Mounting a telescope on the balcony at home, Wang Zhipu, a 16-year-old boy from Fujian province, observes the skies, takes photos and begins his voyage into space after class. Recently, his efforts were rewarded when he won the title of "Young Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2021" in the Royal Observatory Grecnwich's annual astrophotography contest. His winning entry, entitled Family Photo of the Solar System, shows seven of the eight planets lined up horizontally, with the sun on the left and moon on the right,both pictured larger in size than normal.

“All families are unconventional, so I adored this fresh, gently playful concept around the solar system,” said the competition judge Sue Prichard while talking about Wang's picture. “A meaningful technically accomplished work from a rising star of astronomical photography.”

It hasn't been easy taking pictures of outer space. For about half a year, Wang had to calculate the best time to shoot planets when they're opposite the sun in Earth's sky to get the brightest images. What's more, be still needed to wait for clear weather to see better. For example, to capture a clear picture of Mercury, the planet closest to the sun, which is often cited as the most difficult of the five brightest planets to see with the naked eve, Wang tried to shoot it three times in the early morning but failed. At sunset, he shot 10.000 frames of video and selected several thousand better frames to overlay, further refine them and form a more satisfactory picture.

Sometimes Wang would be so absorbed in his observations that he wouldn't go downstairs to fetch a coat, even in the middle of winter. Other times, he stood for hours under the burning sun to get the perfect shot. To get an ideal shot, he often gets up at dawn, sleeps early to wake up at midnight, and even takes time off from evening classes when necessary.

Scientists say they have found detailed evidence of ancient rivers on Mars. The discovery supported existing evidence that Mars once had water. The researchers said their findings suggested rivers may have flowed on the surface of Mars for hundreds of thousands of years.

These images were captured by a camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The camera is able to take detailed pictures of the surface while orbiting the planet from about 400 kilometers away. A team of scientists studied the images, which showed a valley network on Mars.

The team was led by Francesco Salese, a geologist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Salese said the scientists studied sedimentary (沉淀物) rocks from a 200 meters high rocky cliff. Sedimentary rocks form when sedimented (使沉积) and transported by water or wind.

“These are sedimentary rocks and were formed by rivers that were likely active for over 100,000 years,” Salese said, adding even without the ability to examine the cliff area on Mars, the pictures show strong similarities to sedimentary rocks found on the earth.

William McMahon is another geologist who was part of the investigation team. He said sedimentary rocks have long been studied on the earth to learn what conditions were like on our planet millions or even billions of years ago. Another leader of the team was Joel Davis, a researcher with Britain’s Natural History Museum. He said scientists had never before been able to examine such a rock formation with such great detail. They created 3D images of the area to get a more detailed understanding of it, which suggested some ancient Martian rivers were several meters deep.

Extremely energetic light from space is an unexplained wonder. Scientists don’t know where that light comes from, exactly. And now astronomers have spotted this light, called gamma (伽马) rays, at higher energies than ever before.

You can’t see gamma rays with your naked eyes (肉眼). They are much more energetic than the light that we can see. So you need a fancy detector to spot them. The Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory, LHAASO, is an experiment in China. It searches for extremely high energy gamma rays.

Scientists have spotted 12 gamma-ray hot spots. These are parts of the sky from which the gamma rays are sent out. Those hot spots show that our galaxy (银河系), the Milky Way, has powerful particle accelerators (粒子加速器). But those particle accelerators aren’t made by humans. Instead, they come from violent events in the universe. They might be exploding stars, for example. Such violent events make electric and magnetic fields, which can speed up protons (质子) and electrons. Those fast particles can then produce gamma rays with a lot of energy. That can happen when protons interact with other matter in space, for example.

Scientists aren’t sure what could produce gamma rays with the extreme energies observed. But the new observations point to two possibilities. One hot spot was associated with the Crab Nebula. That’s the remains of an exploded star. Another possible source was the Cygnus Cocoon. That’s a region where massive stars are forming. The stars send out strong winds in the process.

LHAASO is located on Haizi Mountain in China’s Sichuan province. It is not yet fully operational. It’s due to be completed later this year. Then, it could find even more gamma rays.