlight.
A more sensitive follow-up experiment, "SMILE-3," is reportedly being prepared as a candidate for the balloon campaign planned in Australia in 2028. The phrase "from a science of inference to a science of seeing" really stayed with me.
Source: JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency)
I love it when an astronomy story connects with chronicles from almost a thousand years ago. In 1181, observers in China and Japan recorded the appearance of a "new star" that remained visible for months. Today that glow is believed to have been the supernova that left behind the nebula Pa 30, and astronomers have just captured the sharpest image of it we have.
The observations were made with the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii, and they reveal about ten times more structure than previous ones. The long filaments that make the nebula look like a firework or a dandelion turn out to actually be chains of gas knots, like beads on a necklace.
Each "pearl" measures about four light-days across. What surprised the team most is how uniform they are and how orderly they appear along the filaments, when something far more chaotic was expected. The work was published in The Astrophysical Journal.
And there's another detail I find fascinating: at the center of Pa 30, a "zombie star" survives. Part of the white dwarf withstood the explosion, something typical of the rare Type Iax supernovae. Studying these knots could help reconstruct what that explosion witnessed by our ancestors was like.
Source: WIRED en Español
During the National Day holiday I came across a piece of news that genuinely excited me: the ocean drilling vessel "Mengxiang" (Dream) has finished a 30-day trial drilling voyage in the South China Sea and returned to Guangzhou. According to the China Geological Survey, the voyage drilled and cored two holes in waters about 4,100 m deep in the South China Sea and successfully recovered basalt samples from the South China Sea ocean basin.
I made a point of noting down a few figures: the voyage reached a maximum total drilling depth of 4,929.17 m and a maximum penetration of 864.77 m, setting a new record for the deepest operating water depth of any drilling carried out independently by China. Using a rotary coring tool it developed in-house, the team brought up a basalt core 4.27 m long.
According to the report, this makes China the third country, after the United States and Japan, to recover hard-rock samples from a deep ocean basin with a drilling vessel. Its deep-sea drilling and coring capability has been raised to the 5,000 m class, and the core recovery rate exceeded 100% on several runs.
To me, the most interesting thing about these cores is that they can provide first-hand material for studying how the South China Sea opened up and evolved. They also show that China's own core drilling equipment has stood the test of ultra-deep-water conditions. I'm looking forward to the research that comes out of this.
Source: 人民网（人民日报海外版）
A far-infrared space telescope I've personally been keeping an eye on for a long time is finally getting off the ground. On September 23, NASA reportedly selected the next-generation telescope "PRIMA" as the first mission in its newly created "Probe Explorers" mission class. The decision came after a comparison with the X-ray telescope "AXIS," and the mission aims for a 2033 launch followed by five years of observations. The cost cap is said to be $1.2 billion (excluding launch costs).
What makes the far infrared so interesting is that it lets you see through the dust-shrouded regions where stars and planets are being born. Besides studying how planets form and how galaxies and supermassive black holes have grown over time, PRIMA will reportedly measure the ratio of deuterium to hydrogen (the D/H ratio) in comet water to tackle the question of "where did Earth's water come from?" No matter how many times I hear that question, it never fails to excite me.
The telescope has a 1.8 m aperture. It will be cooled to about 4.5 K so that its own heat doesn't become noise, and it will carry the spectrometer "FIRESS" and the imaging and polarimetry instrument "PRIMAger." It will neatly fill the wavelength gap between JWST and the ALMA telescope, and 75% of its observing time will reportedly be open to proposals from researchers around the world.
From Japan, JAXA is expected to join as an international partner, and options under consideration reportedly include providing thermal insulation technology developed for the once-planned infrared telescope "SPICA" and supporting data reception at the Misasa Deep Space Station. Seeing SPICA's technology live on in this way honestly warms my heart a little.
Source: TECH+ (Mynavi News)
This one made me smile: a single two-week workshop in Buenos Aires turned a pile of deep-sea samples into 57 species and five genera that nobody had described before.
Back in July, twenty taxonomists and early-career researchers from Latin America and Europe got together at Universidad Maimónides. The workshop was run by the Nippon Foundation-Nekton Ocean Census together with Schmidt Ocean Institute, CONICET and Argentina's natural sciences museum. Most of the material came from Schmidt Ocean Institute's 2025 expedition to the Mar del Plata Canyon, where the ROV SuBastian collected animals from the research vessel Falkor (too), plus some older CONICET samples.
The count breaks down like this: 20 copepods, 22 echinoderms (sea cucumbers and crinoids), 14 cnidarians such as octocorals, sea pens and stony corals, and one tusk-shell mollusc.
My favourite is a horned sea cucumber of the genus Peniagone, nicknamed "Loki", found at 2,577 metres. It is one of up to ten new sea cucumbers from the haul. And the detail that really stuck with me: only about 10% of the copepod samples have been looked at so far, and every single one turned out to be new.
Some of the corals might even be new genera or a new family once the genetic work is done. The specimens stay in Argentina's national collections, and the confirmed species will go into the open Ocean Census database. Honestly, it is a good reminder of how little of the deep sea we have actually catalogued.
Source: DIVE Magazine
