Deep underground in a Canadian mine, scientists have cooled a massive refrigerator to nearly 1,000 times colder than outer space, a key milestone in the search for dark matter. The achievement enables Texas A&M-designed detectors at the core of the Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (SuperCDMS) experiment at SNOLAB in Ontario to reach the extreme sensitivity needed to spot interactions from elusive “light dark matter."

The Paranal solar ESPRESSO Telescope (PoET), installed at the European Southern Observatory's (ESO's) Paranal site in Chile, has made its first observations. The telescope will work with ESO's ESPRESSO instrument to study the Sun in detail. Described as a solar telescope for planet hunters, PoET aims to understand how the variation in the light from stars like the Sun can mask the presence of planets orbiting them, helping us in our search for worlds outside the Solar System.

Researchers at the Geodynamics Research Center (GRC), Ehime University, measured P- and S-wave velocities of a lunar orthopyroxene under high-pressure and high-temperature conditions equivalent to those in the Moon’s interior. Comparison of laboratory data with seismic models from NASA’s Apollo missions revealed the lunar upper mantle (at depths of 40–740 km) likely contains more iron than previously thought. This new finding has wide implications for the formation and evolution history of the Earth-Moon system.

The absence of a signal could itself be a signal. This is the idea behind a new study published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics (JCAP), which aims to redefine how we search for dark matter, showing that it may not be necessary to find the same “clues” everywhere in order to interpret it. In particular, the study suggests that even if we observe a certain type of signal at the center of our galaxy — an excess of gamma radiation that could result from the annihilation of dark matter particles — failing to detect the same signal in other systems, such as dwarf galaxies, is not enough to rule out this explanation. Dark matter, in fact, may not consist of a single particle, but of multiple slightly different components, whose behavior varies depending on the cosmic environment.

A recent study has for the first time systematically identified multiple nitrogen-bearing organic species on the surfaces of lunar soil grains returned by China's Chang'e-5 and Chang'e-6 missions. The research further reveals an evolutionary pathway defined by exogenous delivery, impact modification, and continuous solar wind processing.