Coming in 2019: The Solar System in 3D. A pair of telescopes could soon bring sights like comets, Saturn’s rings and Jupiter’s Great Red Spot to life in full, three-dimensional images and movies for the first time.

When the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) begins science operations in 2019, it will join the veteran Hubble Space Telescope, which has been orbiting for 26 years already and is scheduled to retire in 2021.

While they are in space together, the two can act as a giant pair of eyes, seeing space in a new light: with depth perception.

“This was never possible before because we never had two telescopes with this kind of resolution in space at the same time,” says at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland.

The effect will be possible because Hubble is in near-Earth orbit and the JWST will reside 1.5 million kilometres away, in a spot opposite Earth and the sun called the L2 point. Such a wide separation means that pointing them at the same object in the solar system will provide sufficient difference in viewing angle to create a sense of depth perceptible to the human eye.

Spectacular sights

Green analysed Ìęthe telescopes’ joint capabilities to show how they might see many amazing sights in 3D: Jupiter’s rolling clouds with the planet’s moons in the foreground and background, a mountain peak and atmospheric dust drifting over Mars, or a nearby comet with its tail pointing away as it approaches the sun.

But the most exciting prospect might be observing rapidly changing phenomena, such as storms on Jupiter, impacts on rockyÌęworlds or emissions from a comet. “We can really probe the details of this with such techniques,” says , the deputy project scientist for planetary science for the JWST.

Three-dimensional images and movies will also help engage and educate the public. “This technique would be great for helping non-experts grasp the size of astronomical objects,” says at the University of Texas in Austin.

It will also just be cool. “I’m really excited to see Saturn’s rings pop out of the page at me,” Green says.

Defying expectations, the New Shepard rocket has survived its latest flight. Today, private space-flight firm Blue Origin successfully tested its in-flight escape system, which is designed to bring future space tourists to safety in an emergency.

The launch was originally planned for 4 October, but delayed for one dayÌędue to weather.ÌęDespite an additional 35-minute delay, the test flight went perfectly.

Today’s launch was the first in-flight trial of any escape system since 1966, when NASA tested Apollo’s system using the Little Joe II rocket.ÌęIf something goes wrong during flight,ÌęBlue Origin’sÌęescape system separates the capsule—which can carry six space tourists—from the rocket.

Blue Origin has already flown its reusable New Shepard rocket four times, launching the uncrewed capsule into space and then returning it safely to Earth. Each time, the rocket successfully made a vertical landing.

Before today’s test, Blue OriginÌęwarned that the capsule’s motors would jettison it from the rocket with 300,000 newtons of force, knocking New Shepard off-kilter. If the rocket started veering into a dangerous trajectory, itÌęwould shut off its engine and plummet to the ground in a fiery crash.

But the explosion never happened. Instead, after the capsule separated, New Shepard stayed upright and continued its ascent. After shutting off its engine, it fell back to Earth. Its fins slowed the descent, and its engine fired again, gently lowering it back to the West Texas desert.

Meanwhile, the capsule escaped unharmed. As planned, it separated from the rocketÌę45 seconds after launch, when it had climbed nearly 4,900 metres. After some initial wobbling, the capsule deployed its parachutes and landed softly on the ground, kicking up a cloud of dust.

The company had previously tested the capsule’s , but not while it was on the rocket.

Both the rocketÌęand capsule will now be retired, and may have a second life as museum pieces.

A livestream of the test is .

Pushy planets

Call it a gut reaction. The revolutionary discovery of space-time ripples may have come from two black holes colliding while inside the belly of an enormous star, whose subsequent collapse launched powerful jets of gamma rays.

żìĂš¶ÌÊÓÆ”s already knew that the gravitational waves detected by LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, were generated when two black holes – each about 30 times as massive as the sun – spiralled around each other and merged.

But now it seems that collision may have been followed by a bright burst of gamma rays. NASA’s Fermi gamma-ray space telescope just 0.4 seconds after LIGO’s gravitational waves arrived at Earth. It’s not clear whether the same event triggered both signals, but the Fermi team calculated that the probability of a coincidence was just 0.0022.

The problem is that no one expected such a bright gamma-ray burst to accompany a black-hole merger. Coalescing black holes orbit each other in a cosmic do-si-do, clearing out a region of empty space. According to models of gamma-ray bursts, isolated black holes can’t ignite them.

Strange signal

“Everything smells like a short gamma-ray burst in our signal,” says Valerie Connaughton of the Fermi team. “And that’s a real problem in a way – you don’t expect this signal from merging black holes.”

But when Avi Loeb of Harvard University saw the Fermi results, he realised he knew . You could get a gamma-ray burst if the two black holes were enveloped inside a very massive star. “It’s sort of like a pregnant woman with twins in her belly,” he says. Once the black holes merged, the star would collapse and trigger intense beams of gamma rays.

For that to happen, the two black holes would have to have formed inside an extremely massive star a few hundred times heftier than the sun. As the star exhausted its nuclear fuel, its core began to collapse. Normally that would form a single black hole.

But if the star were rotating very fast, centrifugal force would stretch the collapsing core, shaping it into a dumbbell. Eventually, the dumbbell would snap into two cores, each of which would continue to collapse into its own black hole.

New ideas needed

“The only way to explain the Fermi signal is to surround the black holes with a lot of dense material, and the obvious way to do that, as in Loeb’s idea, is to put them inside a star,” says of Tel Aviv University in Israel. “Maybe there are other ideas, but we need to think them up.”

It’s too soon to know whether this idea is right. Even Fermi’s results are in doubt: researchers analysing data from the European gamma-ray spacecraft, INTEGRAL, , and concluded that the gamma ray signal is not real.

But even if this gamma-ray signal proves to be non-existent, there could be real ones in the future that coincide with a LIGO event, Loeb says. “We shouldn’t have a prejudice that black hole binaries are always silent in terms of their electromagnetic signature.” Astronomers should be on the lookout.

Journal reference:

Sunset stars

Stag beetles wield fearsome mandibles almost as big as their bodies, but you’d think they’re a bit of a drag when it comes to flying. Now it seems the oversized jaws aren’t an aerodynamic burden after all, allowing them to take on a variety of shapes and sizes.

To exert dominance and win the attention of females, male stag beetles use their jaws to fight each other. Their weaponised heads comprise as much as 18 percent of their body mass, meaning a running male beetle uses up 40 per cent more energy than a female. The top-heavy mandibles give the males an unstable gait that threatens to send them tumbling. To find females and nesting sites, males have to fly – with their rather awkward baggage.

“You see that these jaws are so large and they’re not streamlined at all,” says of the University of Antwerp in Belgium. “You might think there is a very large aerodynamic cost.”

But when Goyens ran computer simulations of a beetle inside a wind tunnel, she found that flowing air exerts negligible aerodynamic forces on the insect. The beetle is so heavy that the force of gravity on it is much larger than any drag forces, so it can fly just as well no matter how its jaws are shaped. Drag also doesn’t matter because beetles fly so slowly, at roughly one-twentieth the speed of small birds, which limits the amount of air resistance they feel.

Goyens’ results are consistent with recent studies on rhinoceros beetles, which are also . “This is another piece of evidence that for animals that fly slowly, subtleties of drag are not that important,” says of the University of Montana in Missoula.

In the case of stag beetles, the lack of drag means there is no evolutionary pressure for the mandibles to become aerodynamic, Goyens says. Instead, the beetles have evolved mandibles in a range of killer styles, from stubby and claw-like to long, spear-like protrusions.

Goyens now wants to explore the mechanics of the jaws and how they stand up to the males’ fierce battles.

Journal reference:

Pulsars are dense stellar cores left over when massive stars blow up. They rotate very fast, shining light from their poles that we see as regular flashes on Earth. Their strong magnetic fields gradually slow their spin, but over the past 15 years, astronomers have noticed that many pulsars are slowing more than we would expect.

at the University of Southern Denmark thinks a form of dark matter with a tiny electric charge may be putting on the brakes.

Charged star

Dark matter is a mysterious substance thought to make up about 80 per cent of the matter in the universe. So far we have seen evidence for dark matter interacting with normal matter only via its gravitational pull. The leading candidate dark matter particles – weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs – should also sometimes knock into normal atoms. But efforts to detect hits from these particles have so far come to naught, and some physicists are exploring alternative ideas.

Several theories predict the existence of dark matter particles with a tiny electric charge – less than one-thousandth that of an electron. This charged dark matter would also interact weakly with regular matter. Kouvaris and Maria Ángeles PĂ©rez-GarcĂ­a at the University of Salamanca in Spain crunched the numbers and found that this charged dark matter may get trapped by a pulsar’s magnetic field.

When enough like charge builds up, the pulsar expels the excess from its poles as standard charged particles. The banished particles flow along the star’s magnetic field, generating an electric current. Interactions between the magnetic field and the current then impede the pulsar’s spin.

Density test

There could be more conventional ways to slow down a pulsar, says Wynn Ho at the University of Southampton, UK. For one, natural changes in a pulsar’s magnetic field might hinder its rotation more than we currently account for. And the regular charged particles that surround a pulsar might neutralise any charged dark matter, preventing the accumulation of charge needed to slow its spin.

There is a way to test the theory, says Kouvaris. According to his team, a pulsar will slow down more when it is surrounded by larger amounts of dark matter. Dense concentrations of the stuff are thought to lurk near the centre of the galaxy and in globular star clusters. If pulsars in these regions are slowing down at different rates than elsewhere in the universe, it could indicate that dark matter does carry charge.

Existing and planned underground labs aren’t designed to find charged dark matter particles, so any evidence for them would suggest we need to refine direct detectors, says Kouvaris. “If we know more or less what we’re looking for, then we can develop better techniques.”

Journal reference: Physical Review D,

A big piece of early Earth may have resisted the apocalyptic melting caused by the impact that spawned the moon.

The leading idea for lunar origins is that a primordial planet named Theia slammed into Earth, scattering debris that congealed into the moon. Models suggested that the collision totally melted our planet, creating a ball of magma.

In that scenario, convection should have mixed up the molten rock. After the planet cooled and the mantle reformed beneath the crust, it should have been left with the same isotope signatures throughout.

at Harvard University and his team analysed samples of mantle taken from sites around the globe. They found that the ratio of helium-3 to neon-22 is much higher in the shallow part of the mantle than in the deeper part.

Xenon clock

The team argues that the energy of the impact was not evenly distributed. The side that was struck by Theia melted, releasing trapped gases in a way that created the imbalance. Meanwhile, the rocky part of the planet far from the collision held on to its specific mix of gases. Over time, that rock spread out and formed its own layer within the mantle.

“We think that the observations we have made provide some of the cleanest evidence that the Earth didn’t completely melt,” says Mukhopadhyay. He described the results at the in Sacramento, California, this week.

The team also saw differences in the mix of xenon-129 and xenon-130 in the layers. The deep mantle has a lower ratio than that seen in the shallower mid-ocean ridges. Because xenon-129 comes from the radioactive decay of iodine-129, its presence and abundance can be used like a time stamp of rock formation.

The xenon signature suggests that the deep mantle separated from the shallower layer about 4.45 billion years ago, providing a window into the early stages of Earth’s formation. “That is really exciting, because we can now probe these different stages,” says Mukhopadhyay.

Lost youth

The discovery could help scientists learn more about the collision with Theia, says at the University of Cologne in Germany. Last week, he and his colleagues reported that are different from those on Earth.

Since much of the moon is thought to have formed from Theia’s debris, its isotopic composition should be different from Earth’s. But until now, no one had been able to detect noticeable differences. The team says that seeing the oxygen signature is strong evidence for the giant impact.

Future oxygen-isotope measurements from a portion of Earth that survived the impact could reveal more about what our planet was like in its lost youth. That in turn may help us infer details about Theia, such as its size and composition. “What an exciting outlook!” says Herwartz.