The discovery of a possible “super-Earth” less than 20 light-years from our own planet is offering scientists new hope in the hunt for other worlds that could harbor life, according to an international team including researchers from Penn State. They dubbed the exoplanet, named GJ 251 c, a “super-Earth” as data suggest it is almost four times as massive as the Earth, and likely to be rocky planet.

New research from Rice University suggests that the giant planet Jupiter reshaped the early solar system in dramatic ways, carving out rings and gaps that ultimately explain one of the longest-standing puzzles in planetary science: why many primitive meteorites formed millions of years after the first solid bodies. The study, which combined hydrodynamic models of Jupiter’s growth with simulations of dust evolution and planet formation, was recently published in Science Advances.

Stanford researchers developed a flash-freezing observation method that reveals battery chemistry without altering it, providing new insights to enhance lithium metal batteries.

Recently, a research team led by Prof. XU Yigang and Prof. LIN Mang from the Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences identified seven olivine-bearing clasts from two grams of lunar regolith returned by the Chang'e-6 mission. Their findings were published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on Oct. 20.

Resurrected by a team of Japanese physicists, a long-dismissed knot idea from the 1800s now offers clues to one of physics’ biggest unsolved mysteries, with help from ghostly particles, writhing relics of the primordial universe, and phantomlike barrier crossings.