A new study published in Big Earth Data presents phenological metrics derived from Earth observation (EO) satellite time series—such as greening onset, senescence, and growing season length—which are essential for crop monitoring but challenged by the massive scale of EO data exceeding local processing capacities, and introduces a free, open-source Web Crop Phenology Metrics Service (WCPMS) built on the Brazil Data Cube platform for server-side extraction from large datasets. It further demonstrates the tool’s effectiveness by estimating soybean sowing dates in Brazil using phenological metrics and validating the results against field data.

New research led by Penn State scientists suggests that some of the highest-energy cosmic rays may consist of atomic nuclei heavier than iron and could help narrow down the cosmic sources capable of accelerating these particles.

The most massive black holes in the Universe detected by the ripples they make in space time were not born directly from collapsing stars, according to a new study.

These cosmic giants instead build up through a series of repeated and extremely violent collision events in very densely populated star clusters, an international team of researchers argue.

A research team from the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at The University of Hong Kong (HKU) will participate in China’s planetary exploration mission, Tianwen-3. According to the selection results released by the China National Space Administration recently, the “Short-Wavelength Infrared Spectrometer”, led and developed by HKU, has been officially chosen as a payload for deployment on the service module of the Tianwen-3 mission. The instrument will play a critical role in forecasting dust storms during landing manoeuvres, searching for biosignatures, detecting hydrous minerals, and surveying Martian resources.