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A study of the Ophiuchus star-forming complex has offered new insights into the conditions in which our own solar system was born.

The findings of the study were published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

A region of active star formation in the constellation Ophiuchus is giving astronomers new insights into the conditions in which our own solar system was born.

In particular, the study showed how our solar system may have become enriched with short-lived radioactive elements.

Evidence of this enrichment process has been around since the 1970s when scientists studying certain mineral inclusions in meteorites concluded that they were pristine remnants of the infant solar system and contained the decay products of short-lived radionuclides.

These radioactive elements could have been blown onto the nascent solar system by a nearby exploding star (a supernova) or by the strong stellar winds from a type of massive star known as a Wolf-Rayet star.

The authors of the new study used multi-wavelength observations of the Ophiuchus star-forming region, including spectacular new infrared data, to reveal interactions between the clouds of star-forming gas and radionuclides produced in a nearby cluster of young stars.

Their findings indicated that supernovas in the star cluster are the most likely source of short-lived radionuclides in the star-forming clouds.

“Our solar system was most likely formed in a giant molecular cloud together with a young stellar cluster, and one or more supernova events from some massive stars in this cluster contaminated the gas which turned into the sun and its planetary system,” said co-author Douglas N. C. Lin, professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz.

“Although this scenario has been suggested in the past, the strength of this paper is to use multi-wavelength observations and a sophisticated statistical analysis to deduce a quantitative measurement of the model’s likelihood,” he added.

First author John Forbes at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics said data from space-based gamma-ray telescopes enable the detection of gamma rays emitted by the short-lived radionuclide aluminum-26.

“These are challenging observations. We can only convincingly detect it in two star-forming regions, and the best data are from the Ophiuchus complex,” he said.

The Ophiuchus cloud complex contains many dense protostellar cores in various stages of star formation and protoplanetary disk development, representing the earliest stages in the formation of a planetary system.

By combining imaging data in wavelengths ranging from millimetres to gamma rays, the researchers were able to visualise a flow of aluminum-26 from the nearby star cluster toward the Ophiuchus star-forming region.

“The enrichment process we’re seeing in Ophiuchus is consistent with what happened during the formation of the solar system 5 billion years ago,” Forbes said.

“Once we saw this nice example of how the process might happen, we set about trying to model the nearby star cluster that produced the radionuclides we see today in gamma rays,” he added.

Forbes developed a model that accounts for every massive star that could have existed in this region, including its mass, age, and probability of exploding as a supernova, and incorporates the potential yields of aluminum-26 from stellar winds and supernovas.

The model enabled him to determine the probabilities of different scenarios for the production of the aluminum-26 observed today.

“We now have enough information to say that there is a 59 per cent chance it is due to supernovas and a 68 per cent chance that it’s from multiple sources and not just one supernova,” Forbes said.

This type of statistical analysis assigns probabilities to scenarios that astronomers have been debating for the past 50 years, Lin noted.

“This is the new direction for astronomy, to quantify the likelihood,” he added.

The new findings also showed that the amount of short-lived radionuclides incorporated into newly forming star systems can vary widely.

“Many new star systems will be born with aluminum-26 abundances in line with our solar system, but the variation is huge – several orders of magnitude,” Forbes said.

“This matters for the early evolution of planetary systems since aluminum-26 is the main early heating source. More aluminum-26 probably means drier planets,” he added.

The infrared data, which enabled the team to peer through dusty clouds into the heart of the star-forming complex, was obtained by coauthor Joao Alves at the University of Vienna as part of the European Southern Observatory’s VISION survey of nearby stellar nurseries using the VISTA telescope in Chile.

“There is nothing special about Ophiuchus as a star formation region,” Alves said.

“It is just a typical configuration of gas and young massive stars, so our results should be representative of the enrichment of short-lived radioactive elements in star and planet formation across the Milky Way,” he concluded.

The team also used data from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Herschel Space Observatory, the ESA’s Planck satellite, and NASA’s Compton Gamma Ray Observatory.


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MIT Study Reveals Why Roman Concrete Lasts Thousands of Years

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MIT Study Reveals Why Roman Concrete Lasts Thousands of Years

Ancient Roman structures have always been a major attraction for both common people and researchers. The durability of those magnificent architectural feats like the Pantheon of Rome has made researchers curious about how they are standing tall nearly after two thousand years of the height of the Roman empire. While The longevity of these structures can be attributed largely to Roman concrete, question still prevails about the speciality and the materials used in the concrete itself. 

Ingredients of Roman concrete

According to the study published in the journal Science Advances, an international team of researchers led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found that not only are the materials slightly different from what we may have thought, but the techniques used to mix them were also different.

One key ingrediant was pozzolan, or ash. The Romans used ash from the volcanic beds of the Italian city Pozzuoli and shipped it all over the empire. The silica and alumina in the ash react with lime and water in a pozzolanic reaction at ambient temperatures, resulting in a stronger, longer lasting concrete.
Another key ingredient is lime clasts, or small chunks of quicklime.

These clasts give Roman concrete its self-healing capability. Concrete weathers and weakens over time, but water can infiltrate its cracks and reach the clasts. When they react with the water, the clasts create crystals called calcites that fill in the cracks.

Difference with modern day cement

The high-temperature kiln process used today to make modern day Portland cement, grinds all materials into fine powder. It eliminates the lime clasts which results into the lack of the self-healing properties of Roman cement.

The Romans utilized a method known as hot mixing, which involves combining quicklime with pozzolan, water and other ingredients and then heating them up. The MIT team found that this method helps unlock the lime clasts’ self-healing abilities, and can result in faster setting than cement made with a quicklime-water solution called slaked lime.

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Venus Is Alive: Scientists Discover Signs of Ongoing Geological Activity

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Venus Is Alive: Scientists Discover Signs of Ongoing Geological Activity

In a finding published in the journal Science Advances on May 14, 2025, researchers have unleashed fresh evidence that Venus is still alive geologically. Venus and Earth had similar sizes and exploded by comparable amounts of water billions of years ago. This shared origin has raised questions like why Venus became extremely uninhabitable while Earth is flourishing in a cradle of life. After more than thirty years, NASA’s Magellan spacecraft tracked the surface of Venus, and scientists found the hot material rising signals from the interior of the planet, signalling that the crust is still getting shaped.

Venus May Still Be Geologically Active, Scientists Say

According to Research revealed that Venus is active geologically, shaping its surface by internal heat. Scientists analysed the large, ring-shaped structures called coronae, formed when a hot mantle pushes the crust upside down and collapses into circular depressions.

Gael Cascioli, an assistant scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre, said this gives valuable insight into subsurface motion. Out of 75 Coronae, analysed with the help of NASA’s Magellan spacecraft data, 52 sit above the active, buoyant mantle plumes, which is very hard to believe.

Similarities Between Venus and Early Earth

Anna Gulcher, the co-lead of the study, said that these ongoing processes are similar to the Earth. Venus holds 100s of coronae, particularly within the thin crust and high thermal places.

Venus’ Surprisingly Thin Crust

Justin Filiberto of NASA’s Astromaterials Research Division found that the Venus crust could break off or melt when it exceeds just 65 km in thickness, a thin barrier.

Crustal Recycling and Volcanic Activity

The crust shearing not just shaped the surface but also recycled the materials, such as water in the interior of Venus, which triggers the volcanic activity and the shifts of the atmosphere. The mechanism resets how the geology, atmosphere and crust on Venus work simultaneously.

Upcoming Missions to Unveil More

The future missions include NASA’s VERITAS and DAVINCI. Further, ESA’s EnVision is going to provide high-resolution data for validating the findings. Suzanne Smrekar put emphasis on these missions could change our understanding of Venue geology together with clues of the Earth’s past.

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New Analysis Weakens Claims of Life on Distant Exoplanet K2-18b

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New Analysis Weakens Claims of Life on Distant Exoplanet K2-18b

Last month, astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope made headlines by announcing they had detected hints of the chemicals dimethyl sulphide (DMS) and dimethyl disulfide (DMDS) on the exoplanet K2-18b, located 124 light-years away from the Earth. These chemicals are only produced by life such as marine algae on Earth, meaning they are considered potential “biosignatures” indicating life. recent follow-up research questions the reliability of this finding. A new study led by researchers from the University of Chicago reanalysed the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) data and found the evidence for DMS far less convincing than previously reported.

Weakening of signals

According to a recent arxiv preprint, yet to be peer-reviewed, Rafael Luque, Caroline Piaulet-Ghorayeb, and Michael Zhang, used a joint approach by combining all JWST observations across its key instruments (NIRISS, NIRSpec, and MIRI). They found that the supposed DMS signal becomes significantly weaker when all data are considered together. Differences in data processing and modelling between the original studies also cast doubt on the initial results.

According to the team, even when DMS-like signals appear, they are weak, inconsistent, and can often be explained by other, non-biological molecules like ethane. The researchers stressed the importance of consistent modelling to avoid contradictory interpretations of planetary atmospheres.

Spectral Complexity

Molecules in an exoplanet’s atmosphere are typically detected through spectral analysis, which identifies unique “chemical fingerprints” based on how the planet’s atmosphere absorbs specific wavelengths of starlight as it passes or transits in front of its host star.

The difference between DMS and ethane a common molecule in exoplanet atmospheres is just one sulfur atom, and current spectrometers, including those on the JWST, have impressive sensitivity, but still face limits. The distance to exoplanets, the faintness of signals, and the complexity of atmospheres mean distinguishing between molecules that differ by just one atom is extremely challenging. The recent claim of a “3-sigma” detection of DMS falls short of the scientific standard for confirmation. The team calls for more rigorous standards in both scientific publication and media reporting.

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