Visible in this map is a yellow traverse route beginning at Opportunity’s landing site, Eagle Crater, and ranging 28.06 miles (45.16 kilometers) to its final resting spot on the rim of Endeavour Crater. The rover was descending down into the crater in Perseverance Valley when the dust storm ended its mission. Drive along with the NASA’s Opportunity Mars rover and hear the voices of scientists and engineers behind the mission....

A new formula gauges a person’s 10-year risk of dying by estimating a person’s ability to exercise on a treadmill at an increasing speed and incline. Analyzing data from 58,000 heart stress tests, Johns Hopkins cardiologists report they have developed a formula that estimates one’s risk of dying over a decade based on a person’s ability to exercise on a treadmill at an increasing speed and incline. Several exercise-based risk scoring systems already in use are designed to measure short-term risk of dying but do so strictly among patients with established heart disease or overt signs of cardiovascular trouble....

Using one cosmic mystery to probe another, astronomers analyzed the signal from a fast radio burst to shed light on the diffuse gas in the halo of a massive galaxy [1]. In November 2018 the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope pinpointed a fast radio burst, named FRB 181112. Follow-up observations with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and other telescopes revealed that the radio pulses have passed through the halo of a massive galaxy on their way toward Earth....

Fusing classical epidemiology and genomics is a tool for future pandemics. Genome sequencing of thousands of SARS-CoV-2 samples shows that surges of COVID-19 cases are driven by the appearance of new coronavirus variants, according to new research from the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of California, Davis published on April 1, 2021, in Scientific Reports. “As variants emerge, you’re going to get new outbreaks,” said Bart Weimer, professor of population health and reproduction at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine....

The project was, in part, a proof of concept. Oceans cover two-thirds of the earth’s surface, but placing permanent seismometers under the sea is prohibitively expensive. The fact that the fiber network was able to detect and record a magnitude-8.2 earthquake near Fiji in August 2018 proves the ability of the technology to fill in some of the massive blind spots in the global seismic network, says Caltech graduate student Ethan Williams (MS ’19)....

Between September 7, 2022, and October 13, 2022, the annual Antarctic ozone hole reached an average area of 23.2 million square kilometers (9.0 million square miles). This depleted area of the ozone layer over the South Pole was slightly smaller than the average for the same period last year. This marks a general continuation of the overall shrinking trend of recent years. “Over time, steady progress is being made, and the hole is getting smaller,” said Paul Newman, chief scientist for Earth sciences at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center....

Gravity remains the dominant force on large astronomical scales, but when it comes to stars in young star clusters the dynamics in these crowded environments cannot be simply explained by the pull of gravity. After analyzing Hubble Space Telescope images of star cluster NGC 1818 in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, researchers at the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (KIAA) at Peking University in Beijing found more binary star systems toward the periphery of cluster than in the center – the opposite of what they expected....

Fierce galactic winds powered by an intense burst of star formation may blow gas right out of massive galaxies, shutting down their ability to make new stars. Sifting through images and data from three telescopes, a team of astronomers found 29 objects with outflowing winds measuring up to 2,500 kilometers per second, an order of magnitude faster than most observed galactic winds. “They’re nearly blowing themselves apart,” said Aleksandar Diamond-Stanic, a fellow at the University of California’s Southern California Center for Galaxy Evolution, who led the study....

Replacing margarine, butter, mayonnaise and dairy fat with olive oil was associated with lower mortality risk. Consuming more than 7 grams (>1/2 tablespoon) of olive oil per day is associated with lower risk of cardiovascular disease mortality, cancer mortality, neurodegenerative disease mortality, and respiratory disease mortality, according to a study publishing today (January 10, 2022) in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. The study found that replacing about 10 grams/day of margarine, butter, mayonnaise, and dairy fat with the equivalent amount of olive oil is associated with lower risk of mortality as well....

The moon hanging in the night sky sent Robert Hurt’s mind into deep space – to a region some 40 light years away, in fact, where seven Earth-sized planets crowded close to a dim, red sun. Hurt, a visualization scientist at Caltech’s IPAC center, was walking outside his home in Mar Vista, California, shortly after he learned of the discovery of these rocky worlds around a star called TRAPPIST-1 and got the assignment to visualize them....

Now researchers at MIT and elsewhere have found that, in Hawaii, the amount of energy delivered by waves averaged over each year is a good predictor of how fast or slow a rocky coastline will erode. If waves are large and frequent, the coastline will erode faster, whereas smaller, less frequent waves will result in a slower-eroding coast. Their study helps to explain the Hawaiian Islands’ meandering shorelines, where north-facing sea cliffs, experiencing larger waves produced by distant storms and persistent tradewinds, have eroded farther inland....

This colliding trio — known to astronomers as SDSSCGB 10189 — is a relatively rare combination of three large star-forming galaxies lying within only 50,000 light-years of one another. While that might sound like a safe distance, for galaxies this makes them extremely close neighbors! Our own galactic neighbors are much further away; Andromeda, the nearest large galaxy to the Milky Way, is more than 2.5 million light-years away from Earth....

Discovered by William Herschel in 1787, NGC 5714 was host to a fascinating and rare event in 2003. A faint supernova appeared about 8000 light-years below the central bulge of NGC 5714. Supernovae are the huge, violent explosions of dying stars, and the one that exploded in NGC 5714 — not visible in this much later image — was classified as a Type Ib/c supernova and named SN 2003dr. It was particularly interesting because its spectrum showed strong signatures of calcium....

This newly released Hubble images shows galaxy cluster SDSS J1038+4849. In the center of this image, taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, is the galaxy cluster SDSS J1038+4849 — and it seems to be smiling. You can make out its two orange eyes and white button nose. In the case of this “happy face”, the two eyes are very bright galaxies and the misleading smile lines are actually arcs caused by an effect known as strong gravitational lensing....

In October of 2011, a cataclysmic burst of high-energy gamma-ray radiation — known as a gamma-ray burst, or GRB — was detected coming from the region of sky containing ESO 580-49. Astronomers believe that the galaxy was the host of the GRB, given that the chance of a coincidental alignment between the two is roughly 1 in 10 million. At a distance of around 185 million light-years from Earth, it was the second-closest gamma-ray burst (GRB) ever detected....

An image of a galaxy cluster taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope gives a remarkable cross-section of the Universe, showing objects at different distances and stages in cosmic history. They range from cosmic near neighbors to objects seen in the early years of the Universe. The 14-hour exposure shows objects around a billion times fainter than can be seen with the naked eye. This new Hubble image showcases a remarkable variety of objects at different distances from us, extending back over halfway to the edge of the observable Universe....

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is observing such stars through a large program called HAZMAT — Habitable Zones and M dwarf Activity across Time. “M dwarf” is the astronomical term for a red dwarf star — the smallest, most abundant, and longest-lived type of star in our galaxy. The HAZMAT program is an ultraviolet survey of red dwarfs at three different ages: young, intermediate, and old. Stellar flares from red dwarfs are particularly bright in ultraviolet wavelengths, compared with Sun-like stars....

This is a time-lapse set of images of the aging red giant star CW Leonis, taken on three dates: 2001, 2011, and 2016. The star is embedded inside gossamer cobwebs of dust encircling the star. These are really shells of carbon dust blown off the star. As they expand into space they change shape, as seen between the Hubble Space Telescope exposures. Brilliant searchlight beams from the star’s surface poke through the dust....

Gravitational lenses — such as this galaxy cluster SDSS J1152+3313 — possess immense masses that wrap their surroundings and bend the light from faraway objects into rings, arcs, streaks, blurs, and other odd shapes. This lens, however, is not only wrapping the appearance of a distant galaxy — it is also amplifying its light, making it appear much brighter than it would be without the lens. Combined with the high image quality obtainable with Hubble, this gives valuable clues into how stars formed in the early Universe....

A team of scientists led by Carnegie’s Lin Wang has observed a new form of very hard carbon clusters, which are unusual in their mix of crystalline and disordered structure. The material is capable of indenting diamond. This finding has potential applications for a range of mechanical, electronic, and electrochemical uses. The work is published in the journal Science on August 17. Carbon is the fourth-most-abundant element in the universe and takes on a wide variety of forms—the honeycomb-like graphene, the pencil “lead” graphite, diamond, cylindrically structured nanotubes, and hollow spheres called fullerenes....