Space: Planet-eating stars, NASA slashes telescope budget, interstellar signal mixup

March 21—This week, we're talking about what may be the end of the world's greatest x-ray telescope, stars on planet-based diets, a debate over a putative "interstellar" meteor, every bit of outer space we've brought back to Earth, and more. Enjoy! -Lee Billings, Senior Editor, Space and Physics

Top Stories

Astronomers Fight to Save X-ray Telescope as NASA Dishes Out Budget Cuts The Chandra X-ray Observatory faces a premature end under new funding cuts proposed by NASA—and astronomers aren't happy Jonathan O'Callaghan

Don't Panic, But A Lot of Stars Seem to Eat Their Own Planets At least one in a dozen binary stars shows signs of eating their planets Robin George Andrews

'Interstellar' Meteor Signal May Have Been a Truck—So What Was Collected from the Ocean Floor? New analyses cast doubt on claims that a meteor witnessed over the South Pacific in 2014 came from another star system and raise questions about a high-profile expedition to recover the fireball's fragments from the seafloor Jonathan O'Callaghan

See Every Bit of Outer Space We've Brought Back to Earth Sample-return missions have brought piles of moon rocks, plus pieces of asteroids, comets and even the sun back to Earth. Next up is the big prize: Mars Clara Moskowitz; John Knight

Most Astronauts Get 'Space Headaches.' Scientists Want to Know Why Headaches are a common and recurring problem in space, even for astronauts that don't experience them on Earth Joanna Thompson

Do the Digits of Pi Actually Contain All of Shakespeare? If pi is a "normal" number, the constant would contain much more than Shakespeare, resolving why such a random-looking number lives at the heart of simple circles Jack Murtagh

Orion's Twin Rogue Planets Inexplicably Blaze with Intense Radio Waves Researchers don't know how this pair of free-floating planets formed or why it radiates so brightly Joseph Howlett

Astronomers Are Snapping Baby Pictures of Planets by the Dozen Snapshots of a plethora of planet-forming disks offer more than just eye candy—they also reveal some fundamental aspects of how worlds are born Phil Plait

Stunning Comet Spiral Offers Glimpse of Icy Snowball at Its Core Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks is hiding a strange spiral in its icy heart—and it may tell scientists about the comet's innards Meghan Bartels

How to Make Alien Ice Tricks to produce strange "ordered" ice could reveal new ice forms Elise Cutts

Mathematician Who Tamed Randomness Wins Abel Prize Michel Talagrand innovative work has allowed others to tackle problems involving random processes Davide Castelvecchi; Nature magazine

Quantum Weirdness in New Materials Bends the Rules of Physics Electrons swarm in a soup of quantum entanglement in a new class of materials called strange metals Douglas Natelson

Poem: 'SnapShot, 1968' Science in meter and verse Gregory Bell

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