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Curation teams process the sample return capsule from NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission in a cleanroom, Sunday, Sept. 24, 2023, at the Department of Defense's Utah Test and Training Range. The sample was collected from the asteroid Bennu in October 2020 by NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. The sample return capsule from NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission is seen shortly after touching down in the desert, Sunday, Sept.

An international team of astrophysicists has imaged a large number of exocomet belts around nearby stars, and the tiny pebbles within them. The crystal-clear images show light being emitted from these millimetre-sized pebbles within the belts that orbit 74 nearby stars of a wide variety of ages - from those that are just emerging to those in more mature systems like our own Solar System.

An international team of scientists has produced the clearest three-dimensional view yet of the Ring Nebula - one of the night sky's most iconic celestial objects. The Ring Nebula is perhaps one of the most photographed objects in the night sky, dating back to its first image in 1886, but its intrinsic structure has been debated for as long as it has been observed.

The size and spin of black holes can reveal important information about how and where they formed, according to new research. The study, led by scientists at Cardiff University, tests the idea that many of the black holes observed by astronomers have merged multiple times within densely populated environments containing millions of stars.

The missing ingredient for cooking up stars has been spotted for the first time by an international team led by astronomers at Imperial College. Much like a pressure cooker has a weight on top of its lid to keep the pressure in and get your festive dessert dense, moist and ready to eat, merging galaxies may need magnetic fields to create the ideal conditions for star formation.

A team of astronomers has found that Venus has never been habitable, despite decades of speculation that our closest planetary neighbour was once much more like Earth than it is today. The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, studied the chemical composition of the Venusian atmosphere and inferred that its interior is too dry today for there ever to have been enough water for oceans to exist at its surface.

What can exploding stars teach us about how blood flows through an artery' Or swimming bacteria about how the ocean's layers mix' A collaboration of researchers, including from the University of Cambridge, has reached a milestone toward training artificial intelligence models to find and use transferable knowledge between fields to drive scientific discovery.

Scientists from NASA and our Department of Physics have used supercomputer simulations to reveal that Mars' moons may have been formed from destroyed asteroid fragments. The researchers found that an asteroid passing near Mars could have been pulled apart by the planet's gravity, with the resulting rock fragments strewn into a range of orbits.

Uranus's upper atmosphere has been cooling for decades - and now scientists have shown why. Observations from Earth have shown Uranus' upper atmosphere has been cooling for decades, with no clear explanation. Now, a team led by Imperial College London scientists has determined that unpredictable long-term changes in the solar wind - the stream of particles and energy coming from the Sun - are behind the drop.

An international team that includes the University of Bath has discovered three ultra-massive galaxies in the early Universe forming at unexpected speeds. An international team that was led by the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and includes Professor Stijn Wuyts from the University of Bath has identified three ultra-massive galaxies - each nearly as massive as the Milky Way - that had already assembled within the first billion years after the Big Bang.

Mysteries about Uranus that have baffled scientists for decades may have been the result of an unusually powerful solar storm that happened to occur as a spacecraft visited the planet, a new study involving UCL researchers has found. NASA's Voyager 2, which flew by Uranus in 1986, provided scientists' first, and so far only, close glimpse of the planet, shaping their understanding of it in the decades since.

The first human tissue samples from Oxford's Space Innovation Lab (SIL) have been launched and are on their way to the International Space Station, where they will be used to study the effects of space microgravity on the human ageing process. Researchers from the SIL flew to the Kennedy Space Centre (Florida, USA) to integrate the samples into the payload in preparation for the launch, which took place early in the early hours of Tuesday 5th November (UK time).

Samples collected from the surface of the Moon by the crew of Apollo 16 more than 50 years ago have helped scientists reconstruct billions of years of lunar history. The research team's findings, published in the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science, are based on analysis of a distinct set of lunar breccias that have never been scrutinised in detail before.

Scientists believe they could have pinpointed the age of the largest and oldest impact basin on the Moon to over 4.32 billion years ago. The Moon, like the Earth, has been bombarded by asteroids and comets since its formation, leaving behind craters and basins. However, the exact timing and intensity of most of these events, notably the oldest and largest basin on the Moon, have remained unclear to scientists-until now.

Researchers have used the chemical fingerprints of zinc contained in meteorites to determine the origin of volatile elements on Earth. The results suggest that without 'unmelted' asteroids, there may not have been enough of these compounds on Earth for life to emerge. Volatiles are elements or compounds that change into vapour at relatively low temperatures.

Astronomers have used the NASA/ESA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to observe the 'inside-out' growth of a galaxy in the early universe, only 700 million years after the Big Bang. This galaxy is one hundred times smaller than the Milky Way, but is surprisingly mature for so early in the universe. Like a large city, this galaxy has a dense collection of stars at its core but becomes less dense in the galactic 'suburbs'.

A UK team of researchers including UCL's Professor Lucie Green are working on the launch of a spacecraft mission which will allow us to view the Sun's atmosphere in more detail than ever before. The proposed MESOM mission will enable researchers to study the conditions that create solar storms, leading to improvements in forecasts of space weather on Earth.

The precise distances from Earth of more than 1.8 million galaxies have been revealed in a sky survey involving UCL researchers. The Physics of the Accelerating Universe Survey (PAUS), an international collaboration across 14 institutions, covered a sky area of 50 square degrees, similar to approximately 250 full moons.

A Durham physicist is part of an international research team that has discovered the biggest pair of black hole jets ever seen in space, spanning 23 million light-years in total length. The jets' size is equivalent to lining up 140 Milky Way galaxies back-to-back. The research was led by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and involved scientists at multiple universities, including Dr Roland Timmerman of our Department of Physics.

The number of patients per GP has soared by 9%, rising to a massive 32% when taking chronic conditions into account, a new study in England by University of Manchester researchers has found. The increase - identified from data between 2015 and 2022 - occurred alongside an overall drop in GP supply of 2.7% over the same period, due to falling contractual hours.