Axios

Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rosselló has created a task force to examine the death toll from Hurricane María and release its findings within 90 days, per Reuters.

• Why it matters: His decision comes less than a month after Puerto Rico's Center for Investigative Journalism and The New York Times reported that the death toll is more than 1,000. The official death count was said to be 64. Following the reports, The governor ordered a recount of every death on the island since Hurricane Maria made landfall on September 20, knocking out power to 3.4 million Puerto Ricans.
• Go deeper: Puerto Rico's governor wants recount of hurricane death toll; One-third of Puerto Rico still doesn't have power.

Extremely massive stars may be more abundant in at least one corner of the universe than astronomers have previously thought, according to new research published today in the Science. The finding, if confirmed elsewhere in the cosmos, could change our understanding about the evolution of galaxies, how these stars brought the universe came out of its dark period, the number of supernovae and the occurrence of black hole mergers in the universe.

"These stars and black holes are responsible for converting the universe into the state we see today," says lead author Fabian Schneider from the University of Oxford. "It is important to know how many progenitor stars may have been out in the universe."

If you're in the mood for adventures in space, then 2018 should leave you satisfied — for now, at least. With a half dozen major planetary exploration missions launching or approaching their targets this year, the solar system is going to be a busy place:

• India's lunar lander and rover, Chandrayaan-2, will launch in March.
• NASA leads a return to the Red Planet in May with the departure of its Insight lander.
• Japan's Hayabusa 2 and NASA's OSIRIS-REx missions will arrive at their respective asteroid targets this summer.
• The European Space Agency's BepiColombo orbiter will depart for Mercury in October.

What's next: These missions will return a bounty of information on the history of Mars, the curious properties of Mercury's interior, and even the origins of the solar system itself. Of course, every question answered could prompt at least a dozen more.

Paul Sutter is a cosmological researcher at Ohio State University's Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics.