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By European Space Agency
Video: 02:08:03 ESA’s Living Planet Symposium, one of the world’s leading Earth observation conferences, opened today in Vienna. The plenary session began at 10:30 CEST and included addresses from ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher and ESA Director of Earth Observation Programmes Simonetta Cheli, as well as Margit Mischkulnig, from the Austrian Federal Ministry for Innovation.
There were video addresses from President of Austria, Alexander van der Bellen, Federal Minister for Innovation, Mobility and Infrastructure Republic of Austria Peter Hanke and the EU Commissioner for Defence and Space Andrius Kubilius. Representatives of the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, ECMWF, IPCC, Eumetsat, Nordic Bildung and ETH Zurich also spoke during the opening session.
The first images from Biomass, ESA’s forest mission, launched earlier this year, were also presented during the opening plenary.
More than 6500 participants from almost 120 countries signed up to attend the event. With more than 4200 scientific presentations and posters, the symposium provides a forum and meeting point for scientists, academics and space industry representatives, as well as students and citizens.
The Living Planet Symposium takes place every three years and this year the focus is ‘from observation to climate action and sustainability for Earth’. Held in the Austrian capital over five days from today to 27 June, participants can take part in discussions on how we can work together in the fields of Earth science and with the Earth observation industry to ensure robust data and promote effective climate action to address the environmental crisis, with presentations also on new trends in Earth observation.
Watch more videos from the Living Planet Symposium 2025.
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By USH
Evidence points to the existence of a massive planet once located between Mars and Jupiter, known to some as Maldek. This ancient world is believed to have had a large moon, complete with oceans, an atmosphere, and possibly even life, orbiting it for millions of years.
Maldek is thought to have once been home to a highly advanced humanoid civilization before meeting a cataclysmic end, likely the result of either internal collapse, through nuclear war, technological abuse, or spiritual decline, or an external force, whether natural or engineered. Its destruction scattered debris across the solar system, forming what we now know as the asteroid belt.
As for its large moon, it was cast adrift and eventually settled into a new orbit around the Sun. Today, we know that moon as Mars.
This theory sheds light on several of Mars’ mysteries: the stark contrast between its two hemispheres, the presence of tidal bulges typically seen in moons, and the unusual nuclear isotopes in its soil, matching those produced by atomic explosions.
For decades, government scientists have suppressed this information. But the truth remains, etched into planetary scars, buried beneath ancient monuments, and encoded in the mathematical patterns of our solar system’s violent past.
Additional: According to some alternative theories, a remnant of Maldek’s civilization escaped the planet’s cataclysmic destruction, seeking refuge on Mars, a world that once pulsed with life and bore a striking resemblance to Earth. For a time, they thrived. But Mars, too, would not remain untouched. Whether through the slow unraveling of its atmosphere or the lingering shadows of interplanetary war, Mars fell into decline. And so, the survivors journeyed again, this time to Earth. Shrouded in mystery, their presence may have shaped early human consciousness, remembered through the ages as ancient gods or sky beings.
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By NASA
5 min read
Percolating Clues: NASA Models New Way to Build Planetary Cores
NASA’s Perseverance rover was traveling in the channel of an ancient river, Neretva Vallis, when it captured this view of an area of scientific interest nicknamed “Bright Angel” – the light-toned area in the distance at right. The area features light-toned rocky outcrops that may represent either ancient sediment that later filled the channel or possibly much older rock that was subsequently exposed by river erosion. NASA/JPL-Caltech A new NASA study reveals a surprising way planetary cores may have formed—one that could reshape how scientists understand the early evolution of rocky planets like Mars.
Conducted by a team of early-career scientists and long-time researchers across the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science (ARES) Division at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, the study offers the first direct experimental and geochemical evidence that molten sulfide, rather than metal, could percolate through solid rock and form a core—even before a planet’s silicate mantle begins to melt.
For decades, scientists believed that forming a core required large-scale melting of a planetary body, followed by heavy metallic elements sinking to the center. This study introduces a new scenario—especially relevant for planets forming farther from the Sun, where sulfur and oxygen are more abundant than iron. In these volatile-rich environments, sulfur behaves like road salt on an icy street—it lowers the melting point by reacting with metallic iron to form iron-sulfide so that it may migrate and combine into a core. Until now, scientists didn’t know if sulfide could travel through solid rock under realistic planet formation conditions.
Working on this project pushed us to be creative. It was exciting to see both data streams converge on the same story.
Dr. Jake Setera
ARES Scientist with Amentum
The study results gave researchers a way to directly observe this process using high-resolution 3D imagery—confirming long-standing models about how core formation can occur through percolation, in which dense liquid sulfide travels through microscopic cracks in solid rock.
“We could actually see in full 3D renderings how the sulfide melts were moving through the experimental sample, percolating in cracks between other minerals,” said Dr. Sam Crossley of the University of Arizona in Tucson, who led the project while a postdoctoral fellow with NASA Johnson’s ARES Division. “It confirmed our hypothesis—that in a planetary setting, these dense melts would migrate to the center of a body and form a core, even before the surrounding rock began to melt.”
Recreating planetary formation conditions in the lab required not only experimental precision but also close collaboration among early-career scientists across ARES to develop new ways of observing and analyzing the results. The high-temperature experiments were first conducted in the experimental petrology lab, after which the resulting samples—or “run products”—were brought to NASA Johnson’s X-ray computed tomography (XCT) lab for imaging.
A molten sulfide network (colored gold) percolates between silicate mineral grains in this cut-out of an XCT rendering—rendered are unmelted silicates in gray and sulfides in white. Credit: Crossley et al. 2025, Nature Communications X-ray scientist and study co-author Dr. Scott Eckley of Amentum at NASA Johnson used XCT to produce high-resolution 3D renderings—revealing melt pockets and flow pathways within the samples in microscopic detail. These visualizations offered insight into the physical behavior of materials during early core formation without destroying the sample.
The 3D XCT visualizations initially confirmed that sulfide melts could percolate through solid rock under experimental conditions, but that alone could not confirm whether percolative core formation occurred over 4.5 billion years ago. For that, researchers turned to meteorites.
“We took the next step and searched for forensic chemical evidence of sulfide percolation in meteorites,” Crossley said. “By partially melting synthetic sulfides infused with trace platinum-group metals, we were able to reproduce the same unusual chemical patterns found in oxygen-rich meteorites—providing strong evidence that sulfide percolation occurred under those conditions in the early solar system.”
To understand the distribution of trace elements, study co-author Dr. Jake Setera, also of Amentum, developed a novel laser ablation technique to accurately measure platinum-group metals, which concentrate in sulfides and metals.
“Working on this project pushed us to be creative,” Setera said. “To confirm what the 3D visualizations were showing us, we needed to develop an appropriate laser ablation method that could trace the platinum group-elements in these complex experimental samples. It was exciting to see both data streams converge on the same story.”
When paired with Setera’s geochemical analysis, the data provided powerful, independent lines of evidence that molten sulfide had migrated and coalesced within a solid planetary interior. This dual confirmation marked the first direct demonstration of the process in a laboratory setting.
Dr. Sam Crossley welds shut the glass tube of the experimental assembly. To prevent reaction with the atmosphere and precisely control oxygen and sulfur content, experiments needed to be sealed in a closed system under vacuum. Credit: Amentum/Dr. Brendan Anzures The study offers a new lens through which to interpret planetary geochemistry. Mars in particular shows signs of early core formation—but the timeline has puzzled scientists for years. The new results suggest that Mars’ core may have formed at an earlier stage, thanks to its sulfur-rich composition—potentially without requiring the full-scale melting that Earth experienced. This could help explain longstanding puzzles in Mars’ geochemical timeline and early differentiation.
The results also raise new questions about how scientists date core formation events using radiogenic isotopes, such as hafnium and tungsten. If sulfur and oxygen are more abundant during a planet’s formation, certain elements may behave differently than expected—remaining in the mantle instead of the core and affecting the geochemical “clocks” used to estimate planetary timelines.
This research advances our understanding of how planetary interiors can form under different chemical conditions—offering new possibilities for interpreting the evolution of rocky bodies like Mars. By combining experimental petrology, geochemical analysis, and 3D imaging, the team demonstrated how collaborative, multi-method approaches can uncover processes that were once only theoretical.
Crossley led the research during his time as a McKay Postdoctoral Fellow—a program that recognizes outstanding early-career scientists within five years of earning their doctorate. Jointly offered by NASA’s ARES Division and the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, the fellowship supports innovative research in astromaterials science, including the origin and evolution of planetary bodies across the solar system.
As NASA prepares for future missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond, understanding how planetary interiors form is more important than ever. Studies like this one help scientists interpret remote data from spacecraft, analyze returned samples, and build better models of how our solar system came to be.
For more information on NASA’s ARES division, visit: https://ares.jsc.nasa.gov/
Victoria Segovia
NASA’s Johnson Space Center
281-483-5111
victoria.segovia@nasa.gov
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Last Updated May 22, 2025 Related Terms
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By NASA
Explore This Section Exoplanets Home Exoplanets Overview Exoplanets Facts Types of Exoplanets Stars What is the Universe Search for Life The Big Questions Are We Alone? Can We Find Life? The Habitable Zone Why We Search Target Star Catalog Discoveries Discoveries Dashboard How We Find and Characterize Missions People Exoplanet Catalog Immersive The Exoplaneteers Exoplanet Travel Bureau 5 Ways to Find a Planet Strange New Worlds Universe of Monsters Galaxy of Horrors News Stories Blog Resources Get Involved Glossary Eyes on Exoplanets Exoplanet Watch More Multimedia ExEP Artist’s concept of a planet orbiting two brown dwarfs. The planet is in a polar orbit (red), perpendicular to the mutual orbit of the two brown dwarfs (blue). ESO/L. Calçada The Discovery
A newly discovered planetary system, informally known as 2M1510, is among the strangest ever found. An apparent planet traces out an orbit that carries it far over the poles of two brown dwarfs. This pair of mysterious objects – too massive to be planets, not massive enough to be stars – also orbit each other. Yet a third brown dwarf orbits the other two at an extreme distance.
Key Facts
In a typical arrangement, as in our solar system, families of planets orbit their parent stars in more-or-less a flat plane – the orbital plane – that matches the star’s equator. The rotation of the star, too, aligns with this plane. Everyone is “coplanar:” flat, placid, stately.
Not so for possible planet 2M1510 b (considered a “candidate planet” pending further measurements). If confirmed, the planet would be in a “polar orbit” around the two central brown dwarfs – in other words, its orbital plane would be perpendicular to the plane in which the two brown dwarfs orbit each other. Take two flat disks, merge them together at an angle in the shape of an X, and you have the essence of this orbital configuration.
“Circumbinary” planets, those orbiting two stars at once, are rare enough. A circumbinary orbiting at a 90-degree tilt was, until now, unheard of. But new measurements of this system, using the ESO (European Southern Observatory) Very Large Telescope in Chile, appear to reveal what scientists previously only imagined.
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The method by which the study’s science team teased out the planet’s vertiginous existence is itself a bit of a wild ride. The candidate planet cannot be detected the way most exoplanets – planets around other stars – are found today: the “transit” method, a kind of mini-eclipse, a tiny dip in starlight when the planet crosses the face of its star.
Instead they used the next most prolific method, “radial velocity” measurements. Orbiting planets cause their stars to rock back and forth ever so slightly, as the planets’ gravity pulls the stars one way and another; that pull causes subtle, but measurable, shifts in the star’s light spectrum. Add one more twist to the detection in this case: the push-me-pull-you effect of the planet on the two brown dwarfs’ orbit around each other. The path of the brown dwarf pair’s 21-day mutual orbit is being subtly altered in a way that can only be explained, the study’s authors conclude, by a polar-orbiting planet.
Fun Facts
Only 16 circumbinary planets – out of more than 5,800 confirmed exoplanets – have been found by scientists so far, most by the transit method. Twelve of those were found using NASA’s now-retired Kepler Space Telescope, the mission that takes the prize for the most transit detections (nearly 2,800). Scientists have observed a small number of debris disks and “protoplanetary” disks in polar orbits, and suspected that polar-orbiting planets might be out there as well. They seem at last to have turned one up.
The Discoverers
An international science team led by Thomas A. Baycroft, a Ph.D. student in astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Birmingham, U.K., published a paper describing their discovery in the journal “Science Advances” in April 2025. The planet was entered into NASA’s Exoplanet Archive on May 1, 2025. The system’s full name is 2MASS J15104786-281874 (2M1510 for short).
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Last Updated May 21, 2025 Related Terms
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By NASA
5 Min Read Planetary Alignment Provides NASA Rare Opportunity to Study Uranus
Artist's illustration showing a distant star going out of sight as it is eclipsed by Uranus – an event known as a planetary stellar occultation. Credits: NASA/Advanced Concepts Laboratory When a planet’s orbit brings it between Earth and a distant star, it’s more than just a cosmic game of hide and seek. It’s an opportunity for NASA to improve its understanding of that planet’s atmosphere and rings. Planetary scientists call it a stellar occultation and that’s exactly what happened with Uranus on April 7.
Observing the alignment allows NASA scientists to measure the temperatures and composition of Uranus’ stratosphere – the middle layer of a planet’s atmosphere – and determine how it has changed over the last 30 years since Uranus’ last significant occultation.
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This rendering demonstrates what is happening during a stellar occultation and illustrates an example of the light curve data graph recorded by scientists that enables them to gather atmospheric measurements, like temperature and pressure, from Uranus as the amount of starlight changes when the planet eclipses the star.NASA/Advanced Concepts Laboratory “Uranus passed in front of a star that is about 400 light years from Earth,” said William Saunders, planetary scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, and science principal investigator and analysis lead, for what NASA’s team calls the Uranus Stellar Occultation Campaign 2025. “As Uranus began to occult the star, the planet’s atmosphere refracted the starlight, causing the star to appear to gradually dim before being blocked completely. The reverse happened at the end of the occultation, making what we call a light curve. By observing the occultation from many large telescopes, we are able to measure the light curve and determine Uranus’ atmospheric properties at many altitude layers.”
We are able to measure the light curve and determine Uranus' atmospheric properties at many altitude layers.
William Saunders
Planetary Scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center
This data mainly consists of temperature, density, and pressure of the stratosphere. Analyzing the data will help researchers understand how the middle atmosphere of Uranus works and could help enable future Uranus exploration efforts.
To observe the rare event, which lasted about an hour and was only visible from Western North America, planetary scientists at NASA Langley led an international team of over 30 astronomers using 18 professional observatories.
Kunio Sayanagi, NASA’s principal investigator for the Uranus Stellar Occultation Campaign 2025, meeting virtually with partners and observing data from the Flight Mission Support Center at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia during Uranus’ stellar occultation event on April 7, 2025.NASA/Dave MacDonnell “This was the first time we have collaborated on this scale for an occultation,” said Saunders. “I am extremely grateful to each member of the team and each observatory for taking part in this extraordinary event. NASA will use the observations of Uranus to determine how energy moves around the atmosphere and what causes the upper layers to be inexplicably hot. Others will use the data to measure Uranus’ rings, its atmospheric turbulence, and its precise orbit around the Sun.”
Knowing the location and orbit of Uranus is not as simple as it sounds. In 1986, NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft became the first and only spacecraft to fly past the planet – 10 years before the last bright stellar occultation occured in 1996. And, Uranus’ exact position in space is only accurate to within about 100 miles, which makes analyzing this new atmospheric data crucial to future NASA exploration of the ice giant.
These investigations were possible because the large number of partners provided many unique views of the stellar occultation from many different instruments.
NASA planetary scientist William Saunders and Texas A&M University research assistant Erika Cook in the control room of the McDonald Observatory’s Otto Struve Telescope in Jeff Davis County, Texas, during the Uranus stellar occultation on April 7, 2025.Joshua Santana Emma Dahl, a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech in Pasadena, California, assisted in gathering observations from NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) on the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii – an observatory first built to support NASA’s Voyager missions.
“As scientists, we do our best work when we collaborate. This was a team effort between NASA scientists, academic researchers, and amateur astronomers,” said Dahl. “The atmospheres of the gas and ice giant planets [Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune] are exceptional atmospheric laboratories because they don’t have solid surfaces. This allows us to study cloud formation, storms, and wind patterns without the extra variables and effects a surface produces, which can complicate simulations very quickly.”
On November 12, 2024, NASA Langley researchers and collaborators were able to do a test run to prepare for the April occultation. Langley coordinated two telescopes in Japan and one in Thailand to observe a dimmer Uranus stellar occultation only visible from Asia. As a result, these observers learned how to calibrate their instruments to observe stellar occultations, and NASA was able to test its theory that multiple observatories working together could capture Uranus’ big event in April.
Researchers from the Paris Observatory and Space Science Institute, in contact with NASA, also coordinated observations of the November 2024 occultation from two telescopes in India. These observations of Uranus and its rings allowed the researchers, who were also members of the April 7 occultation team, to improve the predictions about the timing on April 7 down to the second and also improved modeling to update Uranus’ expected location during the occultation by 125 miles.
This image of Uranus from NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope exquisitely captures Uranus’s seasonal north polar cap and dim inner and outer rings. This Webb image also shows 9 of the planet’s 27 moons – clockwise starting at 2 o’clock, they are: Rosalind, Puck, Belinda, Desdemona, Cressida, Bianca, Portia, Juliet, and Perdita.NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI Uranus is almost 2 billion miles away from Earth and has an atmosphere composed of primarily hydrogen and helium. It does not have a solid surface, but rather a soft surface made of water, ammonia, and methane. It’s called an ice giant because its interior contains an abundance of these swirling fluids that have relatively low freezing points. And, while Saturn is the most well-known planet for having rings, Uranus has 13 known rings composed of ice and dust.
Over the next six years, Uranus will occult several dimmer stars. NASA hopes to gather airborne and possibly space-based measurements of the next bright Uranus occultation in 2031, which will be of an even brighter star than the one observed in April.
For more information on NASA’s Uranus Stellar Occultation Campaign 2025:
https://science.larc.nasa.gov/URANUS2025
Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov
Charles Hatfield
Langley Research Center, Hampton, Virginia
757-262-8289
charles.g.hatfield@nasa.gov
About the Author
Charles G. Hatfield
Science Public Affairs Officer, NASA Langley Research Center
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Last Updated Apr 22, 2025 Related Terms
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