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Women who were vaccinated against covid-19 in the luteal phase of their menstrual cycle reported having a breakthrough infection sooner than those vaccinated during their follicular phase

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What did space have in store for Europe this month? This June, ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano was named pilot of NASA's Artemis III mission, Ariane 6 set a new European launch record, Proba-3 returned to operations, ESA satellites detected early signs of El Niño, Euclid unveiled its most detailed view yet of the Milky Way's galactic centre, and Sophie Adenot reached the halfway point of her εpsilon mission aboard the International Space Station.

Join us for another month of European space achievements.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is continuing to have a disruptive impact on ever more parts of humanity. But what does it mean in the long run? A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv from Austrian researcher Sergey Ivliev, extrapolates what the wide scale adoption of AI means for the future of humanity in space - and in particular what it means for the ultimate question of whether we’re truly alone in the galaxy or not.

Astronomers have underestimated just how bright the low-frequency radio sky is, new measurements show.

The post Radio Astronomers Measure a Brighter Sky Than They Expected appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

Image: The map is an interferogram derived from the comparison of Sentinel-1 data on two dates: on the 18 June before the earthquakes and on 25 June a day after.

Tiny 3D-printed diving suits allow cockroaches to walk underwater for up to 3 hours with no ill effects, which could enable a cyborg insect swarm to explore disaster zones and perhaps even Mars

Tiny 3D-printed diving suits allow cockroaches to walk underwater for up to 3 hours with no ill effects, which could enable a cyborg insect swarm to explore disaster zones and perhaps even Mars

When a star strays too close to a supermassive black hole, it is torn apart in a brief, brilliant flare, and astronomers long assumed that was the end of the story. It isn't. Using the Very Large Array to follow dozens of these stellar killings, a team has discovered that many black holes "burp" months or even years later, belching out streams of radio light as they fling part of their meal back into space. These delayed flares let astronomers watch a black hole's appetite change in real time, and reveal that even our Galaxy's quietest looking giants are messier, and far more active, than anyone realised.

The centre of the Milky Way is one of the most violent places in the Galaxy, a churning storm of gas moving faster than sound, and about the last spot you would expect a star to be born. Yet astronomers mapping that chaos with the ALMA telescope have stumbled on a hidden pocket of calm, where the gas slows, settles and quietly begins gathering itself into the seeds of new stars. The find suggests stars may take their first steps the same way everywhere, even here, and that our own Sun was likely born from just such an island of stillness, billions of years ago.

Astronomers have found two of the lightest worlds ever discovered, a pair of giant planets so wispy that, gram for gram, they are less dense than candy floss. Each is roughly the size of Jupiter yet holds almost nothing inside and the two circle the same distant star as siblings, locked in a gravitational dance that sees them tug one another off schedule as they orbit. It was observations from the depths of the Antarctic winter, that let astronomers weigh them and uncover just how astonishingly insubstantial they are. Now they want to know just how a planet ends up barely heavier than air at all.

Star formation is a major driver in galaxy evolution, right up there with the collisions and mergers that shape all galaxies. Researchers led by Ohio State University graduate student Debosmita Pathak, studied 18,000 star-forming regions in nearby spiral galaxies to get a better handle on the influence of starbirth.

Jupiter’s moon, Europa, has become high-value real estate for astrobiologists and the search for life beyond Earth. This is because the small moon, which is slightly smaller than Earth’s Moon, boasts a massive subsurface ocean of liquid water that scientists estimate contains about double the amount of water of all Earth’s oceans combined. As seen on Earth, water equals life, so scientists are eager to continue to explore Europa in any way possible to determine if it could harbor life as we know it, or even as we don’t know it.

This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image features a galaxy cluster, called CL0016+1609 or MACS J0018.5+1626, that is very bright at X-ray wavelengths and is one of the most extensively studied clusters at X-ray and radio wavelengths. The X-ray observations of this cluster revealed that it is two clusters merging along our line of sight.

Researchers from the Los Alamos National Laboratory have confirmed that two long-duration gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) originated from the collapse of neutron stars into black holes.

Is this what will become of our Sun? Quite possibly.

A field guide to the space rocks you might see streaking across the night sky

The event horizon of a black hole should be impossible to study. It’s the point of no return, the boundary where gravity grows so strong that not even light can escape, so by definition nothing can carry word of it back to us. Yet a team of scientists have found a way to reach it and found a hidden signal, a faint trace, never read before, carrying information from the very edge of the horizon in the instant before it formed. From it they measured the new black hole's spin and surface gravity, and opened a fresh way to test whether Einstein's theory survives in the most extreme gravity there is.

Hot Jupiter exoplanets have completely changed how we look at the universe. This is because before the first exoplanet orbiting a Sun-like star was discovered in 1995, 51 Pegasi b, astronomers theorized every solar system looks just like ours: rocky planets orbiting close to the Sun and gas giants orbiting farther away. In contrast, 51 Pegasi b, whose mass is half of Jupiter and radius is about one-quarter larger, was found to orbit its star in just over 4 days.