NASA’s Perseverance Rover spent three years exploring the floor of Jezero Crater, located just north of the Martian equator. This close-up look at what had previously been seen only from orbit revealed evidence of chemical reactions that shaped the planet billions of years ago. SETI Institute Senior Research Scientist Janice Bishop and University of Massachusetts Engineering Professor Mario Parente analyzed orbital hyperspectral images from the Compact Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, producing a detailed mineral map at the tens of meters scale of the crater documenting deposits of clays and carbonates signaling abundant water on ancient Mars. In a new Nature News & Views article, Bishop and Parente explore how these findings, combined with Perseverance’s confirmation of the minerals observed from orbit and discoveries of unusual minerals not detectable from orbit, suggest chemical reactions involving minerals, water, and possibly organic material could have created energy-rich environments on early Mars.

“Coordinating mineral detections from orbit at Mars with in situ detections by the Perseverance rover gives us a detailed look at ancient chemical reactions for a few small areas and a broader view across kilometers of the surface,” said Bishop.

A Texas A&M geologist says recent findings from the Perseverance rover may point to the presence of past microbial life on ancient Mars.

New observations of a merger of two black holes confirm decades-old predictions by Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking and Roy Kerr. The findings emerged from analyses led by Flatiron Institute astrophysicists using the clearest measurements to date of a black hole merger taken by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO).

LIGO's improved sensitivity is showcased in a discovery of a black hole merger detected in January of this year. Scientists analyzing this signal were able to provide the best observational evidence yet for what is known as the black hole area theorem, an idea put forth by Stephen Hawking in 1971 that says the total surface areas of black holes cannot decrease. 

Physicists have long believed that black holes explode at the end of their lives, and that such explosions happen—at most—only once every 100,000 years. But new research published in Physical Review Letters by physicists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has found a more than 90% probability that one of these black-hole explosions might be seen within the decade, and that, if we are prepared, our current fleet of space and earthbound telescopes could witness the event.

Planetary scientists believe they can now predict the green glow of an aurora in the night sky above Mars, and they have the images to prove it. The first observations of a visible-light aurora from the surface of the Red Planet were made by NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover in 2024. Now, presenting at the Europlanet Science Congress–Division of Planetary Science (EPSC–DPS) joint meeting in Helsinki this week, Dr Elise Wright Knutsen of the University of Oslo will reveal a second snapshot of the aurora by Perseverance and, more importantly, the tools to predict when an aurora will occur on Mars.