Tootfinder

🌠 Ryugu asteroid research reveals mineral history predating any on Earth
#astronomy

Ryugu asteroid research reveals mineral history predating any on Earth
In 2020, the Hayabusa2 uncrewed spacecraft successfully returned small fragments from the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu, providing the first pristine samples from a carbonaceous asteroid. Grains from those samples were studied at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II), revealing new details into the asteroid's composition and origin. This insight could ultimately help answer big questions about how water and organic matter came to exist on early Earth, forming the building blocks of lif…

Global #TippingPoints Report 2025: https://global-tipping-points.org/resources-gtp/ (summary and full report) -> Bleaching, Melting, Slowing - New report tracks growing risks of Earth system tipping points: https://www.pik-potsdam.de/en/news/latest-news/files/bleaching-melting-slowing-new-report-tracks-growing-risks-of-earth-system-tipping-points-4 -> The planet has entered a ‘new reality’ as it hits its first climate tipping point, landmark report finds: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/10/13/climate/tipping-points-coral-reef-ice-amoc

Federal funding is about to run out for 19 active #NASA space missions studying Earth's climate, exploring the Solar System, and probing mysteries of the Universe: https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/09/scientists-its-do-or-die-time-for-americas-primacy-exploring-the-solar-system/ - this year's budget expires at the end of this month, and Congress must act before October 1 to avert a government shutdown; if Congress passes a budget before then, it will most likely be in the form of a continuing resolution, an extension of this year's funding levels into the first few weeks or months of fiscal year 2026.

Rare-Earth Engineering of NaAlO3 Perovskites Unlocks Unified Optoelectronic, Thermoelectric, and Spintronic Functionalities
Muhammad Imran, Sikander Azam, Qaiser Rafiq, Amin Ur Rahman
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08130

Rare-Earth Engineering of NaAlO3 Perovskites Unlocks Unified Optoelectronic, Thermoelectric, and Spintronic Functionalities
Perovskite oxides are promising for energy and quantum technologies, but wide-gap hosts such as NaAlO3 suffer from deep-UV absorption and limited carrier transport. Using first-principles GGA+U+SOC calculations, we investigate Eu3+-, Gd3+-, and Tb3+-doped NaAlO3 and evaluate their electronic, optical, elastic, and thermoelectric properties. Rare-earth substitution is thermodynamically favorable (formation energies 1.2-1.6 eV) and induces strong f-p hybridization, reducing the pristine band gap …

♨️ Underwater thermal vents may have given rise to the first molecular precursors of life
https://phys.org/news/2025-10-underwater-thermal-vents-molecular-precursors.html

Underwater thermal vents may have given rise to the first molecular precursors of life
A study published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society has recreated in the laboratory chemical reactions that may have occurred on Earth about four billion years ago, producing the first molecular precursors for the emergence of life.

XRISM observations of solar flare X-ray emission reflected in the Earth's atmosphere
Hiromasa Suzuki, Jun Kurashima, Koji Mori, Satoru Katsuda, Shun Inoue, Daiki Ishi, Eugene M. Churazov, Rashid A. Sunyaev, Ildar Khabibullin, Tsunefumi Mizuno, Caroline Kilbourne, Yuichiro Ezoe, Hiroshi Nakajima, Kosuke Sato, Eric Miller, Kyoko Matsushita
https://

XRISM observations of solar flare X-ray emission reflected in the Earth's atmosphere
The X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM), launched into low-Earth orbit in 2023, observes the reflection of solar flare X-rays in the Earth's atmosphere as a by-product of celestial observations. Using a $\sim$one-year data set covering from October 2023 to November 2024, we report on our first results of the measurement of the metal abundance pattern and high-resolution Fe-K spectroscopy. The abundances of Mg, Si, S, Ar, Ca, and Fe measured with the CCD detector Xtend during M- and X…

Toward Alternative Earths' Habitability of Solar System Bodies at Earth's Orbit
Mohammed Abdel Razak
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06259 https://arxiv…

Toward Alternative Earths' Habitability of Solar System Bodies at Earth's Orbit
This paper presents the first structured evaluation of Solar System bodies hypothetically relocated to Earth orbit (1 AU) to assess their potential as alternative habitats. Using comparative criteria, planetary size and gravity, atmospheric retention, volatile accessibility, weather system potential, soil development feasibility, and orbital transfer cost. We find that most bodies are unsuitable. Mercury and the Moon lack volatiles and atmospheres, while gas and ice giants offer no solid surfac…

Pope Leo, the head of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics, delivered his first dedicated address on climate change Wednesday, imploring leaders to hear “the cry of the Earth and the cry of the poor.”
In First Address on Climate Change, Pope Leo Signals Continuity With Francis—and Opposition to Trump
The pontiff called on people all over the world to demand action on climate from their governments. Right-wing pundits in the U.S. immediately denounced his message as “woke.”

In First Address on Climate Change, Pope Leo Signals Continuity With Francis—and Opposition to Trump - Inside Climate News
The pontiff called on people all over the world to demand action on climate from their governments. Right-wing pundits in the U.S. immediately denounced his message as “woke.”

Day 15 (belated): Darcie Little Badger
An Indigenous author of YA fiction, Little Badger writes warm characters with deep hearts, and of course offers a fantasy world that feels refreshingly different to anyone steeped mainly in fantasy of the Tolkien lineage. Would be nice if works like hers weren't rare and didn't seem exotic, but that's not the world we live in.
I greatly enjoyed "A Snake Falls to Earth" and need to remember to grab more from her soon, although my current library crop is sitting at something like 8 books to do through first.
#20AuthorsNoMen

GeoArena: An Open Platform for Benchmarking Large Vision-language Models on WorldWide Image Geolocalization
Pengyue Jia, Yingyi Zhang, Xiangyu Zhao, Yixuan Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04334

GeoArena: An Open Platform for Benchmarking Large Vision-language Models on WorldWide Image Geolocalization
Image geolocalization aims to predict the geographic location of images captured anywhere on Earth, but its global nature presents significant challenges. Current evaluation methodologies suffer from two major limitations. First, data leakage: advanced approaches often rely on large vision-language models (LVLMs) to predict image locations, yet these models are frequently pretrained on the test datasets, compromising the accuracy of evaluating a model's actual geolocalization capability. Second…

Net-Zero 6G from Earth to Orbit: Sustainable Design of Integrated Terrestrial and Non-Terrestrial Networks
Muhammad Ali Jamshed, Malik Muhammad Saad, Muhammad Ahmed Mohsin, Dongkyun Kim, Octavia A. Dobre, Halim Yanikomeroglu, Lina Mohjazi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00678

Net-Zero 6G from Earth to Orbit: Sustainable Design of Integrated Terrestrial and Non-Terrestrial Networks
The integration of Terrestrial Networks (TN) and Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN) plays a crucial role in bridging the digital divide and enabling Sixth Generation (6G) and beyond to achieve truly ubiquitous connectivity. However, combining TN and NTN introduces significant energy challenges due to the diverse characteristics and operational environments of these systems. In this paper, we present for the first time a comprehensive overview of the design challenges associated with achieving Net-Z…

Here's how (the first partiality of) yesterday's Total #LunarEclipse looked from the #ISS: #refraction.

The Space Coronagraph Optical Bench (SCoOB): 7. design, fabrication, and first light for a self-coherent camera
Kevin Derby, Kian Milani, Grace C. Hathaway, Joshua Liberman, Kyle Van Gorkom, Ramya Anche, Adam Schilperoort, Corey Fucetola, Brandon Chalifoux, Kuravi Hewawasam, Christopher Mendillo, Sebastiaan Y. Haffert, Ewan S. Douglas
https://

The Space Coronagraph Optical Bench (SCoOB): 7. design, fabrication, and first light for a self-coherent camera
The 2020 Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics tasked future space observatories with the goal of detecting and characterizing a large sample of Earth-like exoplanets. To achieve this, these observatories will require coronagraphs and wavefront control algorithms in order to achieve $10^{-10}$ or better starlight suppression. The Space Coronagraph Optical Bench (SCoOB) is a vacuum compatible testbed at the University of Arizona which aims to advance and mature starlight suppression techn…

Are Local Group Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxies the First Safe Planet-hosting Environments?
Stefano Ciabattini, Stefania Salvadori, Leonardo Testi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01669 htt…

Are Local Group Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxies the First Safe Planet-hosting Environments?
We explore whether Local Group dwarf spheroidal (dSph) galaxies might have hosted Earth-like planets dwelling unexposed for several billions of years to major galactic threats to life, such as supernovae and gamma-ray bursts. To this aim, we developed a novel semiempirical model that exploits the observed chemical abundances and star formation histories of a selected sample of local dSphs, to explore whether their stars may have (i) reached the minimum metallicity to trigger planet formation an…

Wealthy Danes take their kids to see coral reefs and glaciers "before they disappear", we will mourn the loss of beech forests in spring, surely one of the most magnificent seasonal sights on earth, all the same.
#seaLevelRise.
This from @AarhusUni et al suggests it will be the trees
https://videnskab.dk/naturvidenskab/juletraeet-og-danmarks-nationaltrae-doer-sandsynligvis-i-skovene-i-dette-aarhundrede

FIRST KNOWN LIFE ON EARTH
Dating back as far as 3.9 billion years ago,
these simple prokaryotic organisms were made up of a single cell that lacked a
nucleus and other organelles.
https://static.scientificamerican.com/

Exploration of vertical self-resonant bifurcations from DRO in the Earth-Moon CR3BP
Cengiz Aydin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.17286 https://arxiv.org/pdf/250…

Exploration of vertical self-resonant bifurcations from DRO in the Earth-Moon CR3BP
The purpose of this paper is to investigate vertical self-resonant (VSR) bifurcations from distant retrograde orbit (DRO) family in the framework of the Earth-Moon CR3BP. To this end, by using a classical corrector-predictor algorithm we compute the vertical stability of DROs and identify twelve vertical-critical DROs. We split them into three groups according to orbiting around libration points $L_i$, $i=1,2,4,5$. (i) We first analyze six VSR bifurcations of multiplicity from five to ten assoc…

Null-Shaping for Interference Mitigation in LEO Satellites Under Location Uncertainty
Fernando Moya Caceres, Akram Al-Hourani, Saman Atapattu, Kandeepan Sithamparanathan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00816

Null-Shaping for Interference Mitigation in LEO Satellites Under Location Uncertainty
Radio frequency interference (RFI) poses a growing challenge to satellite communications, particularly in uplink channels of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) systems, due to increasing spectrum congestion and uncertainty in the location of terrestrial interferers. This paper addresses the impact of RFI source position uncertainty on beamforming-based interference mitigation. First, we analytically characterize how geographic uncertainty in RFI location translates into angular deviation as observed from th…

Compact All optical Reservoir Computing via Luminescence Dynamics in Rare-earth Ions-doped Nanocrystals
Junyan Chen, Jingsong Fu, Jie Xu, Yixiang Qin, Axin Du, Kaiyang Wang, Limin Jin, Can Huang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16042

Compact All optical Reservoir Computing via Luminescence Dynamics in Rare-earth Ions-doped Nanocrystals
Optical neuromorphic computing offers a promising route to high speed, energy efficient information processing. However, photonic neurons, as the critical components for enhancing computational expressivity, still face significant bottlenecks in nonlinear mapping and memory capacity. Here, we demonstrate an all optical reservoir computing system based on rare earth ions doped nanocrystals for the first time, leveraging their intrinsic nonlinear luminescence dynamics and multitimescale memory. U…

Orbital-Engineered Spin Asymmetry and Multifunctionality in Eu-Activated CaAlSiN$_3$: A First-Principles Roadmap to Optical-Thermoelectric Fusion
Muhammad Tayyab, Faiq Umar, Sikander Azam, Qaiser Rafiq, Rajwali Khan, Muhammad Tahir Khan, Vineet Tirth, Ali Algahtani
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00863 …

Orbital-Engineered Spin Asymmetry and Multifunctionality in Eu-Activated CaAlSiN$_3$: A First-Principles Roadmap to Optical-Thermoelectric Fusion
Rare-earth-doped nitride phosphors are promising materials for solid-state lighting and photonic applications due to their thermal stability, sharp emission lines, and strong UV-blue absorption. In this work, we present a first-principles density functional theory (DFT) study, using the GGA+U approach, of pristine and Eu3+-doped CaAlSiN3 at doping levels of 8.5% and 17%. Electronic structure calculations show that Eu incorporation introduces localized 4f states within the band gap, leading to b…

Observations of the fluctuations in Interplanetary Magnetic Field around L1 point during the solar transient events of 2024 with MAG payload onboard Aditya-L1 spacecraft
Vipin K. Yadav, R. K. Choudhary, M. Midhun Goutham
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03182

Observations of the fluctuations in Interplanetary Magnetic Field around L1 point during the solar transient events of 2024 with MAG payload onboard Aditya-L1 spacecraft
The MAG payload onboard India's first solar mission, Aditya-L1, is a dual-senssor fluxgate magnetometer designed to measure th interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) while operating in a halo orbit around the first Sun-Earth Lagrangian point (l1). Since becoming operational in January 2024, MAG has continuously recorded local magnetic field data and has captured several solar transient events over the past one year. During these events, the IMF, typically around 5 nT, exhibited significant enhance…

Comment on the "Electric Power Generation from Earth's Rotation through its Own Magnetic Field"
Iver H. Brevik, Moshe M. Chaichian, Mikhail I. Katsnelson
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00066 …

Comment on the "Electric Power Generation from Earth's Rotation through its Own Magnetic Field"
The suggestion made by C. F. Chyba and K. P. Hand about electric power generation from Earth's rotation through its own magnetic field is intriguing [1, 2]. Here, we reanalyze the theoretical arguments for their conclusion, especially those presented in [1]. The model that they consider, is a magnetic cylindrical shell moving with low velocity $v$ in the $y$ direction at a right angle to the direction of the Earth's magnetic field $B_\infty$. We first focus on one of the electromagnetic boundar…

Mineral Detection of Neutrinos and Dark Matter 2025 Proceedings
Shigenobu Hirose, Patrick Stengel, Natsue Abe, Daniel Ang, Lorenzo Apollonio, Gabriela R. Araujo, Yoshihiro Asahara, Laura Baudis, Pranshu Bhaumik, Nathaniel Bowden, Joseph Bramante, Lorenzo Caccianiga, Mason Camp, Qing Chang, Jordan Chapman, Reza Ebadi, Alexey Elykov, Anna Erickson, Valentin Fondement, Katherine Freese, Shota Futamura, Claudio Galelli, Andrew Gilpin, Takeshi Hanyu, Noriko Hasebe, Adam A. Hecht, Samuel C. …

Mineral Detection of Neutrinos and Dark Matter 2025 Proceedings
The third ``Mineral Detection of Neutrinos and Dark Matter'' (MD$ν$DM'25) meeting was held May 20-23, 2025 in Yokohama, Japan, hosted by the Yokohama Institute for Earth Sciences, Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC). These proceedings compile contributions from the workshop and update the progress of mineral detector research. MD$ν$DM'25 was the third such meeting, following the first in October of 2022 held at the IFPU in Trieste, Italy and the second in January of…

Colors of Life in the Clouds: Biopigments of atmospheric microorganisms as a new signature to detect life on planets like Earth
Ligia F. Coelho, Lisa Kaltenegger, William Philpot, Adam J. Ellington, Noelle Bryan, Stephen Zinder, Brent C. Christner
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25173

Colors of Life in the Clouds: Biopigments of atmospheric microorganisms as a new signature to detect life on planets like Earth
When Carl Sagan and Ed Salpeter envisioned potential Sinkers, Floaters, and Hunters living in Jupiter's clouds in 1976 (C. Sagan & E. E. Salpeter 1976), the nature of life in Earth's atmosphere remained widely unknown. Decades later, research has revealed a remarkable variety of microorganisms in our atmosphere. However, the spectral features of airborne microbes as biomarkers for detecting atmospheric life remained a mystery. Here, we present the first reflectance spectra of biopigments of atm…

First IACT Waveform Analysis Based on Deep Convolutional Neural Networks Using CTLearn
T. Miener (for the CTAO-LST project), L. Burmistrov (for the CTAO-LST project), B. Lacave (for the CTAO-LST project), A. Cervi\~no (for the CTAO-LST project)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15010

First IACT Waveform Analysis Based on Deep Convolutional Neural Networks Using CTLearn
Imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes (IACTs) detect extended air showers (EASs) generated when very-high-energy (VHE) gamma rays or cosmic rays interact with the Earth's atmosphere. Cherenkov photons produced during an EAS are captured by fast-imaging cameras, which record both the spatial and temporal development of the shower, along with calorimetric data. By analyzing these recordings, the properties of the original VHE particle-such as its type, energy, and direction of arrival-can be r…

From daughter at uni: "Im having to do a load of health and safety training and I think they think its my first day on earth..."
And so it begins!

Solar Hegemony: M-Dwarfs Are Unlikely to Host Observers Such as Ourselves
David Kipping
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01215 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.01215…

Solar Hegemony: M-Dwarfs Are Unlikely to Host Observers Such as Ourselves
With no firm evidence for life beyond our solar system, inferences about the population observers such as ourselves rests upon the Earth as a single input, at least for now. Whilst the narrative of our home as a 'humdrum' system has become ingrained in the public psyche via Sagan, there are at least two striking facts about our existence which we know are certainly unusual. First, the stelliferous period spans ~10Tyr - yet here we are living in the first 0.1% of that volume. Second, over three-…

Scientists Make Breakthrough in Solving the Mystery of Life’s Origin https://www.404media.co/scientists-make-breakthrough-in-solving-the-mystery-of-lifes-origin/

Extreme Geomagnetic Storm on Early Earth Induced by Corotating Interaction Regions from the Young Sun
Dibyendu Sur, Vladimir S. Airapetian
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21627 https…

Extreme Geomagnetic Storm on Early Earth Induced by Corotating Interaction Regions from the Young Sun
Recent multiwavelength observations of young solar analogs suggest that the young Sun in the first 600 Myr was a magnetically active star that produced an X-ray and Extreme-UV (EUV) bright corona, fast, massive stellar wind, and energetic eruptive events. These outputs affected magnetospheric environments of early Earth and young rocky exoplanets. The interaction of the fast solar wind with the slow wind produced strong shocks from Corotating Interaction Regions (CIRs) that provided high dynami…

Chinese vs. World Bank Development Projects: Insights from Earth Observation and Computer Vision on Wealth Gains in Africa, 2002-2013
Adel Daoud, Cindy Conlin, Connor T. Jerzak
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25648

Chinese vs. World Bank Development Projects: Insights from Earth Observation and Computer Vision on Wealth Gains in Africa, 2002-2013
Debates about whether development projects improve living conditions persist, partly because observational estimates can be biased by incomplete adjustment and because reliable outcome data are scarce at the neighborhood level. We address both issues in a continent-scale, sector-specific evaluation of Chinese and World Bank projects across 9,899 neighborhoods in 36 African countries (2002 to 2013), representative of 88% of the population. First, we use a recent dataset that measures living cond…

🌡️ Ozone will warm planet more than first thought, study finds
#climatechange

Ozone will warm planet more than first thought, study finds
The world will warm more than expected due to future changes in ozone, which protects the Earth from harmful sun rays but also traps heat as it is a greenhouse gas.

Generative AI models enable efficient and physically consistent sea-ice simulations
Tobias Sebastian Finn, Marc Bocquet, Pierre Rampal, Charlotte Durand, Flavia Porro, Alban Farchi, Alberto Carrassi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14984

Generative AI models enable efficient and physically consistent sea-ice simulations
Sea ice is governed by highly complex, scale-invariant, and anisotropic processes that are challenging to represent in Earth system models. While advanced numerical models have improved our understanding of the sea-ice dynamics, their computational costs often limit their application in ensemble forecasting and climate simulations. Here, we introduce GenSIM, the first generative AI-based pan-Arctic model that predicts the evolution of all relevant key properties, including concentration, thickn…

RU Energy Modeling for O-RAN in ns3-oran
Abdul Wadud, Nima Afraz
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10978 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.10978

RU Energy Modeling for O-RAN in ns3-oran
This paper presents a detailed and flexible power consumption model for Radio Units (RUs) in O-RAN using the ns3-oran simulator. This is the first ns3-oran model supporting xApp control to perform the RU power modeling. In contrast to existing frameworks like EARTH or VBS-DRX, the proposed framework is RU-centric and is parameterized by hardware-level features, such as the number of transceivers, the efficiency of the power amplifier, mmWave overheads, and standby behavior. It enables simulatio…

Dark Matter Boosted by Terrestrial Collisions
Zamiul Alam, Christopher V. Cappiello, Francesc Ferrer
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12791 https://arxiv.org/pdf…

Dark Matter Boosted by Terrestrial Collisions
Inelastic dark matter (IDM) models feature an energy threshold for scattering with Standard Model particles, which enables their consistency with the increasingly stringent limits placed by direct detection experiments. In a typical construction, elastic scattering is absent at tree level, and a lighter dark matter state must first upscatter into a heavier state in order to interact with the nuclei in the detector. We model the excitation of IDM in the Earth followed by its downscattering insid…

50 years (and one day) ago the first images from the surface of another planet reached Earth - not from Mars but from Venus, by the Soviet Union's #Venera 9 lander: https://www.facebook.com/Mercury.3488/posts/pfbid02sEPs9WzQprrJAhPPtEkJfj7jgm65Jzy9995mH5SJtXBHrhHk5tfCTn7hYekmE731l (the image here from https://www.planetary.org/space-images/venus-surface-panorama-from-venera-9 shows a cleaned-up panorama the lander took).

Insights into Xona Pulsar LEO PNT: Constellation, Signals, and Receiver Design
J\'er\^ome Lecl\`ere, Thyagaraja Marathe, Tyler G. R. Reid
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19551 ht…

Insights into Xona Pulsar LEO PNT: Constellation, Signals, and Receiver Design
The landscape of global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) is expanding with the emergence of low Earth orbit (LEO) constellations such as Pulsar, which are expected to play a key role in the future of positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT). LEO-based systems provide advantages including stronger signals for greater robustness, faster dynamics that aid convergence and multipath mitigation, and shorter time to first fix (TTFF) enabled by high data rates. These benefits, however, come with ch…

Crosslisted article(s) found for astro-ph.EP. https://arxiv.org/list/astro-ph.EP/new
[1/1]:
- J-VAR: the northern variable sky in 7 filters -- First Data Release
A. Ederoclite, et al.

Investigating the Sulfur Mystery in Protoplanetary Disks Through Chemical Modeling
Becky J. Williams, L. Ilsedore Cleeves, Rachel E. Gross, Jackson Baker
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02176

Investigating the Sulfur Mystery in Protoplanetary Disks Through Chemical Modeling
Sulfur is a critical element to life on Earth, and with detections of sulfur-bearing molecules in exoplanets and comets, questions arise as to how sulfur is incorporated into planets in the first place. In order to understand sulfur's journey from molecular clouds to planets, we need to understand the molecular forms that sulfur takes in protoplanetary disks, where the rotational emission from sulfur-bearing molecules in the gas phase indicates a very low abundance. To address this question, we…

Detection of CH3 in the O-rich planetary nebula NGC 6302
Charmi Bhatt (Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Western Ontario, Institute for Earth and Space Exploration, University of Western Ontario), Jan Cami (Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Western Ontario, SETI Institute), Els Peeters (Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Western Ontario, SETI Institute), Nicholas Clark (Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Western Ontario…

Detection of CH3+ in the O-rich planetary nebula NGC 6302
Planetary nebulae are sites where ejected stellar material evolves into complex molecules, but the precise physical conditions and chemical routes that govern these processes are unclear. The presence of abundant carbon-rich molecules in O-rich environments poses particular challenges. Here we report the first detection of methyl cation (CH3+) in any planetary nebula, observed in the O-rich nebula NGC 6302 using JWST MIRI/MRS observations. CH3+ is a key driver of organic chemistry in UV-irradia…

Frequency Standard Contributions to Limitations on the Signal-to-Noise Ratio in Very Long Baseline Interferometric (VLBI) Observations
Eric Burt, Todd Ely, Geoff Bower, Joe Lazio, Marin Anderson, Sonia Hernandez
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19123

Frequency Standard Contributions to Limitations on the Signal-to-Noise Ratio in Very Long Baseline Interferometric (VLBI) Observations
Since its observation in 2019, the first image of a super-massive black hole using Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) with an Earth-scale baseline has generated much scientific and public interest, including the possible extension of the baseline into space to obtain higher image resolution. Operating one or more VLBI nodes in space will require the use of frequency standards that are space qualified, greatly reducing the number of options available. The coherence function C(T) is the met…

Catastrophic disruption of asteroid #2023CX1 and implications for planetary defense: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12362 -> Western researchers support international collaboration for planetary defence: https://news.westernu.ca/2025/09/planetary-defence/ - meteor physicists from Western Space aid in first comprehensive study of asteroid from space to impact on Earth.

Tunable optical emissions of Eu3 ions enabled by pressure-driven phase transition in ZnO
C. Ianhez-Pereira, U. F. Kaneko, A. D. Rodrigues, I. S. S. de Oliveira, M. P. F. de Godoy
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10953

Tunable optical emissions of Eu3+ ions enabled by pressure-driven phase transition in ZnO
Controlling the optical properties of rare-earth ions in wide-bandgap semiconductors remains a major challenge in the development of next-generation photonic materials. Here, we show that external hydrostatic pressure modulates the structural characteristics of ZnO thin films and, in turn, tunes the optical emission behavior of embedded Eu3+ ions. By combining in situ synchrotron X-ray diffraction and photoluminescence spectroscopy under high-pressure conditions with first-principles calculatio…

Catastrophic disruption of asteroid 2023 CX1 and implications for planetary defense
Auriane Egal, Denis Vida, Fran\c{c}ois Colas, Brigitte Zanda, Sylvain Bouley, Asma Steinhausser, Pierre Vernazza, Ludovic Ferri\`ere, J\'er\^ome Gattacceca, Mirel Birlan, J\'er\'emie Vaubaillon, Karl Antier, Simon Anghel, Josselin Desmars, K\'evin Bailli\'e, Lucie Maquet, S\'ebastien Bouquillon, Adrien Malgoyre, Simon Jeanne, Ji\v{r}i Borovi\v{c}ka, Pavel Spurn\'y, Hadrien A.…

Catastrophic disruption of asteroid 2023 CX1 and implications for planetary defense
Mitigation of the threat from airbursting asteroids requires an understanding of the potential risk they pose for the ground. How asteroids release their kinetic energy in the atmosphere is not well understood due to the rarity of significant impacts. Ordinary chondrites, in particular L chondrites, represent a frequent type of Earth-impacting asteroids. Here, we present the first comprehensive, space-to-lab characterization of an L chondrite impact. Small asteroid 2023 CX1 was detected in spac…