Why do comets and their meteoroid streams weave in and out of Earth's orbit and their orbits disperse over time? In a paper published online in the journal Icarus this week, two SETI Institute researchers show that this is not due to the random pull of the planets, but rather the kick they receive from a moving Sun.

"Contrary to popular conception, everything in the solar system does not orbit the Sun," said lead author and SETI Institute scientist Stuart Pilorz. "Rather, the Sun and planets all orbit their common center of mass, known to scientists as the solar system barycenter."

April 8, 2024, 36 teams of community scientists assembled along the path of totality from Texas to Maine, creating a “bucket brigade” of small telescopes to image the Sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona, as it crossed the country. This Southwest Research Institute-led Citizen CATE 2024 project is the subject of a new documentary, created by the National Science Foundation National Center for Atmospheric Research (NSF NCAR), which will debut at the Mesa Lab in Boulder, Colorado, on April 23.

There is a large diversity in the chemical composition of astronomical objects such as planets, comets, circumstellar envelopes, or galactic gas clouds. One great challenge in astrochemistry is to understand in detail how this diversity arises from the cosmic backdrop of the cycling of matter between star birth and destruction, with molecules forming, reacting and coalescing in cold clouds of dust and ice in between these events.  Trivalent phosphorus, linked to anaerobic conditions on Earth, has also been found in the atmospheres of giant planets and in the distant interstellar medium. Phosphates are present in certain meteorites and on Saturn’s moon Enceladus. How did phosphorus make its way between these environments and ultimately became central to life on Earth? Studying here, in terrestrial laboratories, various properties of unfamiliar molecules that may wander interstellar space is an intriguing path. …a path being followed by scientists from the Institute of Physical Chemistry, Polish Academy of Sciences.

An international team led by the University of Geneva (UNIGE) has discovered the most distant spiral galaxy candidate known to date. This ultra-massive system existed just one billion years after the Big Bang and already shows a remarkably mature structure, with a central old bulge, a large star-forming disk, and well-defined spiral arms. The discovery was made using data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and offers important insights into how galaxies can form and evolve so rapidly in the early Universe. The study is published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

University of Oxford researchers have helped overturn the popular theory that water on Earth originated from asteroids bombarding its surface;

Scientists have analysed a meteorite analogous to the early Earth to understand the origin of hydrogen on our planet.

The research team demonstrated that the material which built our planet was far richer in hydrogen than previously thought.

The findings, which support the theory that the formation of habitable conditions on Earth did not rely on asteroids hitting the Earth, have been published today (Wednesday 16 April) in the journal Icarus.