Astronomers have discovered a protoplanetary disks where planets are born thrive in the most violent region of our Galaxy. For years the galactic center was thought to be too chaotic and hostile for planet formation. This is wrong. New ALMA observations have seen planet nurseries flourishing in the turbulent Central Molecular Zone near our Galaxy's heart, challenging everything we thought we knew about how worlds are born. Planets find a way.

Sometimes it's fun to look back at old missions that never were. There are more of those than the missions that receive funding and are launched, but many of those were influenced by the ones that were funded that came before. A great fountain of mission ideas is the Alpbach Summer School, held annually in Austria. Every year, at least two teams publish papers defining a complete mission concept as part of their capstone experience at the school. One published in 2014 describes a mission designed to look at Venus' tectonic activity, and even though the concept is over 11 years old, the scientific questions it sought to answer are still outstanding today.

The Small Magellanic Cloud is one of our closest galactic neighbours. It's a dwarf irregular galaxy about 200,000 light-years away, containing several hundred million stars. New research based on massive stars in the SMC shows it's being stretched along two different axes.

Computational Fluid Dynamics. Those words are enough to strike fear into the heart of many an undergraduate engineer. Modeling how liquids move through a system is mathematically challenging, but in many cases, absolutely vital to understanding how those systems work. Computational Fluid Dynamics (more commonly called CFD) is our best effort at understanding those complex systems. A new paper from researchers at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) applies those mathematical models to an area critical for the upcoming era of space exploration - propellant production from in-situ resources.

Just as ice dominates the outer Solar System, blanketing the moons of giant planets and coating objects in the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud—astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have made a chilly discovery in a distant planetary system. The alien system HD 181327, 155 light-years away harbours significant deposits of both ordinary and crystalline water ice. They detected the ice in regions that are farther away from the star, with the outer area containing as much as 20% water ice.

One of the big differences between Venus and Earth is the lack of plate tectonics. While Earth's continents float on tectonic plates—constantly reshaping our world—Venus was previously thought to remain locked in a largely static crust with only occasional volcanic hotspots. But everything we thought we knew might be wrong! Researchers examining 30-year-old NASA Magellan spacecraft images have spotted what appears to be the smoking gun of tectonic activity on our hellish sister planet, potentially rewriting planetary science as we know it.

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are the most powerful phenomena in the Universe. First detected during the Cold War, these events beam a tremendous amount of high-energy light our way in a short period of time. They come in two types: short GRBs that last for less than two seconds and long GRBs that last for minutes. Both types have mysterious origins. Short GRBs could be caused by the collisions of neutron stars or perhaps the powerful flares of a magnetar. Observations of long GRBs suggest they are caused by a powerful supernova called a hypernova, where a massive star collapses to become a black hole. But a new study suggests that the origins of long GRBs are more diverse.

Saturn's moon Titan is the only other body in the Solar System with weather similar to Earth's. The large moon has a thick, nitrogen-rich atmosphere like Earth's, liquid on its surface, and a precipitation cycle. But instead of water, the surface liquid and the precipitation cycle are mainly based on methane.

Shape Memory Alloy (SMA) is becoming increasingly common in space exploration applications. It has primarily been used in deployable structures, such as antenna booms or solar sail deployment. However, it also has a use case nearer the ground of whatever planet, moon, or asteroid it finds itself near. A new paper by Shufeng Tang and their colleagues at the Inner Mongolia University of Technology uses SMA to solve a problem in an area near and dear to space explorers' hearts—small space flexible robotics.

Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, looks more Earth-like on its surface than any other place in the Solar System. With its thick atmosphere and liquid methane rain, it has lakes, rivers, sand dunes and seas. But appearances can be deceiving and in other ways, Titan is in fact a very alien world. One baffling difference, recently discovered, is that Titan's rivers do not seem to form deltas when they reach the sea.