A Space Daily column

Deep Field

Astronomy and cosmology

Deep Field covers astronomy and cosmology. Telescopes and what they find, planets near and far, and the strange physics of the deep universe, traced back to the journal papers and observatory data behind the headlines.

Science

NASA’s Viking 2 lander photographed frost forming on Mars in the 1970s. Nearly half a century later, a University of Arkansas researcher fed its old weather measurements into a model and found something Viking’s scientists never knew: for roughly 30 Martian days each year, the frost around the lander may have created tiny pools of liquid perchlorate brine.

A modern model built around Viking 2's frost photographs and weather record finds a narrow 30-sol season when microscopic calcium-perchlorate brines may briefly form in Martian soil.

Aug 18, 2026

Time And Space

Georgios Kritikos died of decompression sickness during the ten-month salvage of the Antikythera wreck and two of his crewmates were left paralysed, and the site they were dragged off has spent the century since giving up marble heads, human teeth and a skeleton to divers who keep going back

Sponge divers off the Greek island of Antikythera pulled a corroded bronze lump from a Roman-era shipwreck in 1901. It turned out to be a hand-cranked mechanical computer with at least 30 precisely cut gears, built around 100 BCE to predict eclipses and planetary positions — and nothing comparable would appear on Earth for another 1,400 years.

Aug 18, 2026

Outer Planets

JWST found water-altered clay minerals on two of Neptune’s tiny inner moons and its rings that probably formed deep inside much larger icy worlds — compelling evidence that today’s moons may be rubble from Neptune’s original satellite system, destroyed when the captured moon Triton tore through it billions of years ago.

Webb found magnesium-rich phyllosilicates on Larissa, Galatea and Neptune’s rings, pointing to altered rock excavated from much larger ancient icy bodies.

Aug 17, 2026

Time And Space

JWST spotted an object 660 million years after the Big Bang that looks like a star the size of our solar system but shines 100 billion times brighter than any star — and the only thing that could explain it is a black hole wrapped inside

MoM-BH*-1 is a compact source at redshift 7.7569 whose extreme spectrum fits a black hole buried in dense gas, although the Solar System scale and luminosity are modelled.

Aug 17, 2026

Science

James Webb spotted a bizarre object just 660 million years after the Big Bang that looks like an enormous star but shines with roughly 100 billion Suns’ worth of energy — because hidden inside its star-like cocoon is an accreting black hole, rather than a core powered by nuclear fusion.

MoM-BH*-1 may be a young massive black hole inside a dense, nearly dust-free gas cocoon that turns accretion power into a star-like spectrum.

Aug 17, 2026

Constellations

At the start of 2019, fewer than 2,000 active satellites circled Earth. By June 2026 there were 15,711 — and nearly two out of every three belonged to a single constellation: SpaceX’s Starlink.

A June 2026 traffic index counted nearly eight times as many working satellites as existed at the start of 2019, with Starlink making up 65.97 percent.

Aug 17, 2026

Saturn Daily

Mimas looks like one of Saturn’s deadest moons: a frozen, heavily cratered ball with no obvious activity. Then scientists discovered a global ocean beneath it in 2024 — an ocean less than 25 million years old, younger than the Himalayas, hiding beneath a surface that gives almost nothing away.

Cassini measurements of Mimas's libration and orbital precession favour a global ocean beneath 20 to 30 kilometres of ice, with tidal evolution placing its age below 25 million years.

Aug 17, 2026

Saturn Daily

Scientists recreated the conditions on Saturn’s moon Titan and watched molecules that shouldn’t mix form stable crystals together — at around minus 179°C, polar hydrogen cyanide accepts nonpolar methane and ethane into its crystal structure, breaking one of chemistry’s most familiar rules of thumb.

Raman spectra and crystal modelling show how nonpolar hydrocarbons can enter highly polar HCN solids under Titan-like cold, with ethane the stronger surface candidate.

Aug 16, 2026

Science

Webb found strong evidence of a Saturn-mass planet in the habitable zone of Alpha Centauri A — our nearest solar twin, just 4 light-years away — then the planet seemed to disappear, sending astronomers into millions of simulated orbits to work out how it could have slipped from view.

Webb saw a plausible giant planet near Alpha Centauri A once and missed it twice; orbital modeling shows how a real world could have moved behind MIRI's blind spots.

Aug 16, 2026

Science

JWST has spent four years revealing an early universe that galaxy-formation models did not expect: within a few hundred million years of the Big Bang, galaxies were already forming stars faster, shining brighter and appearing in greater numbers than most pre-Webb predictions — challenging the astrophysics built around ΛCDM, though not yet ΛCDM itself.

Webb has confirmed a richer and more luminous cosmic dawn than many pre-launch models forecast, pressing hardest on uncertain galaxy physics rather than yet overturning ΛCDM.

Aug 16, 2026

Science

Gypsum crystals discovered by Zhurong on roughly 760-million-year-old Martian terrain may still contain microscopic pockets of the brine they grew from — tiny sealed samples that could preserve the chemistry of liquid water from a surprisingly recent chapter of Mars’s history.

Zhurong's imagery and spectra support a primary selenite layer in late Amazonian terrain, but microscopic brine inclusions remain a prediction for future in-situ analysis or sample return.

Aug 16, 2026

Science

A planet called GJ 3378b, just 25 light-years away in Camelopardalis, receives about 90 percent as much starlight as Earth — and astronomers revealed this June that its estimated mass is less than half what they previously thought, transforming it from a possible gaseous world into a much stronger candidate for a rocky, potentially habitable planet.

A June reanalysis cuts GJ 3378 b's radial-velocity minimum mass from 5.26 to 2.3 Earth masses, strengthening the case for a rocky world while leaving its atmosphere and habitability unknown.

Aug 16, 2026

Psychology

Titan’s air warms the surface and its sky cools it: the greenhouse effect adds about 38 degrees Fahrenheit while the high-altitude haze subtracts about 16, leaving the surface about 22 degrees warmer than Titan’s effective temperature

Two opposing forces battle for control of Titan's frozen surface, with neither winning by much.

Aug 15, 2026

Outer Planets

James Webb has found patches of fresh crystalline ice on Europa that should be destroyed by Jupiter’s radiation in less than 15 days — meaning parts of the moon’s frozen surface are being renewed fast enough to keep replacing it, possibly offering clues to activity beneath the ice shell.

Webb detected crystalline water ice where radiation should erase its lattice within about 15 days, exposing a rapid contest between damage and repair.

Aug 15, 2026

Outer Planets

Pluto’s sky is blue, chunks of its water-ice mountains float like icebergs across glaciers of frozen nitrogen, and its moon is so large that the two worlds orbit a point in empty space between them — yet Pluto still hasn’t completed a single trip around the Sun since humans discovered it in 1930.

New Horizons revealed blue atmospheric haze, floating water-ice hills, nitrogen glaciers and Pluto's unusual orbital dance with Charon.

Aug 15, 2026

Space Scopes

A planet called WASP-127b, roughly 520 light-years from Earth, has a jet stream ripping around its equator at up to 33,000 km/h — more than 18 times faster than Neptune’s winds, the fastest found anywhere in our own Solar System.

Doppler-shifted water and carbon monoxide reveal record equatorial motion on the inflated giant exoplanet WASP-127b.

Aug 15, 2026