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BALLS on the moon: China set to launch Africa’s 1st lunar science mission in 2029

China's Chang'e-8 moon lander mission scheduled for 2029 could send Africa's first space exploration mission to the lunar south pole.

Under the Africa2Moon venture, the Bounced African Low Lunar Sphere, or BALLS for short, is a technology demonstrator in which a trio of spherical probes on the lunar surface will form a radio astronomy array at the moon's south pole region. Each of the metal spheres contains low-frequency radio telescope antennas that will search for signals from some of the oldest and most distant parts of the universe.

Astronomers say the lunar far side is the most radio-quiet site in Earth's vicinity, a location perfect for "listening" to the universe without interference. The BALLS array will work together to observe low frequency radio signals from space that are not observable from the surface of the Earth, according to Carla Mitchell, mission director of the Africa2Moon initiative and Africa Program manager at the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO). The moon is an ideal place to perform such studies, they said, as the low frequency signals to be measured are unobservable from Earth due to interference created by our planet's atmosphere.

Pathfinder

The Africa2Moon project was selected by the Chinese National Space Administration in April 2025 as one of nearly a dozen of Chang'e-8's international payloads.

BALLS will enable observations below 20 megahertz (MHz) that are inaccessible from Earth due to ionospheric distortion and radio interference. Low-frequency radio waves (below about 50 MHz) come from some of the oldest and most distant parts of the universe.

The BALLS array will serve as pathfinder hardware for future lunar technologies and radio astronomy experiments. They will also act as a technology demonstrator for the full Africa2Moon mission, which plans for an array of 55 antennas to be deployed on the far side of the moon.

From paperwork to hardware

"As a little girl I thought space was not possible for people in Africa. I never thought I would be here today, presenting our lunar mission at NASA," said Mitchell.

Mitchell detailed years of team work on the BALLS initiative, rolling forward from paperwork to hardware, speaking July 22 at the NASA Exploration Science Forum 2026, held at NASA's Ames Research Center and staged by the NASA Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI).

SARAO is the national radio astronomy facility of South Africa, operating and managing such facilities as MeerKAT and the South African Square Kilometer Array (SKA) project. SARAO is involved in a range of cosmic inquiries, from pulsar research to studying fast radio bursts, dark matter and dark energy.

two smiling people pose for a picture next to a spherical metal device

Carla Mitchell, mission director for Africa's Bounced African Low Lunar Sphere, and South African Radio Astronomy Observatory engineer, Japie Ludick, with one of the BALLS spheres that underwent testing. (Image credit: Africa2Moon)

Spaced out

Once deployed on the moon, the BALLS trio would be spaced out on the lunar surface. Signals captured from the BALLS array are to be communicated to the Chinese lander and then relayed back to Earth for further processing.

Each of the BALLS consists of a spherical gyroscope-like frame made of interlocking rings, encasing two large triangular solar panel arrays with a grid-like surface texture. The panels are oriented in opposite directions — one pointing upward and one downward — giving the structure a tetrahedron-like inner form.

The mission is led by the Foundation for Space Development Africa in collaboration with SARAO, the South African National Space Agency, the National Institute for Theoretical and Computational Sciences, as well as institutions in Kenya, Ghana, Botswana and across the continent.

Teams at Petrawell in Cape Town, Aerospace Systems Research Institute at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and Electronic Systems Laboratory at Stellenbosch University were involved in manufacturing the components of the structural and functional BALLS models. They were assembled in April 2026, to be delivered to China's Chang'e-8 team for testing.

"The power of collaboration, education and hope cannot be underestimated for Africa's future in space science and technology," she said.

a bundle of wiring inside a metal frame

The BALLS electronics functional model built by the Stellenbosch University team. During the testing phase, the test model sent data between the model and a mock lander unit. (Image credit: Africa2Moon)

Looking to a second mission

As for the full Africa2Moon mission consisting of 55 antennas emplaced on the far side of the moon, Mitchell said they would require a launch as with the first mission.

"So yes, it would probably be contingent on China partnering again with us," Mitchell told Space.com.

The design of the second mission instruments would be a little different too.

"We would want to have them a little larger in diameter and so they would have to go in a flat version that will deploy into a ball versus the current version that travels as a ball, due to space constraints," Mitchell said.

"The deployment onto the lunar surface would also be different, as in self-deploying from the lander as opposed to a robot deployment. This would enable a faster and more random and further dispersed deployment pattern, which enhances the science," she said.

a dark grey crescent on a black background with a blue-white crescent visible in the far distance

A faint view of a crescent Earth above the horizon on the moons far side as seen by the crew of NASA's Artemis II mission in April 2026. (Image credit: NASA)

Shoe-string budget

"I am amazed that it is being done on a shoe-string budget by volunteers. This demonstrates the inspiration of space and if this is successful, it will ignite the reality of space on the African continent," said Clive Neal, a lunar science exploration specialist and professor in civil and environmental engineering and Earth sciences at the University of Notre Dame.

Attending Mitchell's talk at the recent forum at Ames Research Center, Neal said the broader lunar exploration community is willing to help if needed.

"Her talk was inspirational," Neal said, "especially as the broader planetary science community over here [in the U.S.] is moaning about the lack of funding!"

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Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse! Astronomers capture clearest image yet of famous star’s elusive companion

Astronomers have used the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in the Atacama Desert region of Northern Chile to discover the strongest evidence yet that the famous star Betelgeuse has a companion star. That means after a century of investigation, scientists are closer than ever before to conclusively identifying Betelgeuse as a binary system composed of two stars, Betelgeuse A and Betelgeuse B.

Betelgeuse is a red colored star visible with the naked eye in the constellation of Orion and located around 650 light-years from Earth. Astronomers initially proposed the existence of another star orbiting Betelgeuse around 100 years ago in an attempt to explain the familiar star's strange dimming, which has been observed for over 1,000 years. While other teams have gathered evidence of the existence of Betelgeuse B, this new image is the clearest ever direct observation of the star. The scientists behind the discovery are thrilled.

"This is the conclusion of a century-long quest," team leader Miguel Montargès of the Observatoire de Paris, France, said in a statement. "We have shown that Betelgeuse is not single; it is accompanied by a faint stellar companion. I jumped from my chair when I saw the processed images."

The clearest image ever of what likely is Betelgeuse B, a star orbiting Betelgeuse

The clearest image ever of what likely is Betelgeuse B, a star orbiting Betelgeuse (Image credit: ESO/M. Montargès et al.)

The discovery of this new evidence of Betelgeuse B follows two papers published in 2024 that suggested this elusive stellar companion would be at its furthest from Betelgeuse A in December of that year. With that clue in hand, Montargès and colleagues set about hunting it.

"Honestly, I thought we did not have the sensitivity to detect Betelgeuse B as it was predicted," Montargès said. "Because it is more massive than predicted, we see it!"

Betelgeuse B had previously been theorized to be around the same mass as the sun, but these new observations reveal that this elusive star has instead around two to three times the mass of our star.

"The fact that we can still discover a nearby companion, more massive and brighter than the sun, around such a well-studied star is remarkable," Montargès added. "These are among the best moments in science: seeing something new, unexpected."

Capturing Betelegeuse B was only possible thanks to the VLT's SPHERE instrument, which features a coronagraph that blocks out the light of a planetary system's star. Combined with the advanced optics on the instrument, this allows scientists to measure the wavelength and polarity of light both coming directly from the star and being reflected off of any nearby planets. But that's not all SPHERE can do.

"It is remarkable to see how SPHERE and advanced post-processing techniques, originally developed to find exoplanets, also excel at detecting a companion around a massive, evolved star like Betelgeuse," team member Anthony Boccaletti, also an astronomer at the Observatoire de Paris, said.

This artist’s concept shows the red supergiant star Betelgeuse and an orbiting companion star.

This artist’s concept shows the red supergiant star Betelgeuse and an orbiting companion star. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, Elizabeth Wheatley (STScI); Science: Andrea Dupree (CfA))

There are still many questions to answer regarding Betelgeuse B. The team still needs to solidly confirm that what they have seen is actually a companion star, and they would also like to know how the presence of this star could shape the future of Betelgeuse A.

This red supergiant star nearing the end of its evolution gained notoriety a few years ago when its sudden and rapid brightening led to speculation it was about to suffer an explosive death.

"To be certain that the companion is really there, we still need to observe it in one year on the other side of the star, but there is very little space left for doubt," Montargès said. "The question is truly open whether this companion is going to have an impact on the evolution of the red supergiant."

The team's research was published on Tuesday (July 28) in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

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‘Crazy idea’ succeeds: Scientists monitor space junk with radio telescopes

Radio telescopes are designed to listen for signals from the stars and from distant galaxies, but scientists are also pointing out that these instruments can also track objects somewhat closer to home: junk in Earth's orbit.

Engineers have used the famed radio telescope at Jodrell Bank in the U.K. as part of an international plan to watch high-altitude space debris. Normally, old satellites and bits of spacecraft stuck up in geostationary orbit are too high up for our normal ways of watching space debris. However, said international project, called Long Baseline Multistatic Radar (LBMR), successfully used a radio telescope to get around this problem.

"That's the first time that's ever been done," Simon Garrington, associate director of Jodrell Bank, said in a video about the project.

A pressing problem

It's hardly a secret that junk is rapidly piling up in Earth's orbit — dead satellites, rocket remnants, rubble from satellite collisions or anti-satellite missile tests, and more. And as we keep filling Earth's orbit with thousands more satellites each year, we're also increasing the risk that one is struck by a debris fragment. We need to track this debris.

Most satellites exist in low Earth orbit (LEO) below altitudes of 1,250 miles (2000 kilometers), and indeed space debris is more concentrated at LEO. Still, there’s good reason to be just as concerned about debris in the much higher geostationary orbit (GEO), which falls 22,500 miles (36,000 kilometers) in altitude. Crucial communications and weather satellites lie in GEO, for instance, and space debris doesn't need to come in great quantities to pose a threat — just one unfortunate strike can cripple a satellite.

This leaves debris-hawks with a conundrum. They typically track space junk in LEO with radar, but most ground-based radar systems aren't sensitive enough to watch GEO's heights. Instead, they rely on optical telescopes to see objects in GEO. These telescopes are good for tracking larger objects (larger than about 4 inches, or 10 centimeters, across), but they can't resolve smaller objects as well as radar can. Yet these smaller objects can be just as deadly and destructive as their larger counterparts. If we want to see them with radar, we'll need especially sensitive receivers.

Fortunately, that equipment already exists, too — that's where radio telescopes can help.

A photo of a white large structure with lots of poles holding it up. The poles conglomerate into some large stands that look like

The Lovell Telescope (Image credit: By Mike Peel; Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, University of Manchester., CC BY-SA 4.0)

Engineers have tried debris-watching with radio telescopes as early as the 1990s, but LBMR, backed by NATO and the U.K. Space Agency, wanted to go further and watch debris in real time.

LBMR's engineers drew up a scheme to make this work. They would broadcast radio waves with a radar installation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory in the U.S. These radio waves would glance off debris and fall back into the dishes of U.K. radio telescopes such as the Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank. Back on the ground, the radio telescope's signal would be processed and analyzed in real time.

Aligning a radar transmitter with a radio telescope on the far side of an ocean, then processing its signals, is far easier said than done.

"This idea started about seven years ago. It sounded at that time like a crazy idea, because we had no synchronization. We had assets on one end of the ocean and other assets on the other end of the ocean," said Marco Martorella, an electronic engineer at the University of Birmingham and another member of LBMR, in a video. "But we were crazy enough to continue."

This required years of work, but the researchers have now successfully demonstrated that they can receive a signal with a single antenna. This has allowed them to track the distance to a piece of debris, and how quickly that distance is changing, in real time.

Next, the LBMR researchers hope to demonstrate that they can receive radar reflections of the same object with multiple radio telescopes at once. This, the researchers say, would allow debris-hawks to use the radio telescope technique to truly track debris in three dimensions.

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X-ray spacecraft finds supermassive black hole stirring up the ‘red potato’ galaxy: ‘There may be a cook in this cosmic kitchen’

Using the Chandra X-ray spacecraft, astronomers have seen a supermassive black hole jet churning and "cooking" gas surrounding a galaxy nicknamed the "red potato." And this potato is seen as it was when the universe was around 2 billion years old.

The galaxy in question is officially designated MQN01 J004131.9-493704 and is located about 11.7 billion light-years from Earth at the intersection of a vast cosmic web along which galaxies formed in the early universe. Originally discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the odd, blob-like appearance of the galaxy is why it has such a peculiar nickname.

The red potato sits in a cosmic "pot" of cold and dense gas. This is a little puzzling, as this should mean that stars are actively forming around it, but that isn't happening. New research offers an explanation: a supermassive black hole in the vicinity of the red potato is churning and heating the galaxy's pot of gas. This could be preventing the gas from cooling and collapsing to birth stellar bodies.

“Stars are not forming like we thought they would, so we went searching for the reason why," team leader Weichen Wang of the University of Milan-Bicocca in Italy said in a statement. "We found there may be a cook in this cosmic kitchen."

An unexpected chef

A supermassive black hole's interference with the red potato was first indicated by the fact that its surrounding gas is unexpectedly turbulent in comparison to similar gas clouds around similar galaxies.

Wang and colleagues set about hunting for the source of this turbulence with Chandra. That's when they found a black hole jet pointed toward the red potato, which they reasoned must be slamming into this ancient galaxy's gas envelope.

"If the black hole's jet is stirring up the gas around the red potato, it could greatly slow down how quickly the galaxy can acquire new, fresh material to form stars," team member Sebastiano Cantalupo of the University of Milan-Bicocca said in the statement. "With the energy from the stirring, the galaxy will starve and not be able to produce new stars at the rate expected for similar galaxies at the same cosmic epoch."

The same image of the red potato galaxy with a red and blue blob near one another, but this one is annotated. The red blob is the red potato and the blue blob represents the area around the supermassive black hole.

An annotated image of the red potato galaxy MQN01 J004131.9-493704. (Image credit: ESO/NRAO/NAOJ/ALMA; Image processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk & P. Edmonds)

The meddling supermassive black hole is located in a galaxy around 200,000 light-years from the red potato, and this galaxy is actually very actively forming new stars. Indeed, other galaxies in the vicinity of the Red Potato are also birthing new stars.

This discovery, as part of some of the first research to investigate the behavior of gas around non-star-forming galaxies, could be vital in improving our understanding of how neighboring galaxies interact and, occasionally, interfere with each other's evolution.

A rainbow-like image with a black circle in the center and lots of swirling orange and yellow gas around it.

An illustration of a supermassive black hole in the early cosmos. (Image credit: Robert Lea (created with Canva))

"The red potato is leaving crumbs of information that may help us track down the answers to some really big questions," team member Andrea Travascio, also of the University of Milan-Bicocca, said. "Quite an important job for a galactic spud like this."

The team's research was published on July 7 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

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A seed that flew around the moon grew into this tree in NYC

NEW YORK — Madison Square Park in midtown Manhattan is home to some 44 tree species. And on a Thursday afternoon blanketed in wildfire smoke, a small crowd gathered to see one in particular. The slender American sweet gum looked unassuming, especially compared to the enormous English elm neighboring it. But this tree had a secret: it had traveled 1.3 million miles before landing in New York.

The sapling was germinated from one of 1,000 seeds NASA sent aboard the uncrewed Artemis I mission, which saw a space capsule orbit the moon in 2022. Just a few years later, the same kind of capsule would take the famous Artemis II crewmembers on the same journey. Hundreds of these "moon trees" have been planted across the U.S. in the last two years as the space agency drums up excitement for future Artemis missions, which aim to return humans — and not just seeds — to the lunar surface by 2028.

Steph Lucas, director of horticulture for the Madison Square Park Conservancy, applied with NASA for a moon tree seedling in 2023. The request was finally granted in 2025. "We were so thrilled," Lucas told Space.com. The tree grew quietly for a year before the conservancy unveiled its presence with a "birthday party" extravaganza on Thursday (July 16).

Madison Square Park's moon tree is part of a legacy spanning back to NASA's original lunar program. In 1971, astronaut Stuart "Smoky" Roosa brought about 500 seeds aboard the Apollo 14 moon mission. These seeds later grew into saplings that NASA distributed to parks, arboretums and historic sites across the globe. A seed from one of these first-generation moon trees even attended the new tree's birthday party.

The event also featured a celestial-themed garden, poetry reading, a gallery of children's artwork, launch-able foam rockets and, of course, birthday cake — enough for about 100 people.

However, the party had fewer guests than expected. A thick plume of smoke from wildfires raging in Canada blew southward and tinted the sky above New York orange. The air quality plummeted, and many people chose to remain indoors for their health. Some of those who did turn up wore KN95 masks.

A young boy drawing with crayons also has temporary space tattoos on his arm.

There were many ways to celebrate the moon tree's birthday. (Image credit: Courtesy of Madison Square Park Conservancy)

Three cakes, the middle of which has a Happy Birthday moon tree sign.

The moon tree's birthday cake. (Image credit: Courtesy of Madison Square Park Conservancy)

In a strange way, the atmosphere was fitting. The specter of climate change hung heavy over the city, and it was very much on Lucas' mind as she was vying for the conservancy's moon tree selection. NASA offered five different species of moon tree: Douglas fir, Loblolly pine, Sequoia, London plane and American sweet gum. Lucas requested an American sweet gum over a more cold-hardy London plane tree, even though its current range falls slightly south of New York City. Sweet gums are well-adapted to wet, temperate conditions, and as the climate warms in the coming decades they will likely feel right at home in Manhattan. "We think that this will be a better selection as the future goes on," said Lucas.

Stuart Roosa himself was a former smokejumper for the US Forest Service, a job that involves dropping from a helicopter into the heart of an active wildfire to fight it. He agreed to bring along those first moon seeds as a love letter to future generations on Earth. That's the spirit the Madison Square Park Conservancy hopes to channel.

"Space inspires us, right? And plants can be inspiring too," Lucas said. After a year of growth, the park's moon tree is now firmly rooted and standing tall without supports. Gazing at it through the wildfire haze, Lucas mentioned that the young tree seems by all accounts to be thriving. Its progress, she said, brings her hope. "We can always work towards a better future."

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An off-the-shelf camera could help us find more black holes smashing together

Fixing a problem inside one of the world's most sophisticated scientific observatories might seem like the kind of challenge that demands a multimillion-dollar upgrade or revolutionary new technology.

But for scientists working on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), which listens for ripples in spacetime generated by cosmic collisions like merging black holes, the solution to a mild but persistent engineering challenge turns out to be as simple as an off-the-shelf camera.

By pairing commercially available thermal imaging cameras with computer models, a team led by Jonathan Richardson at the University of California, Riverside, has developed a technique that corrects tiny, heat-induced distortions in the observatory's mirrors — an elusive flaw that scientists say currently limits how far into deep space the facility can look.

"It doesn't require any new technology development, which is almost unheard of for solving a LIGO instrumentation problem," Richardson said in a statement.

Once incorporated into LIGO's upcoming upgrade, Richardson and his team estimate the fix would extend the observatory's reach by roughly 33 million light-years.

That gain might sound like a drop in the ocean against the unimaginably vast scale of the universe, but because space expands in three dimensions, pushing a detector's reach even slightly opens up an exponentially larger window of space. Being able to look further into the universe will allow astronomers to "hear" many more cosmic ripples, in turn increasing the potential for discovering the universe’s most violent collisions that lie beyond LIGO's reach today.

LIGO detects these cosmic ripples, known as gravitational waves, using twin L-shaped facilities in the U.S. — in the states of Washington and Louisiana. Inside each detector, a laser beam shoots down two 2.5-mile-long (4-kilometer-long) tunnels, bouncing off pristine mirrors at each end. When a gravitational wave passes through Earth, it subtly stretches one tunnel and squeezes the other. That microscopic shift alters the laser beams ever so slightly, producing a tiny flicker of light that alerts scientists to a distant cosmic event.

Two people earing white lab coats and other protective lab gear polish a white clear object within a gray cylinder. The view is from within the cylinder.

Researchers in Richardson's group testing a novel adaptive optics device designed to precisely reshape the surfaces of LIGO's main mirrors. (Image credit: LIGO Laboratory/Arnaud Pele)

Because these cosmic signals are inconceivably small, preserving every single photon is crucial. To accomplish this, LIGO relies on mirrors polished to reflect 99.9999%t of the laser light that strikes them, ranking them among the purest optical components ever built.

Yet even these near-perfect mirrors have had one unavoidable flaw. The mirrors still absorb a tiny fraction of that intense laser light. That energy turns into heat, warping the mirror's surface by just a few nanometers, enough to distort the laser beam and reduce the observatory's overall sensitivity.

Physicists already knew they could counteract these distortions by applying targeted heat to the back of the mirrors. The difficult part was measuring the distortions accurately enough such that the correcting heat could be applied with exact precision.

An aerial shot of a brown plain. There is a white building toward the bottom left and two extremely long arms shoot out from the building, forming a 90 degree angle.

An aerial view of LIGO Hanford Observatory in the state of Washington. (Image credit: Public domain/LIGO Hanford Observatory)

The new technique uses infrared thermal images and existing computer models to reconstruct a map of distortions across the mirror's surface.

"You can think of it like taking an infrared picture of a car engine," Richardson said in the statement. "An engineer can look at the temperature pattern on the outside and infer what's happening inside the engine. We're doing the same thing with LIGO's mirrors."

And the technique isn't just a fix for LIGO. It is also expected to become part of the foundational design for Cosmic Explorer, a proposed next-generation U.S. gravitational-wave observatory targeted for the mid-2030s.

With 25-mile-long (40-km-long) arms — 10 times larger than LIGO's — Cosmic Explorer is already designed to detect gravitational wave events far beyond the reach of today's observatories. This new technique will only supercharge its ultimate reach.

"The goal for the next generation of gravitational-wave detectors is to achieve about 10 times the sensitivity of today's instruments," Richardson said in the statement. "One of the key obstacles to achieving that is reducing the fundamental quantum mechanical noise that limits the precision of the measurements."

The technique is described in a paper published July 16 in Classical and Quantum Gravity.

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What lurks beneath the volcanoes of Jupiter’s moon Io? NASA’s Juno probe just took a peek

Scientists have measured temperatures beneath the surface of Jupiter's volcanic moon Io, offering the first-ever glimpse of the hidden heat driving the most volcanically active world in the solar system.

During close flybys of Io in late 2023 and early 2024, NASA's Juno spacecraft turned its Microwave Radiometer (MWR) instrument toward the moon, probing roughly six to 20 feet (two to six meters) beneath its surface. Originally designed to peer through Jupiter's thick clouds, the instrument instead revealed a powerful new way to study how heat moves through planetary crusts, according to a statement from the space agency.

"The surprising discovery that we could see below a rocky moon's surface has important implications for studying Earth's volcanoes," Scott Bolton, coauthor of the study and Juno's principal investigator, said in the statement. "Juno has taught us that if we look with an MWR-type instrument near a volcano on Earth, we might see a similar signature in the subsurface temperature gradient, providing new information on how terrestrial volcanoes work."

Until now, researchers had relied almost entirely on infrared observations, which detect only the temperature of Io's surface. By probing several feet underground, Juno has revealed how heat moves through the moon's crust for the first time.

The measurements showed temperatures rising by more than 40 degrees Fahrenheit (22 degrees Celsius) just a few feet below the surface — far more than sunlight alone could explain. Juno's subsurface heat map also revealed localized regions of elevated heat, with temperatures measuring between 18 and 36 degrees F (10 to 20 degrees C) warmer than the surrounding terrain, according to the statement.

Juno's observations uncovered another surprise, too. Despite being known for its towering mountains and active volcanoes, much of Io's surface appears remarkably smooth and composed of unusually low-density material. Researchers think the moon is blanketed by porous layers of volcanic ash, sulfur frost and other eruptive debris that continually resurface Io, burying older terrain beneath fresh deposits.

Scientists think the heat detected beneath Io's surface could be rising steadily from the moon's molten interior through a conductive crust or coming from pockets of cooling lava flows trapped just below the surface. Either way, the data provide the clearest picture yet of how Io transports heat from its interior.

Unlike Earth, where volcanism is driven largely by heat from radioactive decay, Io is continuously stretched and squeezed by Jupiter's immense gravity as it orbits the giant planet. This constant tidal flexing generates enormous amounts of internal heat, fueling hundreds of active volcanoes and making Io the most volcanically active object in the solar system. By improving scientists' understanding of how heat and magma move beneath a planet's surface before eruptions, the same microwave techniques used by Juno could one day help researchers better monitor Earth's volcanoes and improve eruption forecasting.

"Io provides a unique window into learning how tidal heating works throughout the cosmos, a fundamental process that provides energy and heat to worlds that are far from their parent star," Bolton said in the statement. "This process can not only create the most volcanic body in the solar system, in the case of Io, but also fuels the subsurface oceans on the moons of giant planets, such as Europa and Ganymede. Up until this point we could only observe the heat escaping at the surface or through eruptions. Now we can characterize how the heat is moving from the interior toward the surface."

Because Io is an extreme example of volcanic activity, it serves as a natural laboratory for studying how heat moves through planetary crusts. Those insights could help scientists better understand ancient volcanism on Mars, Venus, and Earth's moon, whose landscapes were shaped by massive eruptions billions of years ago.

The technique could also aid the search for life elsewhere. While Io itself is far too hostile to support life, microwave instruments can also probe beneath icy surfaces. Juno has already used the same instrument to study Jupiter's moons Europa and Ganymede, where scientists believe vast oceans lie hidden beneath thick shells of ice. Understanding how heat moves through those crusts is key to determining whether they could harbor environments suitable for life as we know it.

Their findings were published July 22 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.

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This Week In Space LIVE: The Viking Mars landings 50 years later

Hey, Space Fans! Every weekend here at Space.com, you may have noticed we highlight the latest episode of the podcast This Week In Space, a TWiT show co-hosted by yours truly and my friend and colleague Rod Pyle, a space historian and editor of the National Space Society magazine Ad Astra.

This Week In Space episodes usually drop each Saturday, but this week we're doing something a bit different. To mark the 50th anniversary of NASA's Viking landings (Viking 1 touched down on Mars on July 20, 1976), Rod and I will host a special live taping of the podcast to discuss all things Martian starting at 1:30 p.m. EDT (1730 GMT). It should last up to 90 minutes.

Joining us on the podcast will be:

  • Dr. Pascal Lee, a planetary scientist, geologist and artist with the SETI Institute, Mars Institute and NASA Ames Research Center.
  • Dr. Penny Boston, an astrobiologist and speleologist (the study of caves) with the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.

During our discussion, we'll touch on the personal and scientific impacts of NASA's Viking Mars landings and look at where Mars exploration may go in the modern age. We might even discuss the best places for the hunt for signs of life: the surface or inside Martian caves?

So if you're a Mars fan or a casual space aficionado, join us today at 1:30 p.m. EDT to get a detailed look at NASA's Viking Mars landings and their lasting impact on Martian exploration.

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Hubble telescope watches unique nova explosion fire cosmic ‘bullets’ through the Milky Way at 20 million mph

Using NASA's long-serving Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered that a stellar explosion in the Milky Way is blasting out cosmic bullets travelling at 20 million miles per hour.

The cosmic explosion in question is V445 Puppis, which erupted in 2000 and is the only known "helium nova" in our galaxy. Though astronomers have been studying V445 Puppis for two decades, much of the phenomena associated with it were shrouded in mystery due to a vast cloud of dusty debris that surrounded this nova.

When this debris finally cleared, a team of researchers was able to peer into V445 Puppis using Hubble, NASA's exoplanet-hunting spacecraft TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), and the Earth-based Very Large Telescope (VLT), along with an array of other instruments. This allowed them to discover not only the "bullets", clumps of potentially oxygen-rich gas it is firing, but also the true nature of this system. This revealed that V445 Puppis consists of a dead star hungrily feeding on a companion star that is, by itself, a rare find. Thus, this system offers scientists a rare chance to study one of the rarest types of binary systems and one of the rarest cosmic explosions.

"The origin of these 'bullets' is a mystery. We suspect that these originated post-outburst, but 'bullets' of this kind have not been observed in any other nova," team member John Mills, a researcher at the University of Warwick in the UK, said in a statement.

What is a helium nova?

Helium novas like V445 Puppis occur when a white dwarf dead star cannibalistically strips helium-rich but hydrogen-poor matter from a star that has already lost its outer layer of hydrogen, exposing inner layers of helium; forming a rare "helium star." By contrast, "ordinary" novas are explosions triggered by the buildup of stolen stellar matter rich in hydrogen, not helium.

As the material accumulates on the surface of the white dwarf (a type of stellar remnant left behind when stars around the mass of the sun die) it creates runaway pressures and temperatures that eventually trigger a thermonuclear explosion.

When V445 Puppis went nova back in late 2000, it launched vast, twin plumes of debris that resemble butterfly wings. Stretching out for more than a trillion miles, astronomers initially spotted this bipolar outflow in infrared. The nova also spawned a thick disc of dust that completely obscured the binary star system. That cloud persisted for over two decades, preventing astronomers who were investigating the expanding debris from determining what kind of stars the blast originated from.

Once the debris cleared, this team determined that the system contained a helium star, one of only a few thousand of these stripped stellar bodies to be discovered among the billions of stars that populate the Milky Way.

"The culprits behind this galactic eruption have been an enduring mystery over the past 25 years, which is why it is very exciting to confirm that this helium nova was the result of a helium star accreting onto a white dwarf," Mills said.

The findings also revealed cosmic "bullets" that are even more remarkable, as they have never been seen around any other novas. Intriguingly, the team also found that V445 Puppis may be about to go nova again, and this could lead to an entirely different type of cosmic explosion.

Is V445 Puppis about to blow its top again?

Mills found that the white dwarf in V445 Puppis has overcome its stellar indigestion and is once again feeding on its companion helium star.

This is the process that led to the initial helium nova, and could mean that another episode of this rare type of cosmic explosion is soon to occur.

That has implications for our understanding of another type of cosmic eruption, this time a type of supernova called a Type Ia supernova. These occur when white dwarfs overfeed on companions and are completely destroyed by the resultant explosion.

Scientists have long suspected that repeated helium nova eruptions could lead to final Type Ia supernovas.

An illustration of a white dwarf star feeding on a stellar companion prior to a type Ia supernova

An illustration of a white dwarf star feeding on a stellar companion prior to the eruption of a type Ia supernova (Image credit: Robert Lea (created with Canva))

A new Type Ia supernova would be exciting because these events are so regular in terms of their light emission that they can be used as so-called "standard candles" to measure cosmic distances and gauge the age of the universe.

This means that they can also be employed in the quest to understand how fast the universe's expansion is proceeding, and the influence of the mysterious force called dark energy on this process.

"I look forward to seeing how this result may help us uncover what powers other similar hydrogen-poor astronomical explosions, such as the famous Type Ia supernovas," Mills said.

The team's research was presented this week at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting in Birmingham, UK.

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Scientists may have finally solved the mystery of the sun’s missing silver

For several years now, astronomers who study the sun have faced a little mystery — our star seemed to hold too little silver. Whenever scientists examined the sun's outer layers, they've seen significantly less silver than they've expected to find.

Where, then, did the missing silver go?

As it turns out, this mystery may finally be solved. Newly published research suggests that the sun's missing silver may have been hiding in plain sight all along.

At first, the real mystery might seem to be why you'd seek silver in the sun at all. After all, 98.5% of the sun's mass is made from lightweight hydrogen and helium. Silver is just a tiny fraction of the remaining 1.5%, which also includes traces of other heavy elements like iron and copper.

These trace elements can illuminate the history of the cosmos. Silver is thought to form when dying stars violently explode in supernovas. When astronomers find silver in the sun and other stars, they can retrace the silver's origins and how stars have evolved over the eons.

"By studying the light of stars of different types and ages, we hope to understand where silver is formed in the universe, and how it has been distributed throughout the Milky Way over time," says Sema Caliskan, the lead author of the research and now a postdoc at the University of Liège in Belgium, in a statement.

Silver is particularly interesting because it's also found in utterly ancient meteorites called CI chondrites. These meteorites formed from the same primordial matter that created the sun, 4.6 billion years ago. As a result, when scientists break into CI chondrites that have fallen to Earth, they expect to find silver levels that match those they see in the sun.

A rainbow assortment of spectral lines. On the left, where it's dark, there are two vertical white lines.

(Image credit: Anish Amarsi/Uppsala University)

Astronomers can measure the latter from afar by looking at sunlight's spectral lines. As light streams out from the sun's heart, it crashes into the atoms of our star's outer layers, which absorb the light at certain wavelengths. Look at a spectrum of sunlight, and you'll see dark lines where light has been absorbed. Atoms of different elements absorb different wavelengths, so each element leaves a distinct fingerprint.

Scientists can pore over these spectral fingerprints to reconstruct what elements created them and in what quantities. Therein lies the mystery: The sun seemed to contain much less silver than CI chondrites would indicate. This missing silver is a source for confusion in the sun's history.

Caliskan and her colleagues wondered if astronomers were missing something. They could not visit the sun in person, but they could still find where the silver might be hidden by simulating the sun's atoms on a computer. If they could create a high-silver model that still spawned the low-silver spectral lines, that model could be a good guess for the silver's whereabouts.

Other scientists had tried this before to limited success, but their simulations had been relatively simple. As light strikes an atom, the light has all sorts of intricate effects on the atom's innards. These effects can alter how the atom absorbs the light and, therefore, change how astronomers see that light.

Past models hadn't accounted for many of these tricky "non-equilibrium effects", because simulating them is far easier said than done. They're messy and complex and they vary a great deal from atom to atom.

In fact, no known scientists had ever tried to simulate a silver atom with non-equilibrium effects before Caliskan and her fellow investigators took on the challenge. They tried with their best guesses and the power of the Tetralith supercomputer in Linköping, Sweden.

Indeed, these non-equilibrium effects seem to explain the silver mystery. Based on their model, Caliskan and colleagues calculated that the sun holds 55% more silver than astronomers have measured.

This isn't a perfect match for the CI chondrites, but it's close enough that investigators can rule out any extraordinary cause. Instead, the missing silver may have been right there, in the sun all along, simply occluded from astronomers' view by tricks of physics. Next, Caliskan and colleagues plan to use this method to simulate other types of stars.

They published their work in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics in July 2026.