Space

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We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.

  1. Planetary Science

    This is the biggest known comet in our solar system

    The nucleus of comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein is about 120 kilometers across — about twice the width of Rhode Island — and is darker than coal.

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  2. Planetary Science

    New thermal maps of Neptune reveal surprising temperature swings

    Neptune's atmospheric temperatures show a global drop and later, a weird isolated spike at the south pole. Scientists don't yet know why.

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  3. Planetary Science

    Mars has two speeds of sound

    High-pitched clacks from a laser on NASA’s Perseverance rover zapping rocks traveled faster than the lower-pitched hum of the Ingenuity helicopter’s blades.

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  4. Astronomy

    A star nicknamed ‘Earendel’ may be the most distant yet seen

    Analyzing Hubble Space Telescope images revealed a star whose light originates from about 12.9 billion light-years away, researchers say.

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  5. Space

    Binary stars keep masquerading as black holes

    The drive to find black holes in ever-larger astronomy datasets is leading some researchers astray.

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  6. Astronomy

    When the Magellanic Clouds cozy up to each other, stars are born

    The Magellanic Clouds, the two closest star-making galaxies to the Milky Way, owe much of their stellar creativity to each other.

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  7. Astronomy

    Here’s the best timeline yet for the Milky Way’s big events

    A new study puts more precise dates on when the Milky Way formed its thick disk and collided with a neighboring galaxy.

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  8. Physics

    Levitating plastic beads mimic the physics of spinning asteroids

    "Tabletop asteroids," buoyed by sound waves, hint at why some loosely bound space rocks have odd shapes and can’t spin too quickly.

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  9. Astronomy

    NASA’s exoplanet count surges past 5,000

    With a new batch of 60 confirmed exoplanets, the number of known worlds in our galaxy reaches another milestone.

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  10. Astronomy

    The universe’s background starlight is twice as bright as expected

    Images from the New Horizons spacecraft suggest that light from all known galaxies accounts for only half of the cosmos’ visible background glow.

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  11. Planetary Science

    Diamonds may stud Mercury’s crust

    Billions of years of meteorite impacts may have flash-baked much of a primitive graphite crust into precious gemstones.

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  12. Astronomy

    Some of the sun’s iconic coronal loops may be illusions

    Folds in the plasma that streams from the sun might trick the eye into seeing the well-defined arches, computer simulations of the solar atmosphere show.

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