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Category: space – Page 3

Street green space can help cool cities, but it will not be enough on its own

A new IIASA-led study finds that expanding street green space can reduce urban heat stress in cities worldwide, but even ambitious greening efforts are unlikely to offset a significant share of the additional heat expected under climate change. Instead, the research shows that street greenery should be part of a broader portfolio of urban adaptation measures.

Cities are on the front line of climate change, with rising temperatures and heat stress posing growing risks to health, productivity, and livability. Street green space, such as trees and vegetation along streets, is often promoted as a practical nature-based solution because it can provide shade, cooling, and other positive benefits, for example, improving the mental health of citizens. Yet, evidence on how much cooling street greenery can deliver, to which extent the amount of vegetation can be increased, and how much cooling can be expected in future climates has remained limited, particularly when taking a global view across very different urban forms and climate zones.

In the new study published in Environmental Research Letters, a team of researchers from IIASA and VITO Belgium combined high-resolution street greenery data with 100-meter urban microclimate model outputs for 133 cities worldwide, providing a neighborhood-scale assessment with global coverage. Rather than relying on satellite-based surface temperature alone, the team assessed how street green space relates to air temperature and wet-bulb globe temperature —a measure that captures heat stress more appropriately than temperature alone because it accounts for humidity, wind, and radiation.

Parabolic flight test shows lasers can propel graphene aerogels in microgravity

Lasers could one day steer solar sails and adjust a satellite’s position in outer space, thanks to graphene. An experiment on a gravity rollercoaster ride showed how this innovative material has the potential to revolutionize propulsion beyond Earth.

An international research team boarded ESA’s 86th parabolic flight campaign in May 2025 with ultralight graphene aerogels, then hit them with light during zero gravity phases to observe their reaction under space-like conditions.

The effect of the laser during the microgravity phases was startling: The graphene samples shot forward instantly.

Physicists trace the sun’s magnetic engine, 200,000 kilometers below its surface

Every eleven years, the sun’s magnetic field flips. Sunspots—dark, cooler regions on the sun’s surface that mark intense magnetic activity and often trigger solar eruptions—appear at mid-latitudes and migrate toward the star’s equator in a butterfly-shape pattern before fading as the cycle resets. While this spectacle on the star’s surface has long been visible to astronomers, where this powerful cycle begins inside the star has remained hidden until now.

Researchers at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) have analyzed nearly three decades of solar oscillation data to trace the sun’s interior dynamics, and have now pointed to the likely location of the star’s magnetic engine deep beneath its surface: roughly 200,000 kilometers down, about the length of stacking 16 Earths end to end.

The findings, published in Scientific Reports, provide one of the clearest observational windows yet into the sun’s magnetic engine—the solar dynamo—shedding light on hidden forces shaping space weather patterns linked to the solar cycle, not only on Earth’s nearest star, but potentially on other stars across the galaxy.

Early Data from NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory Reveals Over 11,000 New Asteroids

Scientists at NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory, jointly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, have submitted an unprecedented set of asteroid detections to the IAU Minor Planet Center, including hundreds of distant worlds beyond Neptune and 33 previously unknown near-Earth asteroids.

Using preliminary data from NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory, scientists have discovered over 11,000 new asteroids [1]. The data were confirmed by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center (MPC), making this the largest single batch of asteroid discoveries submitted in the past year. The discoveries were made using data from Rubin’s early optimization surveys and offer a powerful preview of the observatory’s transformative impact on Solar System science.

Rubin Observatory is a joint program of NSF NOIRLab and DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, who cooperatively operate Rubin. NOIRLab is managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA).

A galaxy next door is transforming, and astronomers can see it happening

The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) is one of the Milky Way’s closest galactic neighbors—a small, gas-rich galaxy visible to the naked eye from the southern hemisphere, and bound to our galaxy by gravity, alongside its companion, the Large Magellanic Cloud (1¹LMC). All three galaxies have been interacting for hundreds of millions of years.

The SMC is also one of the most studied galaxies in the sky. Astronomers have catalogued its stars, mapped its gas and tracked its motion for more than half a century. Yet a basic question about it has remained. The galaxy’s stars do not orbit around its center the way stars in most galaxies do, and it has been challenging to explain why.

Collision reveals a galaxy in flux In a study published in The Astrophysical Journal, University of Arizona astronomers have traced the lack of rotation in stars to a direct collision between the SMC and its larger companion, the LMC. The findings also raise questions about how scientists use the SMC as a reference point for understanding galaxies across the history of the universe.

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