JWST has shown that it can detect various chemicals in the atmospheres of other worlds, from water vapor to carbon dioxide. Although it's an incredible demonstration of the telescope's power, it wasn't designed for only this job. The Large Interferometer for Exoplanets (LIFE) is a next-generation space telescope under consideration by ESA. According to a new paper, this telescope could detect rare biosignatures like laughing gas within a few days of study.

Your body's cells use water to dissolve chemicals. It's the same with all life on Earth. But could other fluids work as a solvent? A new paper reviews the potential for different liquid solvents to support life and proposes some surprising candidates, like liquid carbon dioxide, ammonia, and even concentrated sulfuric acid. Each of these solvents is liquid in dramatically different conditions, helping expand the possibilities for life as we don't know it.

In 2017, a worldwide collection of radio telescopes gathered data about the event horizon around the supermassive black hole at the heart of M87. This was the first time we saw the shadow of a black hole. One year later, the Event Horizon Telescope, including the new Greenland Telescope, came together again. Today, we got the updated 2018 image showing that a bright spot in the ring has shifted by 30 degrees compared to the 2017 image.

Researchers have developed the first 3D maps of magnetic field structures within a spiral arm of the Milky Way. While we've seen smaller-scale magnetic fields before, this is much larger, showing the overall magnetic pattern in our galaxy. These fields are incredibly weak, about 100,000 times weaker than the Earth's magnetic field, but they impact the galaxy, strongly influencing star-forming regions.