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…

Weather forecast for tonight’s total lunar eclipse: cloudy with a chance of rain 🌕🌧️
#LunarEclipse #TotalLunarEclipse #astronomy

How about some recent, well, pretty unusual #astronomy papers? Like https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02162 = Dangerous Questions in Astronomy Education or https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19984 = Communicating astrobiology and the search for life elsewhere: speculations and promises of a developing scientific field in newspapers, press releases and papers ... or https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04718 = Quantum panprotopsychism and a consciousness-centered universe

🍇 The universe's secret harvest: Shedding light on 'the cosmic grapes'
#astronomy

The universe's secret harvest: Shedding light on 'the cosmic grapes'
Astronomers have discovered a remarkably clumpy rotating galaxy that existed just 900 million years after the Big Bang, shedding new light on how galaxies grew and evolved in the early universe. Nicknamed the "Cosmic Grapes," the galaxy appears to be composed of at least 15 massive star-forming clumps—far more than current theoretical models predict could exist within a single rotating disk at this early time.

Astropolitics now at #ag2025goerlitz: Jörn Wilms about the next #Denkschrift for German #astronomy to be published in early 2026 - and for the first time in English because international collaboration is more important than ever.