Slashdot reader votsalo shares a report from the Guardian: Tiny glass beads strewn across the moon's surface contain potentially billions of tons of water that could be extracted and used by astronauts on future lunar missions, researchers say. The discovery is thought to be one of the most important breakthroughs yet for space agencies that have set their sights on building bases on the moon, as it means there could be a highly accessible source of not only water but also hydrogen and oxygen. "This is one of the most exciting discoveries we've made," said Mahesh Anand, a professor of planetary science and exploration at the Open University. "With this finding, the potential for exploring the moon in a sustainable manner is higher than it's ever been."

Anand and a team of Chinese scientists analyzed fine glass beads from lunar soil samples returned to Earth in December 2020 by the Chinese Chang'e-5 mission. The beads, which measure less than a millimeter across, form when meteoroids slam into the moon and send up showers of molten droplets. These then solidify and become mixed into the moon dust. Tests on the glass particles revealed that together they contain substantial quantities of water, amounting to between 300m and 270 billion tons across the entire moon's surface. "This is going to open up new avenues which many of us have been thinking about," said Anand. "If you can extract the water and concentrate it in significant quantities, it's up to you how you utilize it."

The latest research, published in Nature Geoscience, points to fine glass beads as the source of that surface water. Unlike frozen water lurking in permanently shaded craters, this should be far easier to extract by humans or robots working on the moon. "It's not that you can shake the material and water starts dripping out, but there's evidence that when the temperature of this material goes above 100C, it will start to come out and can be harvested," Anand said. The water appears to form when high-energy particles streaming from the sun -- the so-called solar wind -- strike the molten droplets. The solar wind contains hydrogen nuclei, which combine with oxygen in the droplets to produce water or hydroxyl ions. The water then becomes locked in the beads, but it can be released by heating the material. Further tests on the material showed the water diffuses in and out of the beads on the timeframe of a few years, confirming an active water cycle on the moon. According to Prof Sen Hu, a senior co-author of the study at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, such impact glasses could store and release water on other airless rocks in the solar system.

The New York Times reports: Since January, the price of lithium has dropped nearly 20%, according to Benchmark Minerals, while sales of electric vehicles have soared. The price of cobalt, another important battery material, has fallen by more than half. Copper, essential to electric motors and batteries, has slipped by about 18%, at a time when U.S. mines and copper-rich countries such as Peru are struggling to increase production.

The price moves have confounded many analysts who predicted costs would stay high, or climb higher, slowing the transition to cleaner forms of transportation. Instead, the drop in commodity prices has made it easier for carmakers to cut prices for electric vehicles. This month, Tesla lowered the prices of its two most expensive cars, the Model S sedan and Model X sport utility vehicle, by thousands of dollars. That followed cuts in January by Tesla to its more affordable Model 3 and Model Y, and by Ford Motor to its Mustang Mach-E. The average price of an electric vehicle in the United States fell by $1,000 in February compared with January, according to Kelley Blue Book. "For electric vehicles, the major roadblock is cost," said Kang Sun, the CEO of Amprius Technologies, a young battery maker that this month announced plans for a factory in Colorado. The falling price of lithium, he said, "is going to promote EV sales."

Sun said he thinks prices could fall much further because demand for the metal has not risen as fast as some in the industry expected.... Ryan Melsert, CEO of American Battery Technology, attributed the recent decline in lithium prices to temporary factors like a seasonal slowdown in electric vehicle sales in China. "We expect to see very high prices for the foreseeable future," Melsert said. Vivek Chidambaram, the senior managing director for strategy at Accenture, the consulting firm, also expects the decline to be temporary. Lithium prices have fallen because sales of electric vehicles, while still brisk, are not growing as fast as automakers expected, he said. That has led suppliers to produce more than is needed.
The article notes America's Department of Energy is providing $3 billion in grants to create a domestic battery supply chain — partly because the supply of lithium has to increase 42-fold by 2050, according to the State Department's undersecretary for energy.

"We have to find additional sources of supply because 42 times is a lot," he tells the Times. "Right now, we don't have enough."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In 2025, United Airlines will fly an air taxi service between the downtown Vertiport Chicago and O'Hare International Airport, using electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft it is purchasing from Archer Aviation. The Archer Midnight eVTOL aircraft will complete the route in about 10 minutes; according to local resident and Ars Managing Editor Eric Bangeman, that journey by car can take over an hour due to road construction. "Both Archer and United are committed to decarbonizing air travel and leveraging innovative technologies to deliver on the promise of the electrification of the aviation industry," said Michael Leskinen, president of United Airlines Ventures. "Once operational, we're excited to offer our customers a more sustainable, convenient, and cost-effective mode of transportation during their commutes to the airport."

If Chicago works out, United plans to add other airport-to-city "trunk routes," with "branch" routes between different communities coming later. The Archer Midnight has a range of 100 miles (160 km) and a top speed of 150 mph (241 km/h). If approved by the FAA, the Chicago air shuttle would be the first commercial eVTOL service to begin operating in North America. Asked about the cost, an Archer spokesperson told the Chicago Sun-Times that the company hopes to make the service competitive with Uber Black, so it will be roughly $100 for the trip.

Scientists have come up with a simple explanation for the strange movements of our solar system's first known visitor from another star. NPR reports: Now, though, in the journal Nature, two researchers say the answer might be the release of hydrogen from trapped reserves inside water-rich ice. That was the notion of Jennifer Bergner, an astrochemist with the University of California, Berkeley, who recalls that she initially didn't spend much time thinking about 'Oumuamua when it was first discovered. "It's not that closely related to my field. So I was like, this is a really intriguing object, but sort of moved on with my life," she says. Then she happened to attend a seminar that featured Cornell University's Darryl Seligman, who described the object's weirdness and what might account for it. One possibility he'd considered was that it was composed entirely of hydrogen ice. Others have suggested it might instead be composed of nitrogen ice.

Bergner wondered if it could just be a water-rich comet that got exposed to a lot of cosmic radiation. That radiation would release the hydrogen from the water. Then, if that hydrogen got trapped inside the ice, it could be released when the object approached the sun and began to warm up. Astronomers who observed 'Oumuamua weren't looking for that kind of hydrogen outgassing and, even if they had been, the amounts involved could have been undetectable from Earth. She teamed up with Seligman to start investigating what happens when water ice gets hit with radiation. They also did calculations to see if the object was large enough to store enough trapped hydrogen to account for the observed acceleration. And they looked to see how the structure of water ice would react to getting warmed, to see if small shifts could allow trapped gas to escape.

It turns out, this actually could account for the observed acceleration, says Bergner, who notes that the kind of "amorphous" water ice found in space has a kind of "fluffy" structure that contains empty pockets where gas can collect. As this water ice warms up, its structure begins to rearrange, she says, and "you lose your pockets for hiding hydrogen. You can form channels or cracks within the water ice as parts of it are sort of compacting." As the pockets collapse and these cracks form, the trapped hydrogen would leak out into space, giving the object a push, she says.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sued Justin Sun Wednesday on allegations of selling and airdropping unregistered securities, fraud and market manipulation. From a report: The SEC said in a press release it was suing Sun, the Tron Foundation, the BitTorrent Foundation and BitTorrent (now known as Rainberry) over the sale of tronix (TRX) and BitTorrent (BTT) tokens, which it described as unregistered crypto asset securities. The regulator further alleged that the defendants "fraudulently manipulat[ed]" TRX's secondary market through an "extensive wash trading" scheme. The agency is also suing Lindsay Lohan, Jake Paul, Soulja Boy, Lil Yachty, Ne-Yo, Akon and Michele Mason on illegal touting charges for their roles allegedly promoting TRX and BTT without disclosing they were paid to do so. The majority of these celebrities settled the charges.

Sun, who was named Grenada's ambassador to the World Trade Organization (WTO) last year, tried to artificially inflate TRX's trading volume through the wash trading scheme, the SEC alleged, by having his own employees "engage in more than 600,000 wash trades of TRX between two crypto asset trading platform accounts he controlled." Somewhere between 4.5 million and 7.4 million TRX was traded daily through these wash trades, the agency said.

A newly discovered asteroid roughly the size of an Olympic swimming pool has a "small chance" of colliding with Earth in 23 years, with a potential impact on Valentine's Day in 2046, according to NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office. From a report: The asteroid has a 1 in 625 chance of striking Earth, based on data projections from the European Space Agency, though NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Sentry system calculated the odds closer to 1 in 560. The latter tracks potential collisions with celestial objects. But the space rock -- named 2023 DW -- is the only object on NASA's risk list that ranks 1 out of 10 on the Torino Impact Hazard Scale, a metric for categorizing the projected risk of an object colliding with Earth. All other objects rank at 0 on the Torino scale.

NASA officials have warned that the odds of impact could be dramatically altered as more observations of 2023 DW are collected and additional analysis is performed. It may be a few days before new data can be collected because of the asteroid's proximity to the moon [...]. The last full moon was two days ago, and it still appears bright and large in the sky, likely obscuring 2023 DW from immediate observation.

The asteroid measures about 160 feet (about 50 meters) in diameter, according to NASA data. As 2023 DW orbits the sun, it has 10 predicted close approaches to Earth, with the nearest landing on February 14, 2046, and nine others between 2047 and 2054. The closest the asteroid is expected to travel to Earth is about 1.1 million miles (1.8 million kilometers), NASA's Eyes on Asteroids website notes. The space rock was first spotted in our skies on February 2. It's traveling about 15.5 miles per second (25 kilometers per second) at a distance of more than 11 million miles (18 million kilometers) from Earth, completing one loop around the sun every 271 days.

A new and detailed investigation by Forbes has raised significant questions about the management and custody of customer assets and stablecoin collateral by Binance. From a report: There are many possible explanations for the nature and intent of certain on-chain transactions highlighted by Forbes, and they could be entirely innocuous. But Binance's so far confused and sometimes contradictory responses to the findings do not inspire confidence, particularly in a post-FTX era of rightfully widespread suspicion of centralized custodians with off-chain balance sheets. A new and detailed investigation by Forbes has raised significant questions about the management and custody of customer assets and stablecoin collateral by Binance. There are many possible explanations for the nature and intent of certain on-chain transactions highlighted by Forbes, and they could be entirely innocuous. But Binance's so far confused and sometimes contradictory responses to the findings do not inspire confidence, particularly in a post-FTX era of rightfully widespread suspicion of centralized custodians with off-chain balance sheets.

Forbes reported this week that on a single day, Aug. 17, 2022, $1.78 billion worth of collateral moved out of Binance wallets intended to back stablecoins, particularly b-USDC, a wrapped version of Circle's USDC. According to Forbes' on-chain analysis, the facts of which Binance has not disputed, $1.2 billion of this was sent to trading firm Cumberland DRW, with other amounts going to now-collapsed hedge fund Alameda Research, Tron founder Justin Sun and crypto infrastructure and services firm Amber Group. Crucially, according to Forbes, this outflow was not accompanied by a corresponding reduction in the circulating supply of b-USDC tokens. Binance's various attempts to offer an innocent explanation of Forbes' findings have not provided a unified and consistent -- much less entirely compelling -- justification for what could, in the worst case, indicate the misuse of customer funds. Before publishing a more focused and detailed account Wednesday morning, Binance officials offered a number of differing, even contradictory explanations.

Equally galling, Binance's responses have continued the petulant and defensive tone of many of its previous dismissals of close investigative attention. Forbes' investigation was motivated by mounting evidence of past problems with Binance's asset management practices. Binance has admitted to Bloomberg that, for certain periods of time, it failed to maintain clear 1:1 backing of its wrapped b-assets in a segregated and transparent manner. In this context, the exchange's attempt to paint an act of journalistic analysis as "conspiracy theories," while suggesting the investigation was motivated by nothing but "collecting a lot of views and clicks," is beneath the dignity of an organization hoping to maintain a leadership position in a high-risk, fraud-riddled industry. Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao even retreated to the oldest refuge of scrutinized crypto organizations, declaring the Forbes reporting nothing more than "FUD," or fear, uncertainty and doubt. But this lazy, knee-jerk dismissal, now as ever, ignores a simple reality: Unclear or incomplete answers from the people most obligated to have them are far more serious sources of confusion and anxiety than accepted facts and reasonable questions surfaced by journalists.

A sheriff's office in Illinois said it was initially thwarted from tracking a stolen car with a 2-year-old boy inside when Volkswagen's Car-Net service refused to provide access to the tracking system because the car's subscription had expired. From a report: "While searching for the stolen vehicle and endangered child, sheriff's detectives immediately called Volkswagen Car-Net, in an attempt to track the vehicle," the Lake County sheriff's office said in a statement posted on Facebook about the incident on February 23. "Unfortunately, there was a delay, as Volkswagen Car-Net would not track the vehicle with the abducted child until they received payment to reactivate the tracking device in the stolen Volkswagen." Volkswagen Car-Net lets owners track and control their vehicles remotely. According to a Chicago Sun-Times article, "the Car-Net trial period had ended, and a representative wanted $150 to restart the service and locate the SUV."

An anonymous reader shares this report from the Washington Post: Sucking carbon dioxide out of the sky — or "direct air capture," as it is known by experts and scientists — is a bit like a time machine for climate change. It removes CO2 from the atmosphere and stores it deep underground, almost exactly the reverse of what humanity has been doing for centuries by burning fossil fuels. Its promise? That it can help run back the clock, undoing some of what we have done to the atmosphere and helping to return the planet to a cooler state.

The problem with direct air capture, however, has been that it takes energy — a lot of energy.... But if the energy powering that comes from fossil fuels, direct air capture starts to look less like a time machine than an accelerator: a way to emit even more CO2. Now, however, a company is working to combine direct air capture with a relatively untapped source of energy: Heat from Earth's crust. Fervo Energy, a geothermal company headquartered in Houston, announced on Thursday that it will design and engineer the first purpose-built geothermal and direct air capture plant. With the help of a grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the company hopes to have a pilot facility online in 3 to 5 years.

If it works, it will be a way to produce carbon-free electricity, while reducing CO2 in the atmosphere at the same time. In short, a win-win for the climate. "You have to have your energy from a carbon-free source" for direct air capture to make sense, said Timothy Latimer, the CEO of Fervo Energy. "Geothermal is a great match...." Geothermal wells don't, of course, get anywhere close to Earth's core, but a geothermal well drilled just 1 to 2 miles into hot rocks below the surface can reach temperatures of up to 1,000 degrees. Water is pumped into the well, heated and returned to the surface, where it can be converted into steam and electricity. Even after generating electricity, most geothermal plants have a lot of waste heat — often clocking in around 212 degrees. And conveniently, that happens to be the exact temperature needed to pull carbon dioxide out of an air filter and bury it underground.
The article notes a study which found that if air capture were combined with all the geothermal plants currently in America, the country "could suck up around 12.8 million tons of carbon dioxide every year."

And "Unlike wind and solar, a geothermal plant can be on all of the time, producing electricity even when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining."

The CBC reports: You may have seen stories over the past week or so with headlines like, "Part of the sun breaks free and forms a strange vortex, baffling scientists," or "Unbelievable moment a piece of the sun BREAKS OFF baffles scientists" or even "NASA captures piece of sun breaking off, baffles scientists." It all started with a harmless, informative tweet. Tamitha Skov, a space weather forecaster and science communicator, just broke away from the main filament... Implications for understanding the sun's atmospheric dynamics above 55 degrees here cannot be overstated!"

But are scientists actually baffled? Tamitha Skov laughs. "No," she said....

The eight-hour event started off with a solar prominence (also known as a solar filament), that began to rise up near the north pole of the sun, which is seen at the top in satellite images. Prominences are made up of plasma, a hot gas of electrically charged hydrogen and helium. They are common on the sun, but it was the location of this one — at the sun's north pole — that was of particular interest to heliophysicists. "What ended up happening was something that started off as a very normal, average, what we call a polar crown filament. It became this kind of tweeted her excitement that "material from a northern prominence big tower, like a big volcano that was beginning to rise up near the very northern pole," Skov explained. The prominence was near the top of the north pole, above 60 degrees latitude where it got caught in an electromagnetic wind. "And it began to yank and pull at some of the material in that prominence," Skov said.

"So it was rising like a hot air balloon, so to speak, up in the air. And as it cooled, instead of just cooling back down and falling, or perhaps erupting, like a normal polar crown filament, part of it got ripped off in this wind. And as it shredded off into this wind, we got to watch it cool down, swirl in a vortex. And that is a very rare, if not, fundamentally new observation."
It looks like the material ultimately just returns to the surface of the sun -- albeit providing clues about the sun's polar winds and the specifics of its magnetic activity cycle.

Skov also says that the sun's magnetic polar fields "flip" during its 22-year solar cycle, which increases the odds of non-charged particles traveling to the poles, according to the article. "So scientists weren't baffled, since they already had some knowledge about this type of activity. But they were thrilled to be able to witness it."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader aduxorth for sharing the news.

In a study published Wednesday in PLOS Climate, a group of astrophysicists proposes shooting lunar dust into space to help partially shield sunlight to Earth. The Washington Post reports: The team used computer simulations to model various scenarios where massive quantities of dust (and we mean a lot of dust) in space can reduce the amount of Earthbound sunlight by 1 to 2 percent, or up to about six days of an obscured sun in a year. Their cheapest and most efficient idea is to launch dust from the moon, which would land into orbit between the sun and Earth and create a sunshade. Yes, the idea sounds like science fiction. Yes, it would require (a lot of) new engineering. Yes, there are more feasible climate mitigation tactics that can be employed now and in the near future. But the researchers view this rigorous physics experiment as a backup option that could aid -- not replace -- existing strategies to help humankind live on a more comfortable Earth. [...]

In the new study, the authors concede their idea isn't perfect but say it addresses some problems with previous concepts. For instance, the amount of material needed to actually shade the sun exceeds 10 billion kilograms (22 billion pounds), which is about 100 times more mass than humans have ever sent into space. Bromley says dust is very efficient at scattering sunlight relative to its size. The team considered different types of dust, scattering properties and size. The team found that aggregates of fluffy and highly porous particles scattered light the best, but they opted for a particle perhaps more easily accessible in space: moon dust. "We really do focus on lunar dust, just plain old, as-it-is lunar dust, without any indication of changing its shape," said Bromley, who said future moon mining could excavate the dust needed. Perhaps the greatest challenge is getting the right material exactly where you need it, Bromley said.

In one computer simulation, the team shot lunar dust from the moon's surface toward the sun. Bromley said the device to launch the lunar dust into space could be something similar to an electromagnetic gun, cannon or rocket -- picture a T-shirt cannon sending dust into orbit. In the simulation, the dust scattered along various routes until the team found suitable trajectories, which allowed the dust to concentrate temporarily and act as a sun shield. Bromley said the dust would periodically disperse away from Earth and throughout the solar system. In another simulation, the team shot off dust from a space platform about 1 million miles from Earth. This would be in an area known as L1 (Lagrange point 1), where objects tend to stay put because of equal gravitational pulls between the sun and Earth. This idea required more astronomical cost and effort because they would need a space platform and a dust supply that could be easily replenished. In either scenario, people on the ground wouldn't be able to see the shield or feel any difference, although some tools would probably be able to detect changes in the incoming solar radiation.

A small asteroid is flying very close to Earth on Thursday night, less than a week after astronomers discovered the object. The New York Times reports: The asteroid, named 2023 BU, was scheduled to pass over the southern tip of South America at 7:27 p.m. Eastern time. The asteroid is fairly small -- less than 30 feet across, about the size of a truck -- and will be best visible in the skies to the west of southern Chile. For space watchers unable to view 2023 BU firsthand, the Virtual Telescope Project will be broadcasting the event on its website and YouTube channel. The asteroid will not hit Earth but will make one of the closest approaches ever by such an object, hurtling past Earth at just 2,200 miles above its surface, according to a news release from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This encounter puts the asteroid "well within the orbit of geosynchronous satellites," the statement noted, but the asteroid is not on track to hit any.

2023 BU was unknown to NASA, or anyone, until last Saturday. Gennadiy Borisov, an amateur astronomer in Crimea, noticed the asteroid from the MARGO Observatory, a setup of telescopes that he has used to discover other interstellar objects. Astronomers then determined 2023 BU's orbit around the sun and impending trip past Earth using data from the Minor Planet Center, a project sanctioned by the International Astronomical Union. It publishes positions of newly found space objects, including comets and satellites, from information of several observatories worldwide.

An exotic green comet that has not passed Earth since the time of the Neanderthals has reappeared in the sky ready for its closest approach to the planet next week. The Guardian reports: Discovered last March by astronomers at the Zwicky Transient Facility at the Palomar Observatory in California, comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) was calculated to orbit the sun every 50,000 years, meaning it last tore past our home planet in the stone age. The comet, which comes from the Oort cloud at the edge of the solar system, will come closest to Earth on Wednesday and Thursday next week when it shoots past the planet at a distance of 2.5 light minutes -- a mere 27m miles.

Comets are balls of primordial dust and ice that swing around the sun in giant elliptical orbits. As they approach the sun, the bodies warm up, turning surface ice into gas and dislodging dust. Together, this creates the cloud or coma which surrounds the comet's hard nucleus and the dusty tail that stretches out behind. Images already taken of comet C/2022 E3 reveal a subtle green glow that is thought to arise from the presence of diatomic carbon -- pairs of carbon atoms that are bound together -- in the head of the comet. The molecule emits green light when excited by the ultraviolet rays in solar radiation.

Since mid-January, the comet has been easier to spot with a telescope or binoculars. It is visible in the northern hemisphere, clouds permitting, as the sky darkens in the evening, below and to the left of the handle of the Plough constellation. It is heading for a fly-by of the pole star, the brightest star in Ursa Minor, next week. The window for spotting the comet does not stay open long. While the best views may be had about February 1 and 2, by the middle of the month the comet will have dimmed again and slipped from view as it hurtles back out into the solar system on its return trip to the Oort cloud.

CNN reports: Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, who became the second person to ever set foot on the moon in 1969, following crewmate Neil Armstrong, married his "longtime love" on his 93rd birthday on Friday.

The former astronaut announced his nuptials on Twitter.... "We were joined in holy matrimony in a small private ceremony in Los Angeles & are as excited as eloping teenagers...." Aldin also thanked fans for their birthday wishes in another Friday tweet. "It means a lot and I hope to continue serving a greater cause for many more revolutions around the sun," he wrote.

NASA's plans for a presence on the moon "will allow the program to practice how to live in space sustainably," writes the Washington Post. "It will allow scientists to tap into the moon's considerable scientific value to learn more about how Earth was formed. And perhaps, it would also serve as a steppingstone to Mars and other deep-space destinations years in the future."

First, unlike in the 1960s — we now know that the moon has water. Water is not only key to sustaining human life, but its component parts — hydrogen and oxygen — can be used as rocket propellant, making the moon a gas station in space. That could be critical for long-duration missions, allowing spacecraft to refuel on the moon instead of lugging all the fuel from Earth. And since the moon's gravity is one-sixth of Earth's, it is a relatively easy springboard to other points of the solar system.
NASA is also considering building a nuclear reactor on the moon: It's one of several initiatives NASA has begun under its Artemis program, designed to help astronauts stay for extended periods when they'll need power, transportation and the ability to use the moon's resources.... The effort is still very much in its nascent stages, and the funding NASA would need for the long term has not materialized in full.... A sustainable presence, despite the rosy predictions coming from the top echelons of the agency, is still years away, and the technical challenges are immense.

But NASA has begun developing the technologies that would be needed to sustain astronauts on the surface for extended periods. In June of last year, the agency and the Energy Department awarded contracts, worth $5 million each, to three companies to develop nuclear power systems that could be ready to launch by the end of the decade for a test on the moon. The systems would generate 40 kilowatts of power, enough energy to power six or seven American households, and last about 10 years....

NASA is also looking to build solar farms, using arrays that point vertically and catch the angle of the sun over the horizon. And it's exploring how best to exploit what are called "in situ resources" — meaning those that already exist, such as the regolith.
The article even broaches the idea of "a lunar economy that would help sustain a permanent presence."

Becky Ferreira writes via Motherboard: You may not realize it in your day-to-day life, but we are all enveloped by a giant "superbubble" that was blown into space by the explosive deaths of a dozen-odd stars. Known as the Local Bubble, this structure extends for about 1,000 light years around the solar system, and is one of countless similar bubbles in our galaxy that are produced by the fallout of supernovas. Cosmic superbubbles have remained fairly mysterious for decades, but recent astronomical advances have finally exposed key details about their evolution and structure. Just within the past few years, researchers have mapped the geometry of the Local Bubble in three dimensions and demonstrated that its surface is an active site of star birth, because it captures gas and dust as it expands into space.

Now, a team of scientists has added another layer to our evolving picture of the Local Bubble by charting the magnetic field of the structure, which is thought to play a major role in star formation. Astronomers led by Theo O'Neill, who conducted the new research during a summer research program at the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA), presented "the first-ever 3D map of a magnetic field over a superbubble" on Wednesday at the American Astronomical Society's 241st annual meeting in Seattle, Washington. The team also unveiled detailed visualizations of their new map, bringing the Local Bubble into sharper focus.

"We think that the entire interstellar medium is really full of all these bubbles that are driven by various forms of feedback from, especially, really massive stars, where they're outputting energy in some form or another into the space between the stars," said O'Neill, who just received an undergraduate degree in astronomy-physics and statistics from the University of Virginia, in a joint call with their mentor Alyssa Goodman, an astronomer at CfA who co-authored the new research. [...] "Now that we have this map, there's a lot of cool science that can be done both by us, but hopefully by other people as well," O'Neill said. "Since stars are clustered, it's not as if the Sun is super special, and is in the Local Bubble because we're just lucky. We know that the interstellar medium is full of bubbles like this, and there's actually a lot of them nearby our own Local Bubble." "One cool next step will be looking at places where the Local Bubble is nearby other feedback bubbles," they concluded. "What happens when these bubbles interact, and how does that drive start formation in general, and the overall long-term evolution of galactic structures?"

The protective ozone layer in the upper atmosphere could be restored within several decades, scientists said Monday, as recent rogue emissions of ozone-depleting chemicals from China have been largely eliminated. From a report: In a United Nations-sponsored assessment, the scientists said that global emissions of CFC-11, a banned chemical that has been used as a refrigerant and in insulating foams, had declined since 2018 after increasing for several years. CFC-11 and similar chemicals, collectively called chlorofluorocarbons, destroy ozone, which blocks ultraviolet radiation from the sun that can cause skin cancer and otherwise harm people and other living things. The scientists said that if current policies remained in place, ozone levels between the polar regions should reach pre-1980 levels by 2040. Ozone holes, or regions of greater depletion that appear regularly near the South Pole and, less frequently, near the North Pole, should also recover, by 2045 in the Arctic and about 2066 in Antarctica.

"Things continue to trend in the right direction," said Stephen A. Montzka, a research chemist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and one of the report's authors. Dr. Montzka led a 2018 study that alerted the world that CFC-11 emissions had been increasing since 2012 and that they appeared to come from East Asia. Investigations by The New York Times and others strongly suggested that small factories in Eastern China disregarding the global ban were the source. The new emissions had threatened to undermine the Montreal Protocol, the treaty negotiated in the 1980s to phase out the use of chlorofluorocarbons in favor of more benign chemicals after it was discovered that chlorofluorocarbons were depleting atmospheric ozone.

SonicSpike shares a report from Space.com: A giant cloud of magnetized plasma exploded from a sunspot hidden on the far side of the sun that might turn to face Earth only two days from now, so get ready for some solar fireworks. The explosion that erupted from behind the sun's eastern edge in the early morning of Tuesday (Jan. 3) was a so-called coronal mass ejection (CME), a burst of particles from the sun's upper atmosphere, or corona. The CME was accompanied by a powerful solar flare that lasted an overwhelming six hours, solar scientist Keith Strong said on Twitter. Neither the flare nor the CME were directed at Earth, but experts warn that the hidden sunspot that produced them will soon be facing the planet as the sun rotates.

Yesterday's flare and CME were detected by multiple sun-observing spacecraft including the joint NASA/European Space Agency Solar and Heliospheric Observatory mission (SOHO) and NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. The measurements helped scientists to determine that the sunspot, or active region, that produced the bursts, will move to the Earth-facing portion of the sun's disk within two days, according to Space Weather. [...] The British space weather forecaster Met Office predicts low solar activity in the next couple of days with a potential increase expected toward the end of this week as the mysterious sunspot emerges at the sun's eastern edge.

The new year has just begun, but the cosmos are already set to make history in 2023. From a report: A comet discovered less than a year ago has traveled billions of miles from its believed origins at the edge of our solar system and will be visible in just a few weeks during what will likely be its only recorded appearance. The comet, C/2022 E3 (ZTF), was first seen in March 2022 as it made its way through Jupiter's orbit. According to NASA, it's a long-period comet believed to come from the Oort Cloud, the most distant region of Earth's solar system that's "like a big, thick-walled bubble made of icy pieces of space debris" that can get even bigger than mountains. The inner edge of this region is thought to be between 2,000 and 5,000 astronomical units (AUs) from the sun -- between 186 billion and 465 billion miles.

This means that C/2022 E3 (ZTF) has made a rare, once-in-a-lifetime journey to be close to Earth. "Most known long-period comets have been seen only once in recorded history because their orbital periods are so, well, long," NASA says. "Countless more unknown long-period comets have never been seen by human eyes. Some have orbits so long that the last time they passed through the inner solar system, our species did not yet exist."

Now, the recently discovered E3 comet, which has been seen with a bright greenish coma and "short broad" dust tail, is set to make its closest approach to the sun on January 12. It will make its closest approach to Earth on February 2. Astrophotographer Dan Bartlett managed to capture an image of the comet in December from his backyard in California. He was able to see "intricate tail structure" in the comet's plasma tail, he said, and "conditions are improving."

To hear the first results from the James Webb Telescope, 200 astronomers descended on the Space Telescope Science Institute for three days in December, reports the New York Times, with an update on what may be 2022's biggest science story. The $10 billion telescope "is working even better than astronomers had dared to hope" -- and astronomers are ecstatic: At a reception after the first day of the meeting, John Mather of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and Webb's senior project scientist from the start, raised a glass to the 20,000 people who built the telescope, the 600 astronomers who had tested it in space and the new generation of scientists who would use it. "Some of you weren't even born when we started planning for it," he said. "Have at it!"
Launched on Christmas one year ago, the Webb telescope "is seven times as powerful as its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope," the Times reports -- sharing what was revealed in that auditorium in December: One by one, astronomers marched to the podium and, speaking rapidly to obey the 12-minute limit, blitzed through a cosmos of discoveries. Galaxies that, even in their relative youth, had already spawned supermassive black holes. Atmospheric studies of some of the seven rocky exoplanets orbiting Trappist 1, a red dwarf star that might harbor habitable planets. (Data suggest that at least two of the exoplanets lack the bulky primordial hydrogen atmospheres that would choke off life as we know it, but they may have skimpy atmospheres of denser molecules like water or carbon dioxide.) "We're in business," declared Bjorn Benneke of the University of Montreal, as he presented data of one of the exoplanets.

Megan Reiter of Rice University took her colleagues on a "deep dive" through the Cosmic Cliffs, a cloudy hotbed of star formation in the Carina constellation, which was a favorite early piece of sky candy. She is tracing how jets from new stars, shock waves and ionizing radiation from more massive nearby stars that were born boiling hot are constantly reshaping the cosmic geography and triggering the formation of new stars. "This could be a template for what our own sun went through when it was formed," Dr. Reiter said in an interview.

Between presentations, on the sidelines and in the hallways, senior astronomers who were on hand in 1989 when the idea of the Webb telescope was first broached congratulated one another and traded war stories about the telescope's development. They gasped audibly as the youngsters showed off data that blew past their own achievements with the Hubble.
The telescope is a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. And appropriately for New Year's Eve, the article concludes with a look to the future: Thus far the telescope, bristling with cameras, spectroscopes and other instruments, is exceeding expectations. (Its resolving power is twice as good as advertised.) The telescope's flawless launch, Dr. Rigby reported, has left it with enough maneuvering fuel to keep it working for 26 years or more. "These are happy numbers...."

The closing talk fell to Dr. Mather. He limned the telescope's history, and gave a shout-out to Barbara Mikulski, the former senator of Maryland, who supported the project in 2011 when it was in danger of being canceled. He also previewed NASA's next big act: a 12-meter space telescope called the Habitable Worlds Observatory that would seek out planets and study them.