About 880 light-years from Earth, a hot mess of an exoplanet is slowly spilling its atmosphere into space, creating two enormous tails of helium that stretch more than halfway around its star.
A newborn star 15,000 light-years from Earth is fascinating astronomers with its dual blasts of superheated plasma jets. The rare sight captured in stunning detail by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) isn’t only a display of cosmic forces. It’s helping solve a decades’ long debate about the origins of massive stellar objects.
Using data gathered by a suite of space- and ground-based telescopes, astronomers have discovered AT 2024wpp, the most luminous fast blue optical transient (LFBOT) ever observed. These rare, brief, and intensely bright outbursts have puzzled scientists for a decade, but the extreme brightness and detailed multiwavelength data from AT 2024wpp show that they cannot be explained by any kind of normal stellar explosion such as a supernova. Instead, the new observations indicate that AT 2024wpp was powered by an extreme tidal disruption event in which a black hole up to about 100 times the mass of the Sun tore apart a massive companion star in a matter of days, converting an extraordinary fraction of the star’s mass into energy.
Officially named PSR J2322-2650b, this Jupiter-mass object appears to have an exotic helium-and-carbon-dominated atmosphere unlike any ever seen before. Soot clouds likely float through the air, and deep within the planet, these carbon clouds can condense and form diamonds.[...]“This system is unique because we are able to view the planet illuminated by its host star, but not see the host star at all,” said Maya Beleznay, a third-year PhD candidate at Stanford University in California who worked on modeling the shape of the planet and the geometry of its orbit. “So we get a really pristine spectrum. And we can study this system in more detail than normal exoplanets.” “The planet orbits a star that's completely bizarre — the mass of the Sun, but the size of a city,” said the University of Chicago’s Michael Zhang, the principal investigator on this study. “This is a new type of planet atmosphere that nobody has ever seen before. Instead of finding the normal molecules we expect to see on an exoplanet — like water, methane, and carbon dioxide — we saw molecular carbon, specifically C3 and C2.”
This animation shows an exotic exoplanet orbiting a distant pulsar, or rapidly rotating neutron star with radio pulses. The planet, which orbits about 1 million miles away from the pulsar, is stretched into a lemon shape by the pulsar’s strong gravitational tides. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope found that the planet’s atmospheric composition defies explanation. They detected molecular carbon, specifically C3 and C2, which would only be expected if there were almost no oxygen or nitrogen.The pulsar’s characteristic radio beams wobble or precess as the pulsar spins because they are angled about 30 degrees from the pulsar’s spin axis. This animation is not to scale. The pulsar spins almost 300 times per second, while the planet orbits once every 7.8 hours.
Careful reanalysis of data from more than a decade ago indicates that Saturn’s biggest moon, Titan, does not have a vast ocean beneath its icy surface, as suggested previously. Instead, a journey below the frozen exterior likely involves more ice giving way to slushy tunnels and pockets of meltwater near the rocky core. Data from NASA’s Cassini mission to Saturn initially led researchers to suspect a large ocean composed of liquid water under the ice on Titan. However, when they modeled the moon with an ocean, the results didn’t match the physical properties described by the data. A fresh look yielded new — slushier — results. The findings could spark similar inquiries into other worlds in the solar system, and help narrow the search for life on Titan.“Instead of an open ocean like we have here on Earth, we’re probably looking at something more like Arctic sea ice or aquifers, which has implications for what type of life we might find, but also the availability of nutrients, energy and so on,” said Baptiste Journaux, a University of Washington assistant professor of Earth and space sciences.
“The discovery of a slushy layer on Titan also has exciting implications for the search for life beyond our solar system,” Jones said. “It expands the range of environments we might consider habitable.” Although the notion of an ocean on Titan invigorated the search for life there, the researchers believe the new findings might improve the odds of finding it. Analyses indicate that the pockets of freshwater on Titan could reach 68 degrees Fahrenheit. Any available nutrients would be more concentrated in a small volume of water, compared to an open ocean, which could facilitate the growth of simple organisms. While it is unlikely that the researchers discover fish wriggling through slushy channels, if life is found on Titan, it may resemble polar ecosystems on Earth.
New research finds a distinct group of hot Jupiters whose circular orbits defy tidal-migration timescales, pointing to formation within protoplanetary disks.
An international team of astronomers has conducted optical and near-infrared observations of a supernova designated SN 2022ngb. As a result, it was found that SN 2022ngb is a faint and slow-evolving Type IIb supernova with a low-mass envelope.
Now, for the first time, astronomers have confirmed a supermassive black hole at least 10 million times the mass of the Sun, somehow yeeted from its host galaxy at a jaw-dropping 954 kilometers (593 miles) per second – that's 0.32 percent of the speed of light.
The shape of the universe is not something we often think about. But my colleagues and I have published a new study suggests it could be asymmetric or lopsided, meaning not the same in every direction.Should we care about this? Well, today’s “standard cosmological model” – which describes the dynamics and structure of the entire cosmos – rests squarely on the assumption that it is isotropic (looks the same in all directions), and homogeneous when averaged on large scales.But several so-called “tensions” – or disagreements in the data – pose challenges to this idea of a uniform universe.We have just published a paper looking at one of the most significant of these tensions, called the cosmic dipole anomaly. We conclude that the cosmic dipole anomaly poses a serious challenge to the most widely accepted description of the universe, the standard cosmological model (also called the Lambda-CDM model).
Starlight and stardust are not enough to drive the powerful winds of giant stars, transporting the building blocks of life through our galaxy. That’s the conclusion of a new study from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, of red giant star R Doradus. The result overturns a long-held idea about how the atoms needed for life are spread.“We thought we had a good idea of how the process worked. It turns out we were wrong. For us as scientists, that’s the most exciting result”, says Theo Khouri, astronomer at Chalmers and joint leader of the study.
Searches for dark matter particles have come up empty so far, driving theorists to get more creative with their ideas.
The masses of fundamental particles such as the Z and W bosons could have arisen from the twisted geometry of hidden dimensions, a new theoretical paper has demonstrated.The work has outlined a way to bypass the Higgs field as the source of particle masses, offering a new tool for understanding how the Higgs field itself might have emerged, as well as a possible means of addressing some of the persistent gaps in the Standard Model of particle physics.
The results also tentatively suggest that the accelerating expansion of the Universe may be linked to curvature imparted by the kind of torsion of a G2 manifold could impart. And, if this torsion behaves as a field, it should manifest particles, the way the Higgs field gives rise to the Higgs boson.
Since its launch, Terra has consistently orbited Earth from pole to pole, training all five instruments on the planet’s surface and gathering simultaneous data, with the Earth Science Mission Operations (ESMO) team vigilantly monitoring the satellite’s energy and performance day and (until quite recently) night. As the satellite aged, the team began performing periodic inclination adjustments to maintain the satellite’s orbit and preserve its fuel supply to ensure it could continue to collect data. Their oversight has been so effective that a mission designed with a six-year lifetime continues to operate in 2025. This unplanned longevity is true for all three of the EOS Flagships.Inevitably, the decades in Earth’s orbit has taken a toll on the flight hardware. Eventually the fuel to keep the satellite stable in its orbit will run out – even if the instruments onboard are still functioning nominally. To conserve Terra’s remaining fuel to allow for controlled reentry into Earth’s atmosphere and to extend science operations aa long as possible, in late 2020 NASA Headquarters decided it was time to stop making adjustments to maintain Terra’s orbit. As a consequence, the satellite has begun to drift in its orbit, slowly sliding into an earlier equator crossing time. By Fall 2022, Terra’s orbit lowered to about 5 km (3 mi) and began crossing the equator at 10:15 AM. While these changes seem significant, they only created minor adjustments to orbital repeat time and swath width. The research community continued to gather data about atmospheric dynamics, water and energy cycles, atmospheric chemistry, physical and radiative properties of clouds, air-land exchanges of energy, carbon and water, and vertical profiles of CO vulcanology. The Earth Observer discussed the consequences – and opportunities – of these orbit shifts to Terra (and Aqua and Aura) in the article NASA Holds Discussions about the Future of the EOS Flagship Missions [Jan.–Feb. 2023, 35:1, 13–17].Along with the adjustments in Terra’s orbit, the satellite has also experienced power limitations due to slow degradation of the battery that powers the spacecraft. While ESMO and the instrument Science Teams managed these reductions for as long as possible without impacts on science, early this year the first sacrifice to science had to be made. MOPITT was switched to safe mode on February 1, 2025 and then turned off on April 9, 2025. As of this writing, the remaining four instruments continue to function, with limitations to the ASTER telescopes.“It really is a testament to great work by the entire team for being able to keep this spacecraft up in the air and healthy and to be able to produce like it has,” Terri Wood [EDOS—Project Manager] told EarthData in 2020. “It’s people, processes, and programs that make this happen. I just think it’s a real testament to what we can do around here.”
