Astronomers have long treated the Milky Way as a kind of cosmic yardstick: if something is true here, maybe it is true everywhere.
However, a new study of our nearest large galactic neighbor, M31, also known as the Andromeda Galaxy, argues that this assumption can be deeply misleading, especially in terms of how this cosmic giant kills off smaller neighboring galaxies.
Published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and available on the arXiv preprint server,

For the first time, researchers have measured how the violent space weather events known as geomagnetic superstorms disrupt the Earth’s protective plasmasphere, placing our critical infrastructure at risk.
Created by massive solar emissions of energy and charged particles, geomagnetic superstorms only occur about once every two decades. The focus of the new study published in Earth, Planets, and Space was the Gannon storm, also known as the Mother’s Day storm, which hit our planet on May 10-11, 2024.

Remarkable new images from the James Webb Space Telescope have captured the first-ever view of four dust spirals surrounding the Wolf-Rayet stars in the Apep system.
The mid-infrared imagery is the culmination of years of data collected by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, supported by James Webb observations. Previously, Webb could image only one of the shells, although all four were hypothesized to exist based on VLT data.
Apep’s Spiral Shells
“Looking

Theia, the colossal, Mars-sized impactor that collided with the Earth to birth our Moon, may have come from the direction of the Sun, answering a fundamental question about the formation of our solar system.
Conflicts between theory and real-world data measurements have left a cloud of mystery over the formation of Earth’s moon and the transition from proto-Earth to our present Earth. One of the fundamental questions has been whether Theia formed in the inner or outer Solar System,