Thomas (Tom) Greene, astrophysicist and former Director of the NASA Ames Center for Exoplanet Studies and Chief of the NASA Ames Astrophysics Branch, will join IPAC as its new Executive Director on May 27.

Astrophysicist Kyu-Hyun Chae at Sejong University (Seoul, South Korea) has developed a new method of measuring gravity with all three components of the velocities (3D velocities) of  wide binary stars, as a major improvement over existing statistical methods relying on sky-projected 2D velocities. The new method based on the Bayes theorem derives directly the probability distribution of a gravity parameter (a parameter that measures the extent to which the data departs from standard gravitational dynamics) through the Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulation of the relative 3D velocity between the stars in a binary. When the method is applied to a sample of about 300 highest-quality wide binaries selected from European Space Agency's Gaia Data Release 3, the results indicate a 4.2σ discrepancy with standard gravity at acceleration lower than about 1 nanometer per second squared. Much improved results are expected in the near future with upcoming data of precise velocities of stars in the line-of-sight (radial) direction.

Scientists from the U.S. National Science Foundation National Solar Observatory and New Jersey Institute of Technology produced the finest images of the Sun’s corona to date. To make these high-resolution images and movies, the team developed a new ‘coronal adaptive optics’ system that removes blur from images caused by the Earth’s atmosphere. Their ground-breaking results were recently published in Nature Astronomy and pave the way for deeper insight into coronal heating, solar eruptions, and space weather, and open an opportunity for new discoveries in the Sun’s atmosphere.

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) has a strong research track record in space technology, with its researchers involved in several national and international space exploration projects. A PolyU project has recently been awarded the Innovation and Technology Fund under the Innovation and Technology Support Programme (ITSP) for key space technology capability research and development with application in terrain cameras.

A research team has, for the first time, successfully replicated the formation of barred olivine—a unique crystalline texture found in chondrules from meteorites and asteroids—using numerical simulations. The results offer critical clues to the conditions in the early solar system and could reshape existing theories on planet formation.