Astronomy

Researchers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have detected the strongest evidence yet for an atmosphere on a rocky planet outside our solar system. Observations of the ultra-hot super-Earth TOI-561 b suggest that the exoplanet is surrounded by a thick blanket of gases above a global magma ocean.

Carl Sagan famously said that “We’re all made of star-stuff”. But he didn’t elaborate on how that actually happened. Yes, many of the molecules in our bodies could only have been created in massive supernovae explosions - hence the saying. Scientists have long thought they had the mechanism for how settled - the isotopes created in the supernovae flew here on tiny dust grains (stardust) that eventually accreted into Earth, and later into biological systems. However, a new paper from Martin Bizzarro and his co-authors at the University of Copenhagen upends that theory by showing that much of the material created in supernovae is captured in ice as it travels the interstellar medium. It also suggests that the Earth itself formed through the Pebble Accretion model rather than massive protoplanets slamming together.

The U.S.’s and Denmark’s health systems are starkly different, so it makes sense that their vaccination schedules would differ, too

The early universe was a very different place than today. And by “early” I don’t mean a billion or even ten billion years ago. The universe is about 13.77 billion years old, and when it was only a handful of seconds old, it was completely unrecognizable.

Many wonders are visible when flying over the Earth at night.

A new study, analyzing over 1,600 galaxies observed with Chandra over two decades, suggests that smaller galaxies do not contain supermassive black holes nearly as often as larger galaxies do.

Christmas trees—and conifers in general—have made some surprising cameos throughout U.S. history, author Trent Preszler reveals in his book Evergreen

In the early 20th century, after years of effort, Albert Einstein developed his general theory of relativity. This was a massive improvement in our understanding of gravity, giving us a sophisticated view into the inner workings of that fundamental force.

General-purpose robots remain rare not for a lack of hardware but because we still can’t give machines the physical intuition humans learn through experience

Tracking down resources on the Moon is a critical process if humanity decides to settle there permanently. However, some of our best resources to do that currently are orbiting satellites who use various wavelengths to scan the Moon and determine what the local environment is made out of. One potential confounding factor in those scans is “space weathering” - i.e. how the lunar surface might change based on bombardment from both the solar wind and micrometeroid impacts. A new paper from a researchers at the Southwest Research Institute adds further context to how to interpret ultra-violet data from one of the most prolific of the resource assessment satellites - the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) - and unfortunately, the conclusion they draw is that, for some resources such as titanium, their presence might be entirely obscured by the presence of “old” regolith.

Radio astronomers hunting for the faint whispers of the early universe face an unexpected threat from above: satellites designed to be silent are leaking radio noise into space. New research using the Murchison Widefield Array has set the first limits on unintended radio emissions from distant geostationary satellites, revealing that most remain mercifully quiet in the frequency range crucial for next-generation telescopes. The findings offer cautious hope that the Square Kilometre Array, set to become the world's most sensitive radio telescope, might avoid the radio pollution crisis now plaguing observations of low Earth orbit satellites.

It is still

Apollo 17 at Shorty Crater

Big Jupiter now rises in the east-southeast less than an hour after dark. It's high in sharp telescopic viewing by about 10 p.m.

The post This Week's Sky at a Glance, December 12 – 21 appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

Scientists have successfully transplanted gene-edited insulin-producing cells into a man with type 1 diabetes—allowing him to make some of his own insulin without immunosuppressants.

Astronomers have been observing the Cosmic Owl for years, wondering if what they were seeing was a long-predicted runaway black hole. Now, 50 years after scientists first predicted the phenomenon, the JWST has provided the clinching evidence.

An oil tanker seized by the U.S. this week reportedly used a technique that scrambled its location, but new advanced visual tracking can help expose such ships’ true coordinates

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope reobserved interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS on 30 November with its Wide Field Camera 3 instrument. At the time, the comet was about 286 million km from Earth. Hubble tracked the comet as it moved across the sky.