SAN ANTONIO — April 9, 2025 —The NASA/ESA Solar Orbiter recently recorded the highest-ever concentration of a rare helium isotope (³He) emitted from the Sun. A Southwest Research Institute-led team of scientists sought the source of this unusual occurrence to better understand the mechanisms that drive solar energetic particles (SEPs) that permeate our solar system. SEPs are high-energy, accelerated particles including protons, electrons and heavy ions associated with solar events like flares and coronal mass ejections.

Traditionally, astronomers have grouped galaxies into two different categories: blue, which are young and actively forming stars, and red, which are older and have ceased star formation. Now, University of Missouri Assistant Professor Charles Steinhardt is challenging the traditional understanding of galaxies by proposing a third category: red star-forming. They don’t fit neatly into the usual blue or red — instead, they’re somewhere in between.

Black holes are fundamental to the structure of galaxies and critical in our understanding of gravity, space, and time. A stellar mass black hole is a type of black hole that forms from the gravitational collapse of a massive star at the end of its life cycle. These black holes typically have masses ranging from about 3 to 20 times the mass of our Sun. 

Sometimes black holes generate beams of ionized gas (plasma) that shoot outward at nearly light speed. Although discovered more than a century ago, how and why jets occur has remained a mystery, described as one of the “wonders of physics”. 

Prof. Kazutaka Yamaoka from Nagoya University in Japan, along with his colleagues from University of Toyama and other international institutes, have discovered key conditions needed for a stellar black hole to create plasma jets. Their findings, published in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan, show that when superheated gas material experiences a rapid shrinkage towards the black hole, jet formation occurs.

About 66 million years ago, an asteroid slammed into the planet, wiping out all non-avian dinosaurs and about 70% of all marine species. But the crater it left behind in the Gulf of Mexico was a literal hotbed for life enriching the overlying ocean for at least 700,000 years, according to research published today in Nature Communications.

Locals at Lake Siljan in northern Sweden have told of persistent winter ice holes that often occur in the same place year after year. Now, researchers from Chalmers University of Technology, in Sweden, have examined the area with a completely new measurement method and discovered unexpectedly strong methane emissions from several places on the lakes in the area – which is the cause of the holes in the ice.

This type of long-term and concentrated methane emission has never been observed by a lake, and the researchers will now investigate whether the emissions are unique to Siljan – or a phenomenon that can occur in lakes all over the world.