SAN ANTONIO — April 15, 2025 —The Southwest Research Institute-led Lucy mission is preparing to survey the next target in its epic 4-billion-mile, 12-year, 11-asteroid tour. On April 20, 2025, NASA’s Lucy spacecraft will fly past the three-mile-wide main belt asteroid (52246) Donaldjohanson as a test run to the main event: visiting the never-before-explored Trojan asteroids in the Jupiter system.

Observations of Jupiter show that ammonia is unevenly distributed in the upper atmosphere, against expectations of uniform mixing. UC Berkeley scientists found evidence for a complicated but apparently real process associated with fierce lightning storms: strong updrafts generate slushy, ice-coated hailstones of ammonia and water that eventually plunge into the planet and deplete areas of ammonia. This is part of the first 3D picture of the planet's atmosphere, which shows storms are primarily shallow.

A Southwest Research Institute-led study modeled the chemistry of TOI-270 d, an exoplanet between Earth and Neptune in size, finding evidence that it could be a giant rocky planet shrouded in a thick, hot atmosphere. TOI-270 d is only 73 light years from Earth and could serve as a “Rosetta Stone” for understanding an entire class of new planets.

An international team of researchers has developed an optical device that mimics the behavior of both black and white holes. The device can either absorb or reject light completely: the first ever demonstration of broadband coherent perfect absorption. Due to the novel geometry, the optical black hole acts by converting light falling on it into a standing wave and absorbs it deterministically in a thin absorber; for the optical white hole, light is rejected. Experimental demonstrations show the device functions as an optical black hole or optical white hole, offering potential applications in energy harvesting, detection systems, and stealth technologies. This breakthrough opens new possibilities for controlling and utilizing light across the electromagnetic spectrum.

First ever supercomputer simulations of Mars with a fully molten core could explain the Red Planet's unusual magnetic field. Billions of years ago, Mars had an active magnetic field. Mysteriously, its imprint is strongest in the southern hemisphere. Research led by the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics found that Mars could have produced a one-sided magnetic field with a fully molten core, rather than the traditional, Earth-like solid inner core setup.

Extreme cosmic events such as colliding black holes or the explosions of stars can cause ripples in spacetime, so-called gravitational waves. Their discovery opened a new window into the universe. To observe them, ultra-precise detectors are required. Designing them remains a major scientific challenge for humans. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light (MPL) have been working on how an artificial intelligence system could explore an unimaginably vast space of possible designs to find entirely new solutions. The results were recently published in the journal ›Physical Review X‹.