Europe’s Scorching Summer - NASA Science (.gov)

"Planets are temperamental, their atmospheres complex and chaotic."

After being born of mostly just hydrogen and helium, a scant 14-ish billion years later the Universe is full of weird planets of wildly varying makes, shapes, and sizes. Well, maybe not shapes, because they're all pretty rotund – it's in the definition of planet. Yet some are truly alien, including oddballs as dense as iron and teeny-tiny 'next door neighbors' that make our modest Venus seem like a giant. Upping the alien ante, astronomers have just announced a suspected exoplanet like no other entity, either in astronomy or in legend: a "phoenix planet" that arose not from its own ashes, but from those of its burned-out mother star. Artist's illustration of the second-generation planet that has formed around white dwarf HS 0209+0832. (Dr Snehalata Sahu/University of Warwick)After nearly three decades of uncertainty, a team led by researchers from the University of Warwick has finally characterized what may be the first second-generation planet ever detected around a white dwarf, one named HS 0209+0832 and located only 270 light-years away. White dwarfs are the cooling cores of formerly Sun-like stars that have exhausted their nuclear fuel.

The spacecraft delivered materials and equipment for new research studies to the station.

Mud from a fjord shows an Atlantic air pattern brought wetter, colder spells to southern Greenland, a clue to how its ice may fare. Greenland’s ice is shrinking as the planet warms. But in the island’s southwest, rainfall and snowfall have been influenced by the same North Atlantic air-pressure pattern for at least 5,000 years. When that pattern tipped one way, the region turned wetter and colder. The record comes from mud on the floor of a Greenland fjord, and it suggests snowfall, not only temperature, shaped how the area’s ice grew and shrank. It doesn’t yet show how glaciers there will respond to the warming ahead. Johan Faust, a researcher at MARUM, the Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen in Germany, led the work with colleagues in Germany, Norway, Denmark and Canada. A seesaw in the airThe pattern is called the North Atlantic Oscillation. It’s the difference in air pressure between a low that sits near Iceland and a high near the Azores, and it’s strongest in winter. When that difference is large, the pattern is in its positive phase. Northwestern Europe and southwestern Greenland both get more rain and snow.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher Isaiah Santistevan led the development of three-dimensional simulations exploring how a nuclear device could deflect or disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth. Credit: Blaise Douros/LLNL Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers are developing three-dimensional simulations to examine how a nuclear device could be used to deflect or potentially disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth.

The Futura Team represents the pulse of Futura’s editorial department, bringing together a collective expertise dedicated to the dissemination of scientific knowledge. Rather than the work of a single author, every article published under this signature is the result of a rigorous collaborative process involving journalists, editors, and fact-checkers. Specializing in news analysis via desk research and international wire services, the team focuses on transforming raw information into accessible, verified content. This curation and synthesis process ensures constant monitoring of technological innovations and major scientific breakthroughs. By cross-referencing sources and conducting multiple rounds of peer review, the Futura Team guarantees scientific accuracy and pedagogical clarity. This collective signature serves as a hallmark of trust, providing reactive, cross-disciplinary information at the forefront of current events Normally, when an asteroid swings by Earth, the burning question is simple: “Are we at risk?” Should we prepare for a massive space rock to pancake our planet? Not this time.