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

Star formation across the cosmos has fallen by roughly 59 per cent in 4.5 billion years, yet its reservoir of neutral atomic hydrogen declined by only about 11 to 26 per cent—a mismatch that rules out rapid loss of atomic gas as the primary cause and shifts the mystery to how galaxies convert that gas into star-forming molecular clouds.

FAST and DESI data show that the universe retained most of its neutral atomic hydrogen while its star-formation rate fell by more than half, shifting attention to gas phase conversion and regulation.

Sep 5, 2026

Science

The AI boom is pushing data-centre emissions higher while simultaneously accelerating America’s solar buildout: data centres could generate nearly half of US electricity-demand growth through 2030, prompting tech companies and utilities to commission vast new renewable projects—even as natural gas supplies much of the power that solar cannot provide around the clock.

AI data centres can finance new solar farms while also making gas plants run more often. The outcome depends on timing, location, storage, grid queues and how clean energy is counted.

Sep 5, 2026

Moon Daily

Classic Moon-formation simulations treated the colliding proto-Earth and Theia as strengthless fluids, typically producing a debris disk that assembled later—but when Southwest Research Institute researchers added temperature-dependent rock strength, one canonical simulation produced an intact Moon in roughly five hours.

Adding temperature-dependent rock strength to a canonical giant-impact calculation changed how Theia deformed—and in one run left a coherent Moon-sized satellite within hours.

Sep 5, 2026

Venusian Heat

For nearly 50 years, Venus’s clouds have been understood as droplets of concentrated sulfuric acid—but a 2025 reinterpretation of data inadvertently collected by NASA’s Pioneer Venus Large Probe in 1978 suggests their aerosols may instead be about 60 per cent bound water by mass, locked largely inside hydrated iron and magnesium salts.

An accidental aerosol capture during Pioneer Venus's descent may have recorded hydrated salts and far more bound water than the standard sulphuric-acid cloud model allows.

Sep 4, 2026

Marsdaily

Scientists often model Mars’s interior as a set of uniform spherical layers, but 16 years of tracking data from three NASA orbiters reveals something radically uneven: the mantle beneath the southern highlands may be up to 720 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than beneath the northern lowlands—and researchers still don’t know whether persistent mantle upwelling, an insulating crust or the after-effects of an ancient giant impact created it.

Seasonal changes in Mars's gravity imply that the mantle beneath its ancient southern highlands is hundreds of degrees warmer than the north, but three origin stories remain.

Sep 4, 2026

Exo Worlds

Every 97 days, a Neptune-sized world looms above Kepler-36b, spanning roughly 2.5 times the apparent diameter of our full Moon. At closest approach, its gravity raises enormous tides that could flex the rocky planet beneath it.

Kepler-36b and its Neptune-sized neighbour pass within about 1.9 million kilometres, creating a giant sky view and a powerful, changing tide across the rocky planet.

Sep 4, 2026

Science

In 1925, 24-year-old Radcliffe graduate student Cecilia Payne calculated that stars consist overwhelmingly of hydrogen and helium. Princeton astronomer Henry Norris Russell called the result “clearly impossible,” prompting her to declare in her thesis that her own extraordinary finding was “almost certainly not real.” Four years later, Russell confirmed that she had been right.

Cecilia Payne's 1925 thesis found that hydrogen and helium dominate stellar atmospheres, then retreated from the result after Henry Norris Russell called it impossible.

Sep 4, 2026

Exo Worlds

Rocky planets were expected to become common only after generations of stars enriched the universe over billions of years. But simulations show that a powerful early supernova could seed a disk with several Earth masses of planetesimals just 100 million years after the Big Bang—less than one percent of the universe’s current age.

A simulated Population III supernova remnant produced enough concentrated solids for rocky-world precursors at cosmic dawn, but the calculation stopped well before a finished planet.

Sep 4, 2026

Marsdaily

What winter means on Mars: temperatures can plunge to −130°C, carbon dioxide falls as snow or freezes directly onto the ground, as much as 16% of the atmosphere becomes part of the winter polar cap, and air pressure planet-wide swings by roughly 25% over the seasonal cycle.

Mars winter can turn atmospheric carbon dioxide into snow and frost, shifting trillions of tonnes of gas into a polar cap and changing pressure across the planet.

Sep 3, 2026

Outer Planets

When Georgia Tech scientists tipped out a tumbler of Titan-like organic grains, 2 to 5 percent refused to fall, held to the walls by static electricity. In comparable experiments with terrestrial sand and volcanic ash, nothing stuck.

Organic grain analogues clung to a nitrogen-filled tumbler after becoming charged, but later tholin tests show why the result cannot yet be assumed to describe Titan's real dunes.

Sep 3, 2026

Deep Space

A 13,000-square-mile block of Virginia and West Virginia restricts permanent radio transmitters so observatories at Green Bank can hear faint signals from space; much stricter rules apply around the telescope itself, where wireless devices are restricted and only approved diesel vehicles are allowed in its most sensitive zone

A 13,000-square-mile swath of Appalachia has surrendered its airwaves so one telescope can listen to the cosmos.

Sep 3, 2026

Exo Worlds

Astronomers can identify water vapour, carbon dioxide and even oxygen across light-years—but nitrogen, despite filling 78 per cent of Earth’s atmosphere, is exceptionally difficult to see because N₂ lacks the strong infrared fingerprint of most gases. Only the faint signal created when nitrogen molecules collide gives it away.

N₂ dominates Earth’s air yet lacks the strong infrared bands used to identify many gases. Its best remote clue is a pressure-sensitive absorption near 4.15 micrometres, created briefly when nitrogen molecules collide.

Sep 3, 2026

Marsdaily

Across Olympus Mons and three other giant Martian volcanoes, seasonal morning frost only about 0.01 millimetres thick disappears within hours of sunrise—yet collectively, approximately 150,000 tonnes of water, enough to fill 60 Olympic swimming pools, may cycle between the surface and atmosphere each cold-season day.

Water frost only about 10 micrometres thick appears for a few cold-season morning hours across four giant Martian volcanoes. Its vast coverage may exchange approximately 150,000 tonnes of water with the atmosphere each day.

Sep 3, 2026

Moon Daily

Moon dust may preserve a far longer record of cosmic history than Earth’s deep-sea deposits. A model validated against Apollo samples suggests metre-deep lunar soil could retain isotope signatures from supernovae and other stellar catastrophes dating back 80–100 million years, while the deep-ocean records currently used reach only about 10 million years.

A model tested against Apollo cores predicts that long-lived radioisotopes could preserve a readable lunar record reaching 80 to 100 million years, if future missions retrieve deep samples.

Sep 3, 2026

Marsdaily

Hollywood exaggerates Martian storms in a specific and measurable way: because Mars’s atmosphere is roughly 100 times thinner than Earth’s, a 60-mph gust would push an astronaut about as hard as a gentle 6-to-8-mph breeze on Earth.

Wind loading depends on air density and speed squared. In Mars's thin surface atmosphere, a 60 mph gust exerts roughly the same push as a 6-to-8 mph Earth breeze, while dust remains a serious hazard to power and machinery.

Sep 2, 2026

Science

Nearly a mile beneath South Dakota, the 10-tonne LUX-ZEPLIN detector recorded a single high-energy xenon recoil for which researchers found no likely background explanation—the experiment’s most intriguing dark-matter candidate yet, although its 2.6-sigma significance remains far short of a discovery.

One 248 keV recoil survived LUX-ZEPLIN’s background checks. The global result is 2.6 sigma: interesting enough to pursue, nowhere near enough to call dark matter.

Sep 2, 2026