Ayy NASA scientists digging back through decades-old data from the Voyager 2 spacecraft have made an eyebrow-raising discovery: Something appeared to have been sucking Uranus’ atmosphere out into space. When Voyager 2 flew past Uranus in 1986, it seems to have passed through something called a plasmoid — a gigantic blob of plasma, essentially — that escaped Uranus and likely pulled a giant gassy cloud of the planet’s fart-like atmosphere along with it, Space.com reports. Cosmic Wind Based on the data Voyager 2 collected as it flew through the planetary flatulence, NASA thinks that the plasmoid itself was about 127,000 miles long and twice as wide, according to Space.com. And while the data, first published in August in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, can give NASA a better understanding of Uranus’ atmosphere, one gas bubble won’t tell them everything. “Imagine if one spacecraft just flew through this room and tried to characterize the entire Earth,” NASA researcher Gina DiBraccio said in a new press release. “Obviously it’s not going to show you anything about what the Sahara or Antarctica is like.” Second Whiff NASA speculates that a similar gas-expelling phenomenon could explain how Mars came to be so barren and dry, but that can’t be known for sure. To learn more, Space.com reports, NASA would unfortunately need to send another spacecraft all the way out to Uranus and probe around. “It’s why I love planetary science,” DiBraccio said. “You’re always going somewhere you don’t really know.”

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has given us its sharpest-ever view of the Red Planet. The Curiosity team just released a 1.8-billion-pixel panorama that features Glen Torridon, a region on the flanks of Mars' 3.4-mile-high (5.5 kilometers) Mount Sharp that the rover has been exploring recently. The new photo is a composite of more than 1,000 images that Curiosity snapped between Nov. 24 and Dec. 1, 2019, when the rover team was taking a break for Thanksgiving.

Astronomers: Something Is Warping Our Entire Galaxy Victor Tangermann in Hard Science Astronomers have known for years that the edges of the Milky Way warp, ripple and wobble like a bowl of Jello — but nobody knew why. But according to a new study using data collected by the European space agency’s star-mapping satellite Gaia, the Milky Way’s disc, made up of hundreds of billions of stars, is being warped as it’s slowly colliding with a smaller neighboring galaxy. To get to this conclusion, a team of physicists at the Italian National Institute for Astrophysicists in Turin analyzed the way 12 million giant stars move in our Milky Way, as observed by ESA’s Gaia space telescope. Their research, as detailed in a paper published on Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy, suggests that the unique way the edges of our galaxy are being warped is being caused by “a recent or ongoing encounter with a satellite galaxy.” “We measured the speed of the warp by comparing the data with our models,” lead author Eloisa Poggio of the Turin Astrophysical Observatory, said in a statement. “Based on the obtained velocity, the warp would complete one rotation around the centre of the Milky Way in 600 to 700 million years.” That’s substantially slower than how long stars, including the Sun, take to make it all the way around the center of the Milky Way. Previous theories have attempted to explain the warp by suggesting that the inner disk of the galaxy is spinning like an inclined spinning top, leaving ripples. This slow rotational speed, however, would refute them, according to the researchers. So which galaxy is actually slowly squashing itself into ours? The astronomers suggest it could be Sagittarius, a dwarf galaxy that orbits the Milky Way, as there’s plenty of evidence it’s already slowly being absorbed by the Milky Way.