The Perseverance rover landed in Jezero crater on Mars, which once contained a lake of liquid water. We report the rock properties encountered by Perseverance during a 10-kilometer traverse extending over 400 meters in elevation, from beneath Jezero's western sedimentary fan to the upper crater rim. These rocks consist of coarse-grained olivine, magnesium and iron carbonates, silica, and phyllosilicates, including some of the oldest materials exposed within Jezero. We infer that these rocks formed by olivine accumulation in an igneous system of layered intrusions, followed by exposure to water and carbon dioxide, which caused extensive carbonation of the silicate minerals. Aqueous alteration was more pronounced at lower elevations. Higher-elevation exposures on the crater rim appear similar to olivine-rich rocks distributed over the wider Nili Fossae region.
3I/ATLAS was discovered on ut 2025 July 1 and joins a limited but growing population of detected ${\sim}10<^>2{\!-\!}10<^>3$ m scale interstellar objects. In this paper, we report photometric observations of 3I/ATLAS from the nights of ut 2025 July 3, ut 2025 July 9, and ut 2025 July 10 obtained with the Southern Astrophysical Research Telescope. The photometric observations are taken with the Goodman High Throughput Spectrograph in the r ' band. These data provide 28 photometric data points to the rapidly growing composite light curve of 3I/ATLAS. They reveal that the object did not exhibit obvious long-term variability in its brightness when these observations were taken. These observations appear to have captured two moderate and independent brightening events on ut 2025 July 9, and ut 2025 July 10. However, we perform a series of stellar contamination, stacking, and aperture experiments that demonstrate that the increases in brightness by ${\sim}0.8$ mag appear to be a result of poor seeing and stellar contamination by close-proximity field stars. We report the mean brightnesses of 3I/ATLAS on each night of magnitude 18.14, 17.55, and 17.54 for ut 2025 July 3, 9, and 10, respectively. Moreover, the presence of cometary activity in extant images obtained contemporaneously with these data precludes them from revealing insights into the rotation of the nucleus. We conclude that the activity of 3I/ATLAS on ut 2025 July 9 and ut July 10 was consistent with the near-discovery activity levels, with no obvious outburst activity.
We present James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Near-Infrared Spectrograph observations of SN 2024ggi, spanning wavelengths of 1.7–5.5 μ m at +285.51 and +385.27 days postexplosion. These nebular spectra are dominated by asymmetric emission lines from atomic species including H, Ca, Ar, C, Mg, Ni, Co, and Fe, indicative of an aspherical explosion. The other strong features are molecular CO vibrational bands from the fundamental and first overtone. We introduce a novel, data-driven approach using non–local thermodynamic equilibrium three-dimensional (3D) radiative transfer simulations to model the CO emission with high fidelity. This method enables us to constrain the 3D CO distribution and its radial temperature structure. CO formation is found to occur prior to day +285, with subsequent evolution characterized by progressive evaporation. The CO mass decreases from approximately 8.7 to 1.3 ×10 ^−3 M _⊙ , while the average temperature drops from ≈2900 to ≈2500 K. Concurrently, the CO distribution transitions from nearly homogeneous to highly clumped (density contrast increasing from fc ≈ 1.2 to 2). The minimum velocity of the CO-emitting region remains nearly constant ( v _1 ≈ 1200 to 1100 km s ^−1 ), significantly above the receding photosphere velocity ( v _ph ≈ 500 km s ^−1 ), suggesting the photosphere resides within Si-rich layers. However, the temperature profile indicates that only a narrow zone reaches the conditions necessary for SiO formation. Due to a lack of observational constraints, SiO clumping is not modeled, and thus, synthetic SiO profiles for mass estimates are not highlighted. We discuss the implications of these findings for dust formation processes in SN 2024ggi.
Producing stable 58Ni in Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) requires sufficiently high-density conditions that are not predicted for all origin scenarios, so examining the distribution of 58Ni using the near-infrared (NIR) [Ni II] 1.939 mu m line may observationally distinguish between possible progenitors and explosion mechanisms. We present 79 telluric-corrected NIR spectra of 22 low-redshift SNe Ia from the Carnegie Supernova Project-II, ranging from +50 to +505 days, including 31 previously unpublished spectra. We introduce the Gaussian Peak Ratio, a detection parameter that confirms the presence of the NIR [Ni II] 1.939 mu m line in eight SNe in our sample. Nondetections occur at earlier phases (<=+100 days) when the NIR Ni line has not emerged yet or in low signal-to-noise spectra, yielding inconclusive results. Subluminous 86G-like SNe Ia show the earliest NIR Ni features around similar to+50 days, whereas normal-bright SNe Ia do not exhibit NIR Ni until similar to+150 days. NIR Ni features detected in our sample have low peak velocities (v similar to 1200 km s-1) and narrow line widths (<= 3500 km s-1), indicating stable 58Ni is centrally located. This implies high-density burning conditions in the innermost regions of SNe Ia and could be due to higher mass progenitors (i.e., near-Mch). NIR spectra of the nearly two dozen SNe Ia in our sample are compared to various model predictions and paired with early-time properties to identify ideal observation windows for future SNe Ia discovered by upcoming surveys with Rubin-LSST or the Roman Space Telescope.
Reliable knowledge of the crustal properties beneath the North Anatolian fault (NAF), seismically silent for more than 250 years beneath the Marmara Sea (MS), is crucial for understanding seismic hazard and mitigating the potential for disaster on an enormous scale. In the present work, the first three-dimensional inverse modeling performed on a magnetotelluric dataset of the MS has unveiled localized weak and locked fault segments along this shear deformation zone. Low-resistivity regions along the northern branch of the NAF beneath the Central and Çınarcık-Imralı basins are likely attributed to the presence of fluids, which may represent a fault zone conductor in a fractured zone and can explain the densely populated microseismicity. These low-resistivity anomalies surrounded by higher resistivity structures imply that the segmented, multi-branched NAF system extends beneath the MS, following the Intra-Pontide suture zone. The resistive anomalies, between the Central and Çınarcık basins, along with those at the western and eastern extremities of the MS, presumably signify regions of stress accumulation, shedding light on the ongoing processes of fault mechanics at play in this critical region.