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In 2014, megafires in Canada’s Northwest Territories scorched more than 7 million acres of forest, releasing half as much carbon back into the atmosphere as all the plants and trees in Canada typically absorb in an entire year.

Astronomers seeking life on distant planets may want to go for the glow. Harsh ultraviolet radiation from red suns, once thought to destroy surface life on planets, might help uncover hidden biospheres as they glow. That neon-like glimmer is a star-induced gleam called biofluorescence, which could turn distant exoplanets into the black-light posters of outer-space, according to new Cornell research, published Aug. 13 in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society “Biofluorescent Worlds II: Biological Fluorescence Induced by Stellar UV Flares, a New Temporal Biosignature,”

Canada-France-Hawaii telescope.

An unexpected companion.

ExoMars parachute testing continues

Parker Solar Probe's WISPR instrument saw the solar wind streaming past during the spacecraft's first solar encounter in November 2018.

Pictured are the four candidate sample collection sites on asteroid Bennu selected by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission. Site Nightingale (top left) is located in Bennu’s northern hemisphere. Sites Kingfisher (top right) and Osprey (bottom left) are located in Bennu’s equatorial region. Site Sandpiper (bottom right) is located in Bennu’s southern hemisphere. In December, one of these sites will be chosen for the mission’s touchdown event.

Hubble Catches 2 Galaxies at Play.

Data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory have revealed what may be the most distant shrouded black hole, which may have existed only 850 million years after the Big Bang, or approximately half a billion years earlier than the previous record-holder. The small, central region marked with a red cross in the main image—from the optical PanSTARRS survey— contains the quasar PSO167-13, which was first discovered with PanSTARRS. The left inset contains X-rays detected with Chandra from this region, with PSO167-13 in the middle. The right inset shows the same field of view as seen by the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) of radio dishes in Chile. The bright source is the quasar and a faint, nearby companion galaxy appears in the lower left.

The ECOSTRESS image shows plant stress in the Guanacaste region of Costa Rica (in red on inset map) a few months after the onset of a major Central American drought. Red indicates high stress, yellow is moderate stress, greens/blues are low stress. Light gray is cloud.