This week Discover magazine looks at evidence — both old and new — for a ninth planet in our solar system: "Orbits of the most distant small bodies — comets or asteroids — seem to be clustered on one half or one side of the solar system," says Amir Siraj [an astrophysicist with Princeton University]. "That's very weird and something that can't be explained by our current understanding of the solar system." A 2014 study in Nature first noted these orbits. A 2021 study in The Astronomical Journal examined the clustering in the orbit and concluded that "Planet Nine" was likely closer and brighter than expected.

Astrophysicists don't agree whether the clustering in the orbit is a real effect. Some have argued it is biased because the view that scientists currently have is limited, Siraj says. "This debate for the last decade has a lot of scientists confused, including myself. I decided to look at the problem from scratch," he says.

In a 2024 paper, Siraj and his co-authors ran simulations of the solar system, including an extra planet beyond Neptune. "We did it 300 times, about 2.5 times more than what was done previously," Siraj says. "In each simulation, you try different parameters for the extra planet. A different mass, a different tilt, a different shape of the orbit. You run these for millions of years, and then you compare the distribution to what we see in our solar system...." They found that the perimeters for this possible planet were different than what has been previously discussed in the scientific literature, and they supported the possibility of an unseen planet beyond Neptune.

Scientists hope a new telescope will have the potential to see deeper into the solar system. In 2025, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory on Cerro Pachón — a mountain in Chile, is expected to go online. The observatory boasts that in the time it takes a person to open up their phone and pose for a selfie, their new telescope will be able to snap an image of 100,000 galaxies, many of which have never been seen by scientists. The telescope will have the largest digital camera ever built, the LSST. Siraj says he expects it will take "the deepest, all-sky survey that humanity has ever conducted." So, what might the Rubin Observatory find past Neptune? Based on the current literature, Siraj sees a few possibilities. One is that the Rubin Observatory, with its increased capabilities, might be able to see a planet beyond Neptune... "Next year is going to be an enormous year for solar system science," he says.
NASA points out that the Hawaii-based Keck and Subaru telescopes are also searching for Planet X, while "a NASA-funded citizen science project called Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, encourages the public to help search using images captured by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission.

And starting next year the Rubin observatory will also "search for more Kuiper Belt objects. If the orbits of these objects are systematically aligned with each other, it may give more evidence for the existence of Planet X (Planet Nine), or at least help astronomers know where to search for it.

"Another possibility is that Planet X (Planet Nine) does not exist at all. Some researchers suggest the unusual orbit of those Kuiper Belt objects can be explained by their random distribution."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Tablizer for sharing the news.

Tuesday at California's Vandenberg Space Force base, the U.S. launched a Minuteman III missile, "in an important test of the weapon's ability to strike its targets with multiple warheads," according to Air and Space Forces magazine: The Minuteman III missiles that form a critical leg of the U.S. nuclear triad each carry one nuclear-armed reentry vehicle. But the missile that was tested carried three test warheads... The intercontinental ballastic missile (ICBM) test was controlled by an airborne command post in a test of the U.S. ability to launch its nuclear deterrent from a survivable platform.... Gen. Thomas A. Bussiere, the commander of Air Force Global Strike Command, said in a release: "An airborne launch validates the survivability of our ICBMs, which serve as the strategic backstop of our nation's defense and defense of allies and partners...."

The three test reentry vehicles — one high-fidelity Joint Test Assembly, which carries non-nuclear explosives, and two telemetry Joint Test Assembly objects — struck the Reagan Test Site near the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands roughly 30 minutes later after launch, a flight of about 4,200 miles. "They make up essentially a mock warhead," Col. Dustin Harmon, the commander of the 377th Test and Evaluation Group, the nation's operational ICBM test unit, said in an interview with Air & Space Forces Magazine. "There's two different types. One is telemetered, so it's got a radio transmitter in it, it's got antennas, gyroscopes, accelerometers — all the things that can sense motion and movement. And we fly those or we can put one in there that's called a high-fidelity. That is assembled much like an actual weapon would be, except we use surrogate materials, and so we want it to fly similarly to an actual weapon. ... It has the explosives in it that a normal warhead would to drive a detonation, but there's nothing to drive...."

The U.S. government formally notified Russia in advance of the launch in accordance with a 1988 bilateral agreement. More than 145 countries were also provided with advance notice of the launch under the Hague Code of Conduct — an international understanding on launch notifications. The U.S. also provided advance notice to China, a DOD spokesperson told Air & Space Forces Magazine. China notified the U.S. of an ICBM launch over the Pacific Ocean in September. There is no formal agreement between Washington and Beijing that requires such notifications, but each side provided them to avoid miscalculations.
Test launches happen three times a year, according to the article, yielding "several gigabytes of data" about reentry vehicles, subsystems, and payloads. "There are 400 Minuteman III missiles currently in service across Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Wyoming."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike for sharing the article.

After missing a chance to capitalize on the AI boom, "Samsung's profit has plunged," reports CNBC, and "around $126 billion has been wiped off its market value, according to data from S&P Capital IQ."

It's gotten so bad that "an executive issued a rare public apology about the company's recent financial performance." [A]s AI applications such as OpenAI's ChatGPT rose in popularity, the underlying infrastructure required to train the huge models they rely on became a bigger focus. Nvidia has emerged as the top player in this space with its graphics processing units (GPUs) that have become the gold standard used by tech giants for AI training. A crucial part of that semiconductor architecture is high-bandwidth memory, or HBM. This next generation of memory involves stacking multiple dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips, but it had a small market before the AI boom. That's where Samsung got caught out and failed to invest...

SK Hynix saw this opportunity. The company aggressively launched HBM chips which were approved for use in Nvidia architecture and, in the process, the South Korean firm established a close relationship with the U.S. giant. Nvidia's CEO even asked the company to speed up supply of its next generation chip, underscoring the importance of HBM to its products. SK Hynix posted record quarterly operating profit in the September quarter...

Analysts said that Samsung is lagging behind competitors for a number of reasons, including underinvestment in HBM and the fact that it is not a first-mover. "It is fair to say that Samsung has not been able to close the gap with SK Hynix on the HBM development roadmap," said Kazunori Ito [director of equity research at Morningstar]. Samsung's ability to make a comeback in the short term appears to be closely linked to Nvidia. A company must pass a strict qualification process before Nvidia approves it as a HBM supplier — and Samsung has not yet completed this verification. But a green light from Nvidia could open the door for Samsung to return to growth and compete more effectively with SK Hynix, according to analysts.

The James Webb Space Telescope has made groundbreaking discoveries, detecting the most distant galaxy yet and capturing an image of the closest directly-imaged exoplanet. "Judging by astronomers' interest in using Webb, there are many more to come," writes Ars Technica's Stephen Clark. With immense demand for observation time, Webb is set to explore a vast array of cosmic targets -- from early galaxies to exoplanet atmospheres -- offering insights that extend far beyond Hubble's reach. From the report: The Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates Webb on behalf of NASA and its international partners, said last week that it received 2,377 unique proposals from science teams seeking observing time on the observatory. The institute released a call for proposals earlier this year for the so-called "Cycle 4" series of observations with Webb. This volume of proposals represents around 78,000 hours of observing time with Webb, nine times more than the telescope's available capacity for scientific observations in this cycle. The previous observing cycle had a similar "oversubscription rate" but had less overall observing time available to the science community.

More than 600 scientists will review the proposals and select the most promising ones for time on Webb. The largest share of proposals would involve observing "high-redshift" galaxies among the first generation of galaxies that formed after the Big Bang. Galaxies this old and distant have their light stretched to longer wavelengths due to the expansion of the Universe. Research involving exoplanet atmospheres and stars and stellar populations were the second- and third-most popular science categories in this cycle. [...] It seems astronomers have no shortage of ideas about where to look. Maybe one day, new super heavy-lift rockets or advancements in in-space assembly will make it possible to deploy space telescopes even more sensitive than Webb. Until then, we can be thankful that Webb is performing well and has a good shot of far outliving its original five-year design life. Let's continue enjoying the show.

Ars Technica's Eric Berger reports: When Chinese space officials unveiled the design for the country's first super heavy lift rocket nearly a decade ago, it looked like a fairly conventional booster. The rocket was fully expendable, with three stages and solid motors strapped onto its sides. Since then, the Asian country has been revising the design of this rocket, named Long March 9, in response to the development of reusable rockets by SpaceX. As of two years ago, China had recalibrated the design to have a reusable first stage. Now, based on information released at a major airshow in Zhuhai, China, the design has morphed again. And this time, the plan for the Long March 9 rocket looks almost exactly like a clone of SpaceX's Starship rocket.

Based on its latest specifications, the Long March 9 rocket will have a fully reusable first stage powered by 30 YF-215 engines, which are full-flow staged combustion engines fueled by methane and liquid oxygen, each with a thrust of approximately 200 tons. By way of comparison, Starship's first stage is powered by 33 Raptor engines, also fueled with methane and liquid oxygen, each with a thrust of about 280 tons. The new specifications also include a fully reusable configuration of the rocket, with an upper stage that looks eerily similar to Starship's second stage, complete with flaps in a similar location. According to a presentation at the airshow, China intends to fly this vehicle for the first time in 2033, nearly a decade from now. Last week, Chinese space startup Cosmoleap announced plans to develop a fully reusable "Leap" rocket with the next few years. "An animated video that accompanied the funding announcement indicated that the company seeks to emulate the tower catch-with-chopsticks methodology that SpaceX successfully employed during Starship's fifth flight test last month," reports Ars.

SpaceX has launched the world's first wood-paneled satellite into space "to test the suitability of timber as a renewable building material in future exploration of destinations like the Moon and Mars," reports the BBC. From the report: Made by researchers in Japan, the tiny satellite weighing just 900g is heading for the International Space Station on a SpaceX mission. It will then be released into orbit above the Earth. Named LignoSat, after the Latin word for wood, its panels have been built from a type of magnolia tree, using a traditional technique without screws or glue. Researchers at Kyoto University who developed it hope it may be possible in the future to replace some metals used in space exploration with wood.

"Wood is more durable in space than on Earth because there's no water or oxygen that would rot or inflame it," Kyoto University forest science professor Koji Murata told Reuters news agency. "Early 1900s airplanes were made of wood," Prof Murata said. "A wooden satellite should be feasible, too." If trees could one day be planted on the Moon or Mars, wood might also provide material for colonies in space in the future, the researchers hope. Along with its wood panels, LignoSat also incorporates traditional aluminium structures and electronic components. It has sensors on board to monitor how its wood reacts to the extreme environment of space during the six months it will orbit the Earth. You can watch the launch on YouTube.

AMD has surpassed Intel in datacenter processor sales for the first time in history, marking a dramatic shift in the server chip market. AMD's datacenter revenue hit $3.549 billion in Q3, edging out Intel's $3.3 billion, according to SemiAnalysis.

The milestone ends Intel's decades-long dominance in server processors, where it held over 90% market share until recent years. AMD's EPYC processors now power many high-end servers, commanding premium prices despite selling at lower costs than comparable Intel chips.

Astronomers have discovered a supermassive black hole in the early Universe devouring matter at over 40 times the Eddington limit. ScienceAlert reports: Led by astronomer Hyewon Suh of Gemini Observatory and NSF's NOIRLab, a team of researchers used JWST to take follow-up observations of a smattering of galaxies identified by the Chandra X-ray Observatory that were bright in X-rays but dim in other wavelengths. When they got to LID-568, they were having trouble identifying its distance across space-time. The galaxy was very faint and very hard to see; but, using the integral field spectrograph on JWST's NIRSpec instrument, the team homed in on the galaxy's exact position. LID-568's far-off location is surprising. Although the object is faint from our position in the Universe, its distance means it must be incredibly intrinsically bright. Detailed observations revealed powerful outflows from the supermassive black hole, a signature of accretion as some of the material is being diverted and blasted into space.

A painstaking analysis of the data revealed that the supermassive black hole is a relatively small one, as supermassive black holes go; just 7.2 million times the mass of the Sun. And the amount of light being produced by the material around the disk was much, much higher than a black hole of this mass should be capable of producing. It suggests an accretion rate some 40 times higher than the Eddington limit. At this rate, the period of super-Eddington accretion should be extremely brief, which means Suh and her team were extremely lucky to catch it in action. And we expect that LID-568 will become a popular observation target for black hole scientists, allowing us a rare glimpse into super-Eddington processes. The research has been published in Nature Astronomy.

Five years ago remote workers were offered $10,0000 to move to Tulsa, Oklahoma for at least a year. Since then roughly 3,300 have accepted the offer, according to the New York TImes. [Alternate URL here.] But more importantly, now researchers are looking at the results: Their research, released this month, surveyed 1,248 people — including 411 who had participated in Tulsa Remote and others who were accepted but didn't move or weren't accepted but had applied to the program — and found that remote workers who moved to Tulsa saved an average of $25,000 more on annual housing costs than the group that was chosen but didn't move... Nearly three-quarters of participants who have completed the program are still living in Tulsa. The program brings them together for farm-to-table dinners, movie nights and local celebrity lectures to help build community, given that none have offices to commute to.
The article says every year the remote workers contribute $14.9 million in state income taxes and $5.8 million in sales taxes (more than offsetting the $33 million spent over the last five years). And additional benefits could be even greater. "We know that for every dollar we've spent on the incentive, there's been about a $13 return on that investment to the city," the program's managing director told Fortune — pointing out that the remote workers have an average salary of $100,000. (500 of the 3,300 even bought homes...)

The Tulsa-based George Kaiser Family Foundation — which provides the $10,000 awards — told the New York Times it will continue funding the program "so long as it demonstrates to be a community-enhancing opportunity." And with so much of the population now able to work remotely, the lead author on the latest study adds that "Every heartland mayor should pay attention to this..."

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared this report from the blog Interesting Engineering: A team of students made history this month by performing Europe's first rocket hop test.

Those who have followed SpaceX's trajectory will know hop tests are a vital stepping stone for a reusable rocket program, as they allow engineers to test their rocket's landing capabilities.

Impressively, no private company or space agency in Europe had ever performed a rocket hop test before. Essentially, a group of students performed one of the most important rocket tests in the history of European rocketry.

However, the remarkable nature of this story doesn't end there. Amazingly, the whole thing was almost derailed by a piece of cheese. A slice of Gruyère the team strapped to their rocket's landing legs almost caused the rocket to spin out of control.

Thankfully, disaster was averted, and the historic hopper didn't end up as rocket de-Brie.

Somewhere off in interstellar space, 15.4 billion miles away from Earth, NASA's 47-year-old Voyager "recently went quiet," reports Mashable.

The probe "shut off its main radio transmitter for communicating with mission control..." Voyager's problem began on October 16, when flight controllers sent the robotic explorer a somewhat routine command to turn on a heater. Two days later, when NASA expected to receive a response from the spacecraft, the team learned something tripped Voyager's fault protection system, which turned off its X-band transmitter. By October 19, communication had altogether stopped.

The flight team was not optimistic. However, Voyager 1 was equipped with a backup that relies on a different, albeit significantly fainter, frequency. No one knew if the second radio transmitter could still work, given the aging spacecraft's extreme distance.

Days later, engineers with the Deep Space Network, a system of three enormous radio dish arrays on Earth, found the signal whispering back over the S-band transmitter. The device hadn't been used since 1981, according to NASA.

"The team is now working to gather information that will help them figure out what happened and return Voyager 1 to normal operations," NASA said in a recent mission update.
It's been more than 12 years since Voyager entered interstellar space, the article points out. And interstellar space "is a high-radiation environment that nothing human-made has ever flown in before.

"That means the only thing the teams running the old probes can count on are surprises."

"One technology critical to fighting climate change is lagging," reports the Washington Post, "thanks to a combination of high interest rates, rising costs, misinformation and the cycle of home construction. Adoption of heat pumps, one of the primary ways to cut emissions from buildings, has slowed in the United States and stalled in Europe, endangering the switch to clean energy.

"Heat pump investment in the United States has dropped by 4 percent in the past two years, even as sales of EVs have almost doubled, according to data from MIT and the Rhodium Group. In 13 European countries, heat pump sales dropped nearly in half in the first half of 2024, putting the European Union off-track for its climate goals." "Many many markets are falling," said Paul Kenny, the director general of the European Heat Pump Association. "It takes time to change people's minds about a heating system." Heat pumps — essentially air conditioners that can also work in reverse, heating a space as well as cooling it — are crucial to making buildings more climate-friendly. Around 60 percent of American homes are still heated with furnaces running on oil, natural gas, or even propane; to cut emissions from homes, all American houses and apartments will need to be powered by electricity...

In the United States, experts point to lags in construction, high interest rates, and general belt-tightening from inflation... [Cora Wyent, director of research for the electrification advocacy group Rewiring America] added, heat pumps are still growing as a share of overall heating systems, gaining ground on gas furnaces. In 2023, heat pumps made up 55 percent of all heating systems sold, while gas furnaces made up just 45 percent. "Heat pumps are continuing to increase their total market share," she said.

Homeowners may also run into trouble when trying to find contractors to install heat pumps. Barton James, the president and CEO of the Air Conditioning Contractors of America, says many contractors don't have training on how to properly install heat pumps; if they install them incorrectly, the ensuing problems can sour consumers on the technology... In the United States, low gas prices also make the economics of heat pumps more challenging. Gas is around three times cheaper than electricity — while heat pumps make up most of that ground with efficiency, they aren't the most cost-effective option for every household.
The Post also spoke to the manager for the carbon-free buildings team at the clean energy think tank RMI. They pointed out that heating systems need to be replaced roughly every 15 years — and the next cycle doesn't start until 2035.

The article concludes that "even with government policies and subsidies, many parts of the move to clean energy will require individual people to make changes to their lives. According to the International Energy Agency, the number of heat pumps will have to triple by 2030 to stay on track with climate goals. The only way to do that, experts say, is if incentives, personal beliefs, and technology all align."

This week's Ubuntu Summit 2024 was attended by Lproven (Slashdot reader #6,030). He's also a FOSS correspondent for the Register, where he's filed this report: One of the first full-length sessions was presented by David Morin, executive director of the Academy Software Foundation, introducing his organization in a talk about Open Source Software for Motion Pictures. Morin linked to the Visual Effects Society's VFX/Animation Studio Workstation Linux Report, highlighting the market share pie-chart, showing Rocky Linux 9 with at some 58 percent and the RHELatives in general at 90 percent of the market. Ubuntu 22 and 24 — the report's nomenclature, not this vulture's — got just 10.5 percent. We certainly didn't expect to see that at an Ubuntu event, with the latest two versions of Rocky Linux taking 80 percent of the studio workstation market...

What also struck us over the next three quarters of an hour is that Linux and open source in general seem to be huge components of the movie special effects industry — to an extent that we had not previously realized.
There's a "sizzle reel" showing examples of how major motion pictures used OpenColorIO, an open-source production tool for syncing color representations originally developed by Sony Pictures Imageworks. That tool is hosted by a collaboration between the Linux Foundation with the Science and Technology Council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the "Academy" of the Academy Awards). The collaboration — which goes by the name of the Academy Software Foundation — hosts 14 different projects The ASWF hasn't been around all that long — it was only founded in 2018. Despite the impact of the COVID pandemic, by 2022 it had achieved enough to fill a 45-page history called Open Source in Entertainment [PDF]. Morin told the crowd that it runs events, provides project marketing and infrastructure, as well as funding, training and education, and legal assistance. It tries to facilitate industry standards and does open source evangelism in the industry. An impressive list of members — with 17 Premier companies, 16 General ones, and another half a dozen Associate members — shows where some of the money comes from. It's a big list of big names. [Adobe, AMD, AWS, Autodesk...]
The presentation started with OpenVBD, a C++ library developed and donated by Dreamworks for working with three-dimensional voxel-based shapes. (In 2020 they created this sizzle reel, but this year they've unveiled a theme song.) Also featured was OpenEXR, originally developed at Industrial Light and Magic and sourced in 1999. (The article calls it "a specification and reference implementation of the EXR file format — a losslessly compressed image storage format for moving images at the highest possible dynamic range.")

"For an organization that is not one of the better-known ones in the FOSS space, we came away with the impression that the ASWF is busy," the article concludes. (Besides running Open Source Days and ASWF Dev Days, it also hosts several working groups like the Language Interop Project works on Rust bindings and the Continuous Integration Working Group on CI tools, There's generally very little of the old razzle-dazzle in the Linux world, but with the demise of SGI as the primary maker of graphics workstations — its brand now absorbed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise — the visual effects industry moved to Linux and it's doing amazing things with it. And Kubernetes wasn't even mentioned once.

The Washington Post reports that America's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) "is considering legal action against Meta over allegations that it improperly used financial data obtained from third parties in its highly-lucrative advertising business..."

The article says a Meta securities filing Thursday revealed it had received a formal notification about the federal investigation last month. The filing said only that the inquiry relates to "advertising for financial products and services on our platform." A spokesperson for Meta declined to comment on the investigation. "We disagree with the claims," the company's filing said, "and believe an enforcement action is unwarranted...."

The CFPB's probe underscores its aggressive recent focus on Big Tech. In recent years, major companies including Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google have launched a wave of new financial services, including credit cards and apps that help users send money to friends... Under its current director, Rohit Chopra, the CFPB has also sought to ensure that tech giants adhere to the same safeguards that have long applied to their brick-and-mortar banking predecessors. The bureau formalized its tech crackdown in 2021, when Chopra ordered companies including Facebook to turn over records related to their payment apps and other financial service offerings.

At the time, he expressed fear that these giants already possessed troves of customer data and could solidify their dominance if they gained greater insight into users' purchasing and spending habits. "This data can be monetized by companies that seek to profit from behavioral targeting, particularly around advertising and e-commerce," Chopra said in a statement announcing the review. "That many Big Tech companies aspire to grow in this space only heightens these concerns." Since then, the watchdog agency has proposed new rules that could treat Apple, Google and PayPal-owned Venmo more like banks, opening the door for federal regulators to inspect some of their operations in a bid to protect users' deposits.

The rules, which have not been finalized, have sparked fierce lobbying opposition from major tech companies.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A new global inventory has catalogued air pollution from space activities from 2020 to 2022. The inventory includes time, position and pollution from 446 launchers as they ascended and the tracks of re-entries as objects are heated to extreme temperatures and break up or burn up in the upper atmosphere. It catalogues the pollution from 63,000 tons of rocket propellants used in 2022 and from 3,622 objects, including rocket parts and satellites, that re-entered the atmosphere between 2020 and 2023, amounting to about 12,000 tons. [...]

Types of launch pollutants depend on the propellent but can include particles of soot and aluminum oxides as well as nitrogen oxides, chlorine and water vapour and carbon dioxide. Extreme heat on re-entry causes atmospheric oxygen and nitrogen to combine to form more nitrogen oxides and also produces tiny metal-oxide particles as the objects break and burn up. Soot emitted high in the atmosphere can persist for several years, with a resulting climate warming impact that is up to 500 times greater than the same amount of soot from aviation or ground-level sources. Aluminum oxide particles, nitrogen oxides and chloride can consume the ozone in the stratosphere that protects us from the sun's ultraviolet radiation. These can remain in the atmosphere for decades. Dr Connor Barker, of the UCL team, said: "Many rocket manufacturers and space agencies keep this information tightly controlled. We had to be creative about the different sources we consulted, from launch live streams on YouTube to online databases maintained by space enthusiasts in their spare time."

A new study suggests Uranus' moon Miranda may harbor a vast subsurface ocean, challenging previous assumptions about its frozen state and positioning it as a potential ocean world alongside other icy moons. Phys.Org reports: Among the moons in the solar system, Miranda stands out. The few images Voyager 2 captured in 1986 show Miranda's southern hemisphere (the only part we've seen) is a Frankenstein-like hodgepodge of grooved terrain quartered off by rough scarps and cratered areas, like squares on a quilt. Most researchers suspect these bizarre structures are the result of tidal forces and heating within the moon. Caleb Strom, a graduate student at the University of North Dakota who worked with Nordheim and Alex Patthoff of the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona, revisited the Voyager 2 images. The team set out to explain Miranda's enigmatic geology by reverse engineering the surface features, working backward to uncover what the moon's interior structure must have been to shape the moon's geology in response to tidal forcing.

After first mapping the various surface features like cracks, ridges and Miranda's unique trapezoidal coronae, the team developed a computer model to test several possible structures of the moon's interior, matching the predicted stress patterns to the actual surface geology. The setup that produced the best match between predicted stress patterns and observed surface features required the existence of vast ocean beneath Miranda's icy surface some 100-500 million years ago. This subsurface ocean was at least 62 miles (100 kilometers) deep, according to the study, and hidden beneath an icy crust no more than 19 miles (30 kilometers) thick. Given Miranda has a radius of just 146 miles (235 kilometers), the ocean would have filled almost half of the moon's body. "That result was a big surprise to the team," Strom said.

Key to creating that ocean, the researchers believe, were tidal forces between Miranda and nearby moons. These regular gravitational tugs can be amplified by orbital resonances -- a configuration where each moon's period around a planet is an exact integer of the others' periods. Jupiter's moons Io and Europa, for example, have a 2:1 resonance: For every two orbits Io makes around Jupiter, Europa makes exactly one, leading to tidal forces that are known to sustain an ocean beneath Europa's surface. These orbital configurations and the resulting tidal forces deform the moons like rubber balls, leading to friction and heat that keeps interiors warm. This also creates stresses that crack the surface, creating a rich tapestry of geologic features. Numerical simulations have suggested that Miranda and its neighboring moons likely had such a resonance in the past, offering a potential mechanism that could have warmed Miranda's interior to produce and maintain a subsurface ocean.

At some point, the moons' orbital ballet desynchronized, slowing the heating process so that the moon's insides started to cool and solidify. But the team doesn't think Miranda's interior has fully frozen yet. If the ocean had completely frozen, Nordheim explained, it would have expanded and caused certain telltale cracks on the surface, which aren't there. This suggests that Miranda is still cooling -- and may have an ocean beneath its surface even now. Miranda's modern-day ocean is probably relatively thin, Strom noted. "But the suggestion of an ocean inside one of the most distant moons in the solar system is remarkable," he said. Miranda wasn't predicted to have an ocean. With its small size and old age, scientists thought it would likely be a frozen ball of ice. Any leftover heat from its formation was assumed to have dissipated long ago. But as Patthoff pointed out, predictions about ice moons can be wrong, as evidenced by Saturn's moon Enceladus. The study has been published in The Planetary Science Journal.

Dropbox is letting go 20% of its workforce as the cloud company undergoes what CEO Drew Houston calls a "transitional period." From a report: In a letter to staff, Houston said that the reduction in headcount would impact 528 people. The goal, he added, was to make cuts in areas where Dropbox has "over-invested" while designing a "flatter, more efficient" team structure.

"As CEO, I take full responsibility for this decision and the circumstances that led to it, and I'm truly sorry to those impacted by this change," he wrote. "This market is moving fast and investors are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into this space. This both validates the opportunity we've been pursuing and underscores the need for even more urgency, even more aggressive investment, and decisive action." According to a filing with the SEC, Dropbox estimates it'll lay out total cash expenditures of $63 million to $68 million on the layoffs, primarily in the form of severance and benefits, and recognize $47 million to $52 million of incremental expense.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the European Space Agency: White dots arranged in five clusters against a black background (PNG). This is the simulated extraterrestrial signal transmitted from Mars and deciphered by a father and a daughter on Earth after a year-long decoding effort. On June 7, 2024, media artist Daniela de Paulis received this simple, retro-looking image depicting five amino acids in her inbox. It was the solution to a cosmic puzzle beamed from ESA's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) in May 2023, when the European spacecraft played alien as part of the multidisciplinary art project 'A Sign in Space.' After three radio astronomy observatories on Earth intercepted the signal, the challenge was first to extract the message from the raw data of the radio signal, and secondly to decode it. In just 10 days, a community of 5000 citizen scientists gathered online and managed to extract the signal. The second task took longer and required some visionary minds.

US citizens Ken and Keli Chaffin cracked the code following their intuition and running simulations for hours and days on end. The father and daughter team discovered that the message contained movement, suggesting some sort of cellular formation and life forms. Amino acids and proteins are the building blocks of life. Now that the cryptic signal has been deciphered, the quest for meaning begins. The interpretation of the message, like any art piece, remains open. Daniela crafted the message with a small group of astronomers and computer scientists, with support from ESA, the SETI Institute and the Green Bank Observatory. The artist and collaborators behind the project are now taking a step back and witnessing how citizen scientists are shaping the challenge on their own.

Federal Communications Commission Chair Jessica Rosenworcel outlined a vision for universal connectivity last week that merges satellite and ground-based networks. The FCC recently became the first regulator to establish a framework for supplemental coverage from space (SCS). "Satellites may be in our skies, but they are the anchor tenant in our communications future," said Rosenworcel, calling for seamless integration of fiber, cellular, wireless, and satellite infrastructure into a unified network. The vision comes as the FCC's Affordable Connectivity Program recently ended due to funding depletion.

NASA's economic impact report highlights that in fiscal year 2023, the agency's initiatives contributed $75.6 billion to the U.S. economy, created over 300,000 jobs, and drove advancements in areas like space exploration, climate research, and technology innovation. The agency's budget for that year was $25.4 billion. Space.com reports: The Moon to Mars program alone created $23.8 billion in economic output and 96,479 jobs, while investments in climate research and technology contributed $7.9 billion and 32,900 jobs. The report also drills down into impacts in each state, with 45 states seeing over $10 million in impact and eight states surpassing the $1 billion mark. [...]

NASA's missions supported 304,803 jobs across America, according to the report -- the third agency-wide study of its kind -- generating an estimated total of $9.5 billion in federal, state, and local taxes. Additionally, NASA's technological innovations and transfers in 2023 led to 40 new patent applications, 69 patents issued, and thousands of software usage agreements. A number of NASA technology spinoffs have become everyday household items. The full NASA economic impact report can be found here.