While studying Lake Fryxell, a frigid Antarctic lake, geoscientists at the University of California, Davis, discovered a thin layer of green bacteria that was generating a little oasis of oxygen. The scientists believe that this could be a replica of conditions on Earth two and a half billions ago when oxygen was not so common in the Earth’s atmosphere. Read more about their research here.

Physicists with the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) made the groundbreaking announcement that they have detected the gravitational waves. David Reitze, the executive director of the LIGO Laboratory, stated that after 10 years of efforts, the twin detectors in their laboratory “heard the gravitational 'ringing'” that is a result of collision of two black holes that are 1.3 billion years away from our planet. Read more about their research here.

A group of researchers, including Dr. John Pasley of the York Plasma Institute, Department of Physics, discovered that stars generate sound. Read more about their research here.

A team of researchers from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, discovered evidence for an unanticipated role of electrons in creating the pulsating auroras. Read more about their research here.

Fertilizers are widely used around the world, and the effect of the chemicals in fertilizers on water and soil are immense. In particular, phosphorus has become a concerning chemical because it accumulates in water bodies as well as the landscape. An international team of researchers studied the presence of this chemical in three river basins: the Thames River basin in the U.K., the Maumee River Basin in the mid-western section of the U.S. and the Yangtze River Basin in China. Read more about their research here.

Researchers at the Department of Geography at CU-Boulder published the findings of the longest and largest study of wildfires in Amazon, which is the world's largest rainforest. In this study lasting a decade, the researchers selected a 370-acre plot in the southeastern portion of the Amazon and tested the effects of controlled fires of different burn frequencies. Read on to know more about this study.

NASA’s Spritzer Space Telescope has discovered seven Earth-sized exoplanets that are likely to have liquid water. All seven planets closely circle around a single dwarf star Trappist-1. The system is about 40 light years away from Earth in the constellation Aquarius. Of the seven, three planets are in the habitable zone and have the highest chances of having life. Read more about this discovery here.

An international team of researchers has released the new World Atlas of Artificial Sky Brightness, which shows that the Milky Way is hidden from one third of humanity due to light pollution. Using high-resolution satellite data and precision sky brightness measurements, the team assessed the impact of light pollution on humans as well as wildlife. Read more about their research here.

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which has been orbiting Saturn for more than a decade, has revealed that Saturn’s moon Titan has a sea filled with liquid methane. It is known that Saturn’s atmosphere consists primarily of methane, and the extreme cold weather on the planet have led researchers to speculate that it could have reserves of hydrocarbon in the form of seas. This was proved right by the Cassini spacecraft’s data which showed that more than 1.6 million square kilometers of the planet’s surface is covered in liquid. Read more about these findings here.

Researchers at the University of East Anglia discovered that ‘Pelagibacterales,’ a group of bacteria, have a significant role to play in maintaining the stability of the Earth’s atmosphere by increasing the cloud droplets. This bacteria, which are the smallest genomes of all free-living organisms, are found in abundance on the Earth. Read more about their research here.