If you still picture Mars as a monotonous red desert, it may be time for an update.

The European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter has been capturing some of the Red Planet's most surreal landscapes, and its latest images reveal a sprawling field that looks like molten metal frozen across the floor of an ancient Mars crater.

The shimmering "waves" aren't metal at all, however. They are dark sand dunes dusted with seasonal frost, much of it carbon dioxide, or "dry ice," that settles on the surface during Martian winters, giving the dunes their uncanny chrome-like sheen, according to ESA.

The rest is a trick of light and contrast. Because the dark sand absorbs light and the white frost reflects it, the interplay transforms the landscape into something that looks more like a scene from a sci-fi movie than a windswept Martian plain.

Over thousands of years, Martian winds have sculpted this volcanic sand into dunes that now ripple through the floor of Kaiser Crater, a 129-mile-wide (207-kilometer-wide) impact basin in the planet's southern highlands. The bowl-shaped crater acts as a giant sand trap that prevents the sand from escaping, according to NASA.

The dunes themselves are darker than much of Mars' surface because they are made of fine, basaltic sand rich in volcanic minerals such as pyroxene and olivine, rather than the iron-oxide dust that gives the planet its familiar rusty-red appearance and its famous moniker, the Red Planet.

Because the crater floor remains visible between the ridges, scientists think there is a relatively limited sand supply shaping the field. Still, these ripples of sand are massive, extending for several kilometers and towering more than 100 meters (320 feet) above the surrounding terrain.

The landscape isn't just visually dramatic, it also preserves clues to a time when Mars was a very different world.

Today, Mars is wrapped in an atmosphere little more than a thin veil that is 100 times thinner than Earth's and slowly leaking into space. That makes it harder for winds to lift and transport sand than it is on our own planet. Yet the soaring dunes inside Kaiser Crater show that Martian winds have nonetheless been powerful enough to sculpt vast landscapes over time, perhaps during a period when the Martian atmosphere was thicker a few billion years ago.

The new image adds to a growing collection of striking Martian scenes captured by Mars Express, which has been orbiting the Red Planet since 2003. Just last month, the probe tracked a frenetic cluster of 30 dust devils swirling through the canyons of Mamers Valles, also in the northern hemisphere.

Over the spring and summer, the orbiter similarly spotlighted the planet's vast and complex geological history, from Shalbatana Vallis — carved by groundwater floods about 3.5 billion years ago into winding valleys that span the length of Italy — to a massive blanket of dark volcanic ash elsewhere on the world that has spread across a large chunk of the terrain over just the last 50 years, having either been redistributed by Martian winds or exposed as the overlying dust was blown away.

However desolate Mars may appear from afar, there is certainly no shortage of activity on its surface — or discoveries still waiting to be made.

Reboots and remakes may be all the rage in Hollywood with mixed degrees of success (we don't talk about the Nightmare on Elm Street reboot ... ever), but they aren't so popular in other forms of art such as painting. However, a recent cosmic rework of one of art's most well-regarded pieces could be just as breathtaking as its original counterpart.

That's all thanks to the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), which has captured a vibrant view of the Corona Australis molecular cloud, that shows the star-forming region resembling a cosmic take on Vincent Van Gogh's iconic painting The Starry Night.

The Corona Australis Molecular Cloud measures around 16 light-years in diameter is located around 430 light-years from Earth, making it one of the closest star-birthing regions to our solar system. The molecular cloud and its dark lanes of gas and dust, the raw materials for star construction, are at the left of the DECam image.

Also prominent on the left of the image is the shining nebula NGC 6729, which is a reflection nebula of the Corona Australis Molecular Cloud. That means that it is a cloud of interstellar dust that is reflecting the light of the newborn stars embedded within this molecular cloud.

NGC 6729 is composed of different elements that can be seen on the left side of the image. This includes an orange cloud that is actually the binary star system R Coronae Australis. This binary consists of a pre-main-sequence star that has gathered mass but hasn't yet triggered the fusion of hydrogen to helium in its core, and its companion, a red dwarf star. These stars orbit each other every 43 to 47 years and are incredibly bright, with their light also reflecting from nearby reflection nebulas. This light also ionizes nearby gas, creating glowing regions called emission nebulae, also part of NGC 6729.

To the top-right of the image is the globular cluster NGC 6723, nicknamed the Chandelier Cluster. Located around 29,000 light-years from Earth, NGC 6723 is thought to contain some of the oldest stars in the Milky Way.

The Chandelier Cluster contains tens of thousands to millions of stars, which aren't all ancient; within the spherically shaped globular cluster are more than a smattering of younger stars.

Astronomers and astrophotographers of all levels will be more than familiar with the Corona Australis Molecular Cloud and the Chandelier Cluster and this region as a whole.

But just as it took the artistic vision of Van Gogh to transform the night sky into a stunning painting, it has taken the observing power of the DECam, mounted on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile, to bring out the stunning beauty of this slice of the night sky.

The wildfires tearing across Canada are so extreme that the smoke billowing upward can be seen from space.

What is it?

Over 850 wildfires are currently devastating Canada, as reported by the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center. The fires are spreading across Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Ontario; most remain completely uncontrolled.

In addition to the immense destruction caused by the fires themselves, the smoke from these fires is causing serious concerns about dangerously poor air quality all across Canada and even in the northeastern United States. As far as New York, the air quality on Thursday (July 16) was labeled "very unhealthy" after the state activated emergency air quality protocols.

The smoke is so expansive it's clearly visible in this image captured on July 14 from Earth orbit.

Why is it noteworthy?

Studying wildfires and wildfire smoke from orbit can give us a bigger picture view of these catastrophic event. This data is important for disaster relief in the short term — but also in the long-term. With climate change continuing to progress due to human activities like burning coal for cheap power, we can expect natural disasters to worsen. Among the many effects of climate change, this includes longer and more intense wildfire seasons, especially in regions that are already susceptible to fire such as these regions across Canada.

The new image was captured by the NOAA-21 satellite with the instrument VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imagine Radiometer Suite). You can see massive plumes of smoke over southeastern Canada treading into the northeastern U.S. Thick smoke covers swaths of Canada's landscape and wisps of smoke trail all the way down through New York and across the U.S.

Most of this smoke, at least the smoke we can see in this satellite image, is coming from wildfires in northwestern Ontario. As the wildfires continue to burn, satellites like NOAA-21 will be keeping watch.

The most powerful solar storms to strike Earth may pack a bigger punch than scientists realized, according to a new study that suggests the impacts of extreme space weather have been underestimated.

Researchers found evidence that the apparent upper limit on Earth's response to the strongest solar storms may be an artifact of how solar wind has been measured rather than a true physical ceiling. If confirmed, the findings suggest that rare "once-in-a-thousand-year" geomagnetic storms could have a greater impact on modern technology than current estimates indicate, according to a statement.

"Our planet's magnetic field does a really great job of protecting us against many space weather effects and so they often just show up as glitches or beautiful aurora," Maria Walach, co-author of the study from Lancaster University, said in the statement. "There are however extreme cases."

Solar storms occur when eruptions from the sun, such as coronal mass ejections and solar flares, send clouds of charged particles hurtling toward Earth. While they can produce spectacular auroras, they can also disrupt satellites, GPS, radio communications and power grids.

History has shown the damage even less extreme storms can cause. The 1859 Carrington Event, the strongest geomagnetic storm on record, disrupted telegraph systems around the world and pushed auroras from their usual high-latitude skies near the Arctic and Antarctic to locations as far south as the tropics. Another powerful storm in 1989 collapsed Quebec's power grid, leaving millions without electricity, while the 2003 "Halloween storms" disrupted satellites, GPS and radio communications.

While the study doesn't suggest that an unprecedented solar storm is imminent, it argues that scientists may need to rethink how they estimate the severity of the rarest events — an increasingly important challenge as modern society grows more dependent on satellites and other vulnerable technologies.

The researchers traced the apparent upper limit to where most solar wind measurements are collected. Many observations of extreme events come from spacecraft near the Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 1 (L1), about 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) upstream of Earth. Because the strongest solar wind tends to weaken somewhat before reaching Earth, comparing L1 measurements with conditions at our planet can make it appear that Earth's upper atmosphere stops responding to increasingly intense solar wind, even when it does not.

To test that idea, the team analyzed more than one million solar wind measurements collected by NASA spacecraft orbiting much closer to Earth, where the solar wind directly interacts with our planet's magnetic field. Those observations showed that electrical currents flowing through Earth's upper atmosphere continued to increase alongside stronger solar wind, with no sign of the previously assumed upper limit. The results suggest that exceptionally powerful solar storms could generate stronger geomagnetic disturbances — and greater impacts on satellites, communications systems and power grids — than earlier estimates predicted.

"Fortunately, these very extreme cases are rare, but this also means we have limited data to work with and only time will tell what happens at the very extreme one-in-a-thousand-year kind of event," Walach said in the statement.

The study comes as the sun remains near the peak of its roughly 11-year solar cycle, known as solar maximum, when sunspots, solar flares and coronal mass ejections become more frequent. During the current cycle, strong geomagnetic storms have repeatedly sent auroras far beyond their usual polar skies.

In May 2024, the strongest geomagnetic storm in more than two decades illuminated skies across much of the United States and Europe while causing intermittent disruptions to high-frequency radio communications, GPS-guided equipment and some satellite operations. Although significant, that event was far less powerful than the Carrington Event — or the even rarer storms the new study suggests may be possible.

The findings were published July 15 in the journal Nature.

The aftermath of landslides have been found in images of Pluto's surface taken when the New Horizons mission flew past the dwarf planet in 2015. The landslides are evidence that the icy world is still active, albeit on geological timescales.

A team led by geologist Marco Emanuele Discenza pored over images taken by New Horizons' LORRI (Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager) instrument, which was capable of detecting surface features as small as 984 feet (300 meters). They found convincing evidence for six landslides in total that have taken place down the inner walls of three craters on the western edge of Sputnik Planitia, the heart-shaped feature that characterizes Pluto's appearance.

Previously, geological features left behind by landslides have been found on a host of bodies in the solar system, including Mars, Ceres in the asteroid belt, some of the icy moons of the gas giants, and even Pluto's companion, Charon. However, these are the first to be found on Pluto.

A landslide that fell 1.4 miles (2.2 kilometers) was identified in Pluto's Coughlin crater, close to a secondary crater on Coughlin's rim that may have triggered the landslide in the first place. Two further landslide features were seen in Giclas crater, and another three were spotted in a third, unnamed, crater.

The landslides were identifiable by their large debris aprons that spilled out onto the crater floors, the distance the landslide material travelled ranging being between 6.3 and 9 miles (10.1 and 14.5 km). Some of these debris aprons appeared bumpy, as if they contain large boulders of solid ice, while the areas around the source of the landslides feature well-defined, concave-shaped cliffs where material has broken away and tumbled down the craters' steep walls.

The great lengths that the debris rolled means that Pluto's landslides are among the most mobile in the solar system, a product of low gravity and low-friction icy rubble. The largest of the debris aprons covers 50 square miles (130 square kilometers), which would be large enough to bury a small city or a large town.

Landslides are important processes in shaping planetary surfaces, enabling the transport of material across great distances. The trigger for Pluto's landslides, however, is not yet clear. While the landslide in Coughlin appears to have been caused by a smaller impact nearby, the other five have less certain origins. One possibility is thermal stresses in the surface ice caused by the slight temperature changes that cause Pluto's volatile materials – among them molecular nitrogen, carbon monoxide and methane – to periodically sublimate and then condense again. These temperature changes are the result of Pluto subtly heating up and cooling down as its elliptical orbit brings it slightly closer to the sun, crossing inside Neptune's orbit, and then moving farther away again.

There is also evidence for more landslides in other craters, but New Horizons' coverage of Pluto's surface was limited as it hurriedly flew past on July 4, 2015, and the imagery required to confirm these other landslides is lacking.

The findings were published in the journal Icarus.

This might be the closest we've gotten to finding a planet that could support life: Astronomers have detected an atmosphere around an Earth-like, rocky planet orbiting in the habitable zone around its star, a monumental first.

The rocky planet, called LHS 1140 b, is 48-light-years away from Earth and according to this new research, it has an atmosphere that contains helium. It is also the first rocky planet to have an atmosphere be detected directly. This is the first rocky planet to be found with an atmosphere that is also in the habitable zone, meaning it's at the right distance away from its star for liquid water to potentially exist on the planet. As we continue to search the cosmos for planets that can be considered "habitable," this planet checks more boxes than almost anything we've ever seen.

"We have actually detected directly the helium present in the atmosphere itself, and that's the first direct detection for any rocky exoplanet, which is really exciting … and then there's this added bonus that it's in the habitable zone, which is super exciting for astrobiology and habitability and searching for life," lead author Collin Cherubim, who recently earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University, told Space.com. "It feels kind of surreal."

What's this planet like?

Let's explore this planet and the system where it "lives."

This exoplanet, or planet outside of our solar system, was first discovered in 2017 by a team led by astronomer Jason Dittmann who is now a co-author on this new discovery.

"This planet was found like 10 years ago, and we're just now saying, okay, that's an atmosphere," Dittman told Space.com. "We're slowly narrowing the gap and checking these boxes … we're finding a planet that's rocky, a planet that's of the right temperature and now … it's like okay, we finally found one that has an atmosphere."

And being a rocky planet, "there's definitely a surface … it's made of rocks," Dittman said. What does the planet's surface look like? We can't say yet, but the researchers who found this planet's atmosphere think there's a good chance it could have water.

While it orbits a red dwarf star, which is smaller and cooler than the sun, it orbits closer than we do to our star, maintaining a temperature that keeps the planet in the "Goldilocks zone" where liquid water could exist on its surface.

"It probably also has a lot of water," Cherubim said. "If it has some amount of atmosphere that can provide a bit of a greenhouse effect, which we know that it does now … it will very likely be what we consider to be habitable conditions on Earth, and conditions that would likely support liquid water."

So is it Earth-like? While it's certainly not an Earth copy, this planet can be considered Earth-like in two main ways, Cherubim shared. One: its overall composition. The planet is rocky, likely with an iron core and (now we know) it has an atmosphere. And two: the planet's temperature is just right for liquid water, which is necessary for life at least as far as we understand it on our planet.

Finding an atmosphere

The discovery of the first exoplanet was confirmed just over 30 years ago. Since then, scientists have found over 6,000 exoplanets and counting. And while a few rocky planets have been found in their star's habitable zone, it wasn't until now that an atmosphere has been confirmed around a rocky planet in the habitable zone.

One reason why scientists have had a hard time finding such planets with atmospheres is their stars. LHS 1140 b orbits the most common type of star, a red dwarf, which is about one-third the size of our sun. This type of star remains active for a lot longer than stars like our sun. This activity means it releases bursts of extreme radiation like solar flares and coronal mass ejections. And typically, the extreme radiation around these stars totally strips the atmospheres from the planets orbiting them, so astronomers have wondered if planets orbiting these stars can have an atmosphere at all.

"This discovery is a big deal because it's showing that at least this rocky planet has retained an atmosphere over billions of years," Cherubim said. It's "a bona fide, robust way of saying yes, atmospheres can survive on rocky exoplanets."

It's possible that other gases beyond helium are in the planet's atmosphere, and it's possible that some of its atmosphere was previously stripped away by its star's radiation. But the red dwarf that this planet orbits is roughly 6 billion years old, a few billion years older than the age at which their extreme radiation activity begins calming down. So while some helium is still slowly escaping the planet's atmosphere over time, the team expects the planet to retain an atmosphere, Dittman shared. After all, even Earth's helium is slowly escaping our own atmosphere.

The proof is in the atmosphere

To prove that this planet has an atmosphere, the team started with a prediction that Cherubim made during graduate school. It all started with a theoretical model and a sneaking suspicion that there must be rocky exoplanets with atmospheres other than Earth.

"This came out of a very specific prediction from a planetary evolution model that I actually developed myself, from scratch, from first principles, for my Ph.D. as a theorist, and I made a very specific prediction about this planet," Cherubim said. "And then I went out and did a pretty unexpected, weird thing using this technique that's typically reserved for observing giant planets, and I used it for a rocky planet, which nobody has done before.

"And lo and behold, I made this measurement that was actually consistent with my prediction. And it was really nice to kind of close the whole loop of the scientific method."

The team took the theoretical model that Cherubim developed in graduate school and put it to the test using the Warm Infrared Echelle (WINERED) Spectrograph on the Magellan Observatory in Chile. And with their observations, they were able to see LHS 1140 b and another planet both transit, or pass in front of, their star in the same night. With this spectrographic data, they could identify the signatures of molecules in the atmospheres of these planets as they passed in front of the star. And while one planet yielded no results, this planet showed a direct, undeniable helium signature.

Are there aliens?

When looking at a planet that is rocky, has an atmosphere, and is in the habitable zone (meaning it could have liquid water), the question of life comes up quite quickly.

But the researchers don't have enough data to make that conjecture. "I'm not claiming this planet has life," Cherubim made clear. With further investigation, scientists could better understand what else might be in this planet's atmosphere, and they could confirm if it has water. Further observations might not be able to confirm habitability or identify any life on the planet, but they could at least help us to better understand planets like this.

With this being the first planet of its kind discovered, further exploration will help us to put the pieces together. But it is certainly a major step forward in the eternal human quest to answer the question: are we alone?

This work was described in a study published in the journal Science.

There may be an easier way to describe how black holes "leak" energy than the theory Stephen Hawking proposed — and the newly suggested process is similar to how we describe a boiling pot of water. This simple (well, relatively simple) description could be used to model black holes in many situations such as during their formation, mergers with other black holes, eventual evaporation and even explosive death.

In the 1970s, legendary theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking wrote a letter to the journal Nature entitled "Black hole explosions?" explaining how these objects may leak thermal radiation, evaporate and eventually implode at the end of their lives. This radiation eventually became known as Hawking radiation.

But in new research, scientists have suggested an alternative to Hawking radiation. It involves describing the increase in disorder, or entropy, of black holes. Boiling water, as an example, is also often described based on its increase in entropy. For black holes, this measure of entropy is connected to characteristics like spin and energy, which means it could be used to understand how these cosmic titans respond to different events.

"Hawking's laws of black hole mechanics provided a satisfying connection between extreme and ordinary physics and have been the paradigm for 50 years, but they have a serious limitation," team leader Abhay Ashtekar of the Eberly College of Science at Penn State University said in a statement. "They were formulated for black holes at equilibrium — or unchanging over time — but black holes are constantly changing; they form, merge, and eventually evaporate. We wanted to find a way to overcome this limitation and extend the laws to black holes that are out of equilibrium."

Black holes, Einstein and Hawking

To investigate the origins of black holes, one has to go back to history's most famous physicist (sorry Hawking, you're number two), Albert Einstein.

In 1915, Einstein revealed his theory of gravity, general relativity. One consequence of the equations underpinning that theory was the possibility of a singularity, a point at which the equations of general relativity go to infinity. This represents the heart of a black hole.

Another consequence of the general relativity equations is a region of space around this singularity at which gravity is so extreme that the escape velocity of the area increases to a value greater than the speed of light. That region is the light-trapping outer boundary of the black hole known as the event horizon, which prevents us from ever seeing the singularity at the heart of the black hole or receiving information from it. In fact, until Hawking's work in 1974, this is why it was proposed that nothing at all can escape a black hole.

"The laws of black hole mechanics came directly from Einstein's equations," team member Daniel E. Paraizo, a graduate student in physics at Penn State, said. "Because you cannot see into a black hole, it seemed that there could be an infinite number of ways to make a black hole, making their entropy infinite as well. They were also thought to only absorb energy and never radiate, so their temperature was zero."

However, the advent of Hawking radiation somewhat changed this paradigm. By suggesting that black holes actually radiate thermal energy, Hawking redefined them in such a way that suddenly the laws of thermodynamics could be applied to black holes.

"This changed the thinking about the thermodynamic properties of black holes from a sort of mathematical concept described by equations, to being more of a physical reality," Paraizo said. "This opened the door to finding analogies in black holes of entropy and temperature used in thermodynamics."

In Hawking's recipe for black holes, the area of the event horizon is proportional to its temperature and entropy, and is inversely proportional to its mass and its spin.

"There is a problem, though," team member Jonathan Shu, also from Penn State, said in the statement. "These analogies only really work for a black hole that is at equilibrium. In dynamic situations, event horizons can form and grow in what we call flat regions of space-time, where nothing is happening."

Shu added that a consequence of this is the properties of black holes cannot be determined just by the local physics of the black hole. Instead, determining the properties of black holes relies on the prediction of events that may or may not happen in the future.

"Therefore, the area of event horizons cannot be a measure of the physical entropy of dynamical black holes," Shu argues. "If we want to understand black holes that are growing, evaporating and merging, we need a viable alternative."

For the team, this meant replacing the event horizon of a black hole with something they call a "dynamical horizon," already used when scientists simulate black holes. Now, the first law of thermodynamics — which states the energy of a closed system cannot be created or destroyed but rather can only change forms — can be applied to black holes even when they are involved in dynamic acts. It also means black holes are subject to the second law of thermodynamics, which says the total entropy of an isolated system will always increase over time, during their birth, merger and death.

"This allows us to extend the first and second laws of thermodynamics to black holes that are not at equilibrium, thereby overcoming the limitations of the paradigm that has been used for over half a century," Ashtekar said. "We can apply these generalized laws to better understand evaporating black holes in quantum theory and black hole mergers."

The team's research was published in June in the journal Physical Review Letters.

A laser star guide beams up from the Gemini South Observatory and into the Milky Way on Cerro Pachón, a mountain in central Chile.

What is it?

The Gemini South Observatory, located in Chile, is one of two Gemini Observatories with the other located in Hawaii (named Gemini North, or 'Alopeke) on the volcano Mauna Kea.

Each Gemini Observatory has a 26.6-foot (8.1-meter) telescope. On the same mountain in Chile sits the 13.4-foot (4.1-meter) SOAR telescope.

In this photograph captured by Petr Horálek, an audiovisual ambassador for the U.S. national center for ground-based, nighttime optical astronomy at NOIRLab (the National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory), it looks like Gemini South is about to be beamed up into the night sky.

However, there isn't some alien ship behind that laser beam. Instead, Gemini South is beaming up a laser guide star, or a powerful laser that creates the appearance of a fake star in the night sky. This fake star acts as a reference point, helping the telescope to calibrate and correct any light distortions.

Why is it incredible?

Even from just this photograph, which shows an observatory in action, it's clear why this mountain is a hotspot for astronomical observing.

These peaks are chosen for many reasons, including their altitude and how far they are from bright lights that could affect observations. But even in a regular photograph, Horálek was able to show the incredible beauty of the glow of the Milky Way's heart above the mountain range, with every color in the rainbow popping up in the gas and dust across our galaxy.

Even the framing of the shot draws you in, as the viewer feels almost pulled down the road toward the observatory and right up into the Milky Way.

Two major mysteries in science, the nature of dark matter and the possible existence of higher dimensions, could be linked, new research suggests. The team behind a new study proposes that dark matter may be so strange and ghost-like because it is in tune with a fifth dimension.

When scientists discuss "extra dimensions," they aren't talking about other universes in which another evil version of you exists (and with a beard). Instead, they refer to dimensions that could be "curled up" with reality alongside the standard four-dimensional spacetime, consisting of the three dimensions of space and one dimension of time.

While these extra dimensions remain highly speculative, they have become a hot topic, especially as string theory, the most popular extension to standard physics, relies upon the existence of at least 11 dimensions. Scientists are more sure that dark matter exists, but proving its existence still remains troubling because, despite its gravity literally holding galaxies together and outweighing ordinary matter by around five to one, it remains effectively invisible because it doesn't interact with light and it simply ghosts through ordinary matter.

"Understanding dark matter would represent a profound advance in humanity's knowledge of the cosmos and what it is made of," team member Yu-Dai Tsai of the University of Sheffield said in a statement.

"Our research gives physicists clear new targets in the search for dark matter, while connecting two of the biggest ideas in fundamental physics: the mystery of dark matter and the existence of hidden dimensions."

Dark photons play dark matter like a violin

Though the main idea is that dark matter may operate in the fifth dimension, this new research expands upon that concept with another theory. It suggests that dark matter exists with another inhabitant of the fifth dimension, a force-carrying particle called a "dark photon."

Standard photons are the constituent particles of electromagnetic radiation, or light; dark photons would be similar but for a hypothetical "dark force."

The team's new proposal would see the unique geometry of the fifth dimension causing the masses of dark matter particles to form an arrangement that gives rise to a "dark matter resonance." This is akin to the intense vibration of a musical instrument at certain notes.

"Dark matter resonance is already known to be a powerful idea, with the potential to change our understanding of how dark matter was produced in the early universe and how we search for it today," team member Yu-Dai Tsai of the University of Sheffield said in a statement. "But many previous resonant dark matter models have treated the resonance as an assumption. This work gives a possible deeper origin for it: the resonance may come directly from the geometry of hidden dimensions."

Tsai explained that while dark matter resonance is a phenomenon that has been explored before, the research conducted by this team differs because it suggests dark matter resonance is not a coincidence. Instead, the possible deeper origin for the resonance sees it emerge directly from the geometry of hidden dimensions. This would allow dark matter to interact strongly shortly after the Big Bang while allowing it to settle into its ghost-like inert existence today.

"This resonance can make dark matter interactions much stronger at crucial epochs in cosmic history, such as in the early universe," Tsai added. "Crucially, the model allows for these strong interactions in the past while still explaining why dark matter appears so inert and hard to detect today."

Of course, it is very early days for the team's theory, but it excitingly offers a way toward solving two of the universe's greatest mysteries.

The team's research was published in the Physical Review D.

A space rock exploded through a bedroom ceiling in New Jersey, and scientists have now traced its origins to a strange, briny asteroid once visited by a NASA mission.

Two years ago on July 16, 2024 in the middle of the afternoon, a sonic boom shook New York City as a fireball streaked through the sky. The culprit? A rock the size of a heavy airline bag weighing roughly 110 pounds (50 kilograms). The meteorite hurtled over the east coast before crash-landing in a house in Hillsborough, New Jersey where the homeowner found it, reeking of sulfur. In studying this meteorite, scientists think that it could have come from the surface of an asteroid where liquid saltwater could have rested, possibly providing clues to life's origins on Earth.

"In a way, you can think of it as smelling the origins of life's atmosphere," lead author and meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute and NASA’s Ames Research Center, told Space.com.

Despite its sulfuric stench, in a stroke of absolute luck, this meteorite crashed into the right house. After traveling through our atmosphere and heating up, searing through the sky and then crashing through a roof and then a bedroom ceiling, the meteorite broke apart into pieces. The homeowner not only sprung into action to collect these pieces of space rock into jars, they did so with gloves, protecting the rocks and keeping them remarkably well-preserved.

"He had the wherewithal to put on gloves and take out jars," Jenniskens said. "And for this type of meteorite, carbonaceous chondroits, it's very important because they just suck in every moisture you can think [of]." So if he would've handled the rocks with his bare hands, oils or moisture from his hands could have completely contaminated the rock, which is common in found meteorites. The homeowner also thought to call the American Meteor Society very quickly after recovering the rocks, making these samples unusually pristine.

Of course, some of the rocks were found to have some fiberglass and even carpet remnants on them after crashing through the roof of a house, Jenniskens said. But the integrity of the meteorites was still incredibly well-preserved for scientific investigation.

What did they find in these space rocks?

Once the rock fragments were collected, they were brought in for analysis led by co-author Mike Zolensky, a meteoriticist at NASA's Johnson Space Center. And they found the now-dubbed "Hillsborough meteorite" to be full of organic compounds created through chemical reactions with minerals also present in the rock as well as amino acids. They also found that some parts of the rocks were more altered by water than others.

They classified the meteorite as a CM1/2 carbonaceous chondrite, which are primitive meteorites that formed in the early solar system. CM2 meteorites typically come from parent asteroids that haven't been significantly altered by water while CM1 typically comes from asteroids with water. The Hillsborough meteorite doesn't fit neatly into either category, with some pieces of the rock altered by salty water.

This provided evidence that its parent asteroid must have had water, leading them to further classify this rock as a CM1/2, a category between 1 and 2. This is only the second meteorite of this type observed on Earth.

"Thanks to the homeowner’s quick reaction, these are the most pristine CM1/2 meteorites we know of," Jenniskens said in a statement.

They also found small, salty fragments inside the meteorite, leading the researchers to conclude that this rock may have come from a near-surface area of its parent asteroid, where liquid water evaporated and salt accumulated. A salty, briny asteroid.

This salty brine on the rock's parent asteroid could be an important piece to study, as researchers think that such a brine could ignite the chemical reactions between organic molecules and minerals that could create life. Some theories suggest that life on Earth began thanks to minerals and molecules deposited by crashing meteorites, and further study of such a well-preserved piece of a briny asteroid could help to put those pieces together.

And while the team doesn't know the full story behind the organic compounds and amino acids found in this rock, early analysis suggests that the amino acids present formed on the rock's parent asteroid with the help of chemical reactions in this briny environment.

Another major finding came from information from even before the crash. Thanks to reports from members of the public and footage from cameras (even doorbell cameras) across the eastern U.S., experts led by Jenniskens were able to piece together the trajectory of the object. Doppler weather radar at Newark Airport even helped to put the pieces together, detecting a long trail of pebbles stretching from Staten Island to New Jersey falling from the rock as it fell apart and out of the sky. This combined intel provided experts with the object's speed, and the direction from which it came.

In piecing together the rocks' trajectory, "we can say where they came from in the asteroid belt," Jenniskens said. "This one seemed to have come out of the inner asteroid belt."

In fact, he added that this meteorite's parent asteroid likely came from an area of the asteroid belt already observed in a flyby by NASA's Lucy mission, which is exploring the asteroids of the solar system. Could it be possible that Lucy observed the same bit of rock that ended up in a bedroom in New Jersey?

Jenniskens added that "If you hear about a meteorite fall in your area, please check your dash cams and video cameras and security ring [cameras], and even your cell phones." Who knows, you might have even accidentally captured footage that helps researchers to better understand a mysterious rock from space.

And if you live in the greater New York City area and want to get a closer look at this space rock, some of the meteorite fragments will be on display, curated at the American Museum of Natural History.

This work was described in a study published in the journal Science Advances.