compiled by Arlene & David Kaplan

NASA’s Webb Space Telescope Observes Interstellar Comet NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope observed interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS Aug. 6, with its Near-Infrared Spectrograph instrument. The research team has been analyzing insights from Webb’s data, and a preprint is available online…more

How old is Jupiter? Meteorite ‘raindrops’ help scientists pin down gas giant’s age Mysterious spherical droplets in meteorites aren’t just cosmic oddities. They’re evidence of planetary formation. In some cases, to learn more about our solar system, all we have to do is look at evidence found on Earth. Researchers from Japan’s Nagoya University…more

This Powerful Telescope Quickly Found 2,100 New Asteroids More than a million asteroids, some of them potential threats to Earth. Asteroids with tails like comets. Interstellar objects that happen to be swinging by our sun. (Could they be alien spaceships?) More distant worlds including, perhaps, a ninth planet, which could fill in the story of our solar system’s turbulent youth….more

Onionlike Space Explosion May Be a New Type of Supernova Carl Sagan once said we are all made of star-stuff. Astronomers have long predicted that some of the heavier elements in the universe that comprise our very being, like carbon and oxygen, are forged inside stars and released when they die and explode in powerful supernovas….more

Scientists Find a Quadruple Star System in Our Cosmic Backyard Zenghua Zhang, an astronomer at Nanjing University in China, and his colleagues were combing through catalogs of stars in search of cold brown dwarfs, interstellar objects that fall somewhere between planets and stars. They found something odd, and rare, in the Milky Way….more

Rainer Weiss, Who Gave a Nod to Einstein and the Big Bang, Dies at 92 Rainer Weiss, who shared a Nobel Prize in Physics for developing a device that uses gravity to detect intergalactic events, like black holes colliding, and who helped confirm two central hypotheses about the universe: the Big Bang theory of how and when it began and Einstein’s theory of general relativity, died on Monday in Cambridge, Mass. He was 92….more

Uranus Was Hiding a Moon Outside Its Rings The space around Uranus just got a bit more crowded. On Tuesday, astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope announced the discovery of a moon orbiting around the pale blue ice giant, bringing its total number of satellites to 29. The latest addition, tentatively known as S/2025 U1, is tinier and fainter than any of the planet’s….more

NASA IXPE’s ‘Heartbeat Black Hole’ Measurements Challenge Current Theories An international team of astronomers using NASA’s IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer), has challenged our understanding of what happens to matter in the direct vicinity of a black hole. With IXPE, astronomers can study incoming X-rays and measure the polarization, a property of light that describes the direction of its electric field….more

NASA’s Hubble Uncovers Rare White Dwarf Merger Remnant An international team of astronomers has discovered a cosmic rarity: an ultra-massive white dwarf star resulting from a white dwarf merging with another star, rather than through the evolution of a single star. This discovery, made by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope’s sensitive ultraviolet observations, suggests these rare white dwarfs may be more common than previously suspected…more

NASA’s Apollo Samples, LRO Help Scientists Forecast Moonquakes As NASA prepares to send astronauts to the surface of the Moon’s south polar region for the first time ever during the Artemis III mission, scientists are working on methods to determine the frequency of moonquakes along active faults there. Faults are cracks in the Moon’s crust that indicate that the Moon is slowly shrinking as its interior cools over time. The contraction from shrinking causes the faults to move suddenly,….more