NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has taken its first visible light images of the surface of Venus from space.

Smothered in thick clouds, Venus’ surface is usually shrouded from sight. But in two recent flybys of the planet, Parker used its Wide-Field Imager, or WISPR, to image the entire nightside in wavelengths of the visible spectrum—the type of light that the human eye can see—and extending into the near-infrared.

The images, combined into a video, reveal a faint glow from the surface that shows distinctive features like continental regions, plains, and plateaus. A luminescent halo of oxygen in the atmosphere can also be seen surrounding the planet.

And it’s the only one of its kind we’ve seen.

An international group of astronomers discovered a previously unknown mechanism behind the massive aurorae on the poles of Saturn, a press statement reveals.

The researchers found that, unlike any other planet observed to date, Saturn generates aurorae by swirling winds within its own atmosphere, and not only from the magnetosphere surrounding the planet — as is the case on Earth.

The new discovery shows that Saturn has a truly unique aurora, and it is the only one known to truly live up to the name Aurora Borealis\.

The NASA TESS mission hit a milestone of 5,000 exoplanet candidates or TOIs (TESS Object of Interest). The TESS catalog has been growing steadily since the start of the mission in 2018, and the batch of TOIs boosting the catalog to over 5,000 comes primarily from the Faint Star Search led by MIT postdoc Michelle Kunimoto. Now in its extended mission, TESS is observing the Northern Hemisphere and ecliptic plane, including regions of the sky previously observed by the Kepler and K2 missions, so we can expect more discoveries until 2025.

To discuss this achievement, SETI Institute Senior Astronomer Franck Marchis is joined by Dr. Kunimoto, TESS postdoctoral associate at MIT Kavli Institute. Dr. Kunimoto focuses her work on detecting transiting exoplanets and the statistical determination of exoplanet demographics. She will tell us how astronomers worldwide will study each of these TOIs to confirm whether they are bonafide planets and what we can expect from this complicated task.

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Scientific Reports — Mercury Isotopes as Proxies to Identify Sources and Environmental Impacts of Mercury in Sphalerites. Sci. Rep. 6, 18686; doi: 10.1038/srep18686 (2016).

Thanks to NASA receiving a gift of components from a former spy program, the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope will observe more sky than ever before.

Spacefaring nations have been dumping their junk in the area around the Pacific Ocean’s Point Nemo, the most remote place on Earth, since the 1970s.