Astronomers have announced the discovery of 128 new moons orbiting Saturn, raising questions about why the planet has such a huge number of satellites. Investigating this phenomenon could provide us with crucial knowledge about the evolution of our Solar System. The discovery is 'fascinating', says Samantha Lawler, an astronomer at the University of Regina in Canada, who also contributed observations that led to the finding but did not contribute to the forthcoming paper about them. 'It just shows how much is out there.' The moons, which were officially recognized this week by the International Astronomical Union, will be described in a paper led by astronomer Edward Ashton at the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taipei, Taiwan. The study will be published in the Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society. Unlike our own Moon, which is 3,475 kilometres wide, these small rocks are just a few kilometres across in size. They swing around Saturn in chaotic, distant orbits, often moving in reverse relative to the planet's major moons, such as Titan and Rhea....

New research from a team at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics suggests that the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy neighboring the Milky Way, hosts a gravitational structure hundreds of thousands of times the mass of the sun: a potential supermassive black hole. The most widely accepted theory of galactic evolution holds that supermassive black holes are found only in the largest galaxies, such as the Milky Way. Until now, there was no reason to imagine that a small cluster like the Large Magellanic Cloud could host one. When x-ray telescopes or observatories have been trained on smaller clusters like the Large Magellanic Cloud, they have found no signatures associated with black hole activity. But then came the hypervelocity stars. For nearly 20 years, astronomers have spotted fast-traveling stars with enough acceleration to be ejected from their own galaxies. While a traditional star moves at about 100 kilometers per second, a hypervelocity star travels up to 10 times faster. Experts think such stars appear by being 'catapulted outward' by a supermassive gravitational structure under the Hills mechanism'which is where a binary star system interacts with a black hole, with one star captured by the black hole and the other flung away from it....

David McGee, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at MIT, was recently appointed head of the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), effective Jan. 15. He assumes the role from Professor Robert van der Hilst, the Schlumberger Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences, who led the department for 13 years. McGee specializes in applying isotope geochemistry and geochronology to reconstruct Earth's climate history, helping to ground-truth our understanding of how the climate system responds during periods of rapid change. He has also been instrumental in the growth of the department's community and culture, having served as EAPS associate department head since 2020. 'David is an amazing researcher who brings crucial, data-based insights to aid our response to climate change,' says dean of the School of Science and the Curtis (1963) and Kathleen Marble Professor of Astrophysics Nergis Mavalvala. 'He is also a committed and caring educator, providing extraordinary investment in his students' learning experiences, and through his direction of Terrascope, one of our unique first-year learning communities focused on generating solutions to sustainability challenges.'...

According to the Kenya Space Agency, the object weighed 1,100 pounds and had a diameter of more than 8 feet when measured after it landed on December 30. A couple of days later, the space agency confidently reported that the object was a piece of space debris, saying it was a ring that separated from a rocket. "Such objects are usually designed to burn up as they reenter the Earth's atmosphere or to fall over unoccupied areas, such as the oceans," the space agency told The New York Times. Since those initial reports were published in Western media, a small band of dedicated space trackers have been using open source data to try to identify precisely which space object fell into Kenya. So far, they have not been able to identify the rocket launch to which the large ring can be attributed. "It was suggested that the ring is space debris, but the evidence is marginal," wrote Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist working at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. McDowell is highly regarded for his analysis of space objects. 'The most likely space-related possibility is the reentry of the SYLDA adapter from the Ariane V184 flight, object 33155. Nevertheless, I am not fully convinced that the ring is space debris at all,' he wrote....