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Unusual Dust-Infused Baroclinic Storms Form Over Europe

Lead Image: Dusty Storm Clouds Over Europe March 2022 Annotated Long-lasting, icy cirrus clouds filled with Saharan dust covered many parts of the continent in March. In March 2022, several large storms carried clouds of Saharan dust to Europe. One of them also brought long-lasting, high-altitude cirrus clouds infused with dust, which led to extensive cloud cover—from Iberia to the Arctic—for more than a week. It was an unusual type of storm that scientists have only recently come to understand. Called a dust-infused baroclinic storm (DIBS), its hallmarks are icy clouds permeated with dust. In mid-March, an atmospheric river of…

Hubble Spots Farthest Star Ever Seen Thanks to Lucky Cosmic Alignment – “We Almost Didn’t Believe It”

Lead Image: The Sunrise Arc Galaxy With Lensed Star Earendel Credit: Science: NASA, ESA, Brian Welch (JHU), Dan Coe (STScI), Image Processing: NASA, ESA, Alyssa Pagan (STScI) A lucky cosmic alignment has revealed a single source of light in the first billion years after the big bang, setting up a major confirmation for the James Webb Space Telescope in its rookie year. Even NASA’s powerful Hubble Space Telescope can benefit from some assistance, as evidenced in its latest discovery: a record-breaking star so distant that a combination of the telescope’s sophisticated instrumentation and nature’s natural magnifying glass was needed to…

Sealed Apollo 17 Lunar Sample Opened for the First Time – “Incredibly Precious” Scientific Gift

Lead Image: Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan preparing to collect samples 73001 and 73002 on the Moon in 1972. Gene Cernan collected the sample from a landslip deposit that cascaded down into the Taurus-Littrow Valley. The Apollo 17 astronaut hammered a 70 cm long cylindrical tube into the surface to extract a core sample of the lunar soil. Credit: NASA Like a time capsule that was sealed for posterity, one of the last unopened Apollo-era lunar samples collected during Apollo 17 has been opened under the careful direction of lunar sample processors and curators in the Astromaterials Research and Exploration…

Roman Space Telescope to search for other Earths by surveying space dust

With the James Webb Space Telescope continuing its commissioning phase, NASA is already looking ahead to its next major space observatory, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Currently scheduled to launch in 2027, Roman will observe the universe to answer crucial questions needed for the complete understanding of our universe, especially in the areas of dark energy, exoplanets, and infrared astrophysics. According to a new study published by a team of researchers from the University of Arizona, Roman will be able to use one of its onboard instruments to measure a specific kind of space dust littered around the habitable…

MIT Researchers Create a Tool for Predicting the Future

Researchers design a user-friendly interface that helps nonexperts make forecasts using data collected over time. Whether someone is trying to predict tomorrow’s weather, forecast future stock prices, identify missed opportunities for sales in retail, or estimate a patient’s risk of developing a disease, they will likely need to interpret time-series data, which are a collection of observations recorded over time. Making predictions using time-series data typically requires several data-processing steps and the use of complex machine-learning algorithms, which have such a steep learning curve they aren’t readily accessible to nonexperts. To make these powerful tools more user-friendly, MIT researchers developed…