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A Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) review of data collected from near-Earth asteroids Bennu and Ryugu supports the hypothesis that they were originally part of the Polana collisional family in the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The study compared spectroscopy data from Polana with spacecraft and laboratory data from Bennu and…

An international team of scientists, led by Northwestern University astrophysicists, has detected a never-before-seen type of exploding star, or supernova, that is rich with silicon, sulfur and argon. When massive stars explode, astrophysicists typically find strong signatures of light elements, such as hydrogen and helium. But the newly discovered supernova, dubbed SN2021yfj, displayed a startling…

Southwest Research Institute led a James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) survey, discovering a previously unknown tiny moon orbiting Uranus. A team led by SwRI’s Dr. Maryame El Moutamid discovered the small object in a series of images taken on Feb. 2, 2025, bringing Uranus’ total moon count to 29. “As part of JWST’s guest observer…

Today’s NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope Picture of the Week offers a closeup of a nearby spiral galaxy. The subject is NGC 2835, which lies 35 million light-years away in the constellation Hydra (The Water Snake). A previous Hubble image of this galaxy was released in 2020, and the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope turned its…

More trees will cool the climate and suppress fires, but mainly if planted in the tropics, according to a new UC Riverside study. The study, published in npj Climate and Atmospheric Science, found that tree planting is generally a net positive for the climate because it helps pull warming carbon out of the atmosphere. However,…

The odds of high-severity wildfire were nearly one-and-a-half times higher on industrial private land than on publicly owned forests, a new study found. Forests managed by timber companies were more likely to exhibit the conditions that megafires love — dense stands of regularly spaced trees with continuous vegetation connecting the understory to the canopy. The…

The size of our universe and the bodies within it is incomprehensible for us lowly humans. The sun has a mass that is more than 330,000 that of our Earth, and yet there are stars in the universe that completely dwarf our sun. Stars with masses more than eight times that of the sun are…