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A small asteroid narrowly missed Earth over Antarctica, passing within the altitude of the International Space Station. Credit: Shutterstock ===================================================================== Asteroid 2025 TF zoomed over Antarctica just 266 miles above Earth, roughly the same height as the ISS. Detected only hours later, the 1–3 meter rock posed no threat but provided valuable data for astronomers. Close Encounter Over Antarctica In the early hours of October 1, Asteroid 2025 TF swept over Antarctica at 00:47:26 UTC ± 18 seconds, passing within just 428 ± 7 km (266 ± 4 miles) of Earth’s surface. That distance places it nearly at the same...

Astronomers from Princeton may have found evidence of a hidden planet -- Planet Y -- orbiting in the far reaches of the Solar System. Could this be the missing world shaping the Kuiper Belt? Watch to find out. A New Planet Discovered? Planet 9 Has a Rival -- Meet Planet Y | 9:45 NASA Space News | 556K subscribers | 28,062 views | October 6, 2025 Chapters: 00:00 Introduction 00:38 The Discovery 03:04 Scientific Importance and Theories 05:30 Implications and What’s Next 08:29 Outro 08:43 Enjoy

Chatter Points * A new model suggests dark matter and dark energy may not be real entities, but effects of changing physical constants. * Galaxy rotation curves from seven galaxies fit the model using one key parameter: a “turn-off density.” * The approach also explains supernovae, galaxy clusters, and the cosmic microwave background without exotic matter. * Challenges remain: galaxies are complex, and no direct evidence yet shows that fundamental constants truly vary. ========================================================================== A physicist at the University of Ottawa has published research suggesting the universe’s most perplexing mysteries — dark matter and dark energy, which together supposedly account...

Recent images purportedly depicting the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS during its closest approach to Mars last week have erupted in controversy online, as many took to social media with theories about what the object’s unusual shape could mean about its nature and origins. The new images obtained last week by NASA’s Perseverance rover appear to show 3I/ATLAS streaking through the Martian night sky as it passed through the field of view of the robotic explorer’s Right Navigation Camera (Navcam) from its position in Jezero Crater. The recent imagery was originally uploaded to NASA’s multimedia page in raw format. Since that time,...

Thunderbird, the University of British Columbia’s benchtop-scale particle accelerator and electrochemical reactor. (Photo: UBC) ************************************************************************* Researchers at the University of British Columbia seeking the energy grail of cold fusion—alias lattice confinement fusion or low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR)— used electrochemistry to load extra deuterium ions into a metal lattice and found a “modest” performance boost of 15 percent, compared with experiments without the electrochemical loading technique, according to the university. While the experiment is benchtop scale, with more energy input than gained, it is the first time that deuterium–deuterium fusion has been demonstrated using the technique, according to UBC. The results...

According to the team the polarimetric behavior is "significantly different from all known comets (either interstellar or bound to our Solar System)". 3I/ATLAS imaged by NASA’s Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx). Image credit: NASA/SPHEREx. ================================================================= Ateam of astronomers have presented the first polarimetric observations of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, finding that it has extreme negative polarization. On July 1, 2025, astronomers spotted an object moving through the Solar System at nearly twice the velocity of previous interstellar visitors ‘Oumuamua and Comet Borisov. The object was confirmed to be an interstellar comet with...

Since it was first discovered in August 2019, astronomers have been awestruck by interstellar Comet 2I/Borisov. But recent observations of the space object suggest that it could be breaking apart. A group of researchers from Poland have noted that the object has brightened up twice this month. “The total brightness increase is thus about 0.7 mag in 5 days between UT 2020 March 4.3 and 9.3,” the researchers wrote in a note published March 12. “This behavior is strongly indicative of an ongoing nucleus fragmentation.” In September 1019, the International Astronomical Union confirmed that the object was from another solar...

Explanation: From somewhere else in the Milky Way galaxy, Comet 2I/Borisov was just visiting the Solar System. Discovered by amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov on August 30, 2019, the first known interstellar comet is seen in these two Hubble Space Telescope images from November and December 2019. On the left, a distant background galaxy near the line-of-sight to Borisov is blurred as Hubble tracked the speeding comet and dust tail about 327 million kilometers from Earth. At right, 2I/Borisov appears shortly after perihelion, its closest approach to Sun. European Southern Observatory observations indicate that this comet may never have passed close...

Space can surprise even those who spend their lives studying it. People often think of our solar system as just a few planets and a bunch of empty space. Yet new observations suggest we have been living inside a hot, less dense region, and that there may even be a strange cosmic channel connecting us to distant stars. After years of careful mapping, a new analysis reveals what appears to be a channel of hot, low-density plasma stretching out from our solar system toward distant constellations. Astronomers from the Max Planck Institute recently confirmed it using data from the eRosita...

Explanation: Galaxies like colorful pieces of candy fill the Hubble Ultra Deep Field 2014. The dimmest galaxies are more than 10 billion times fainter than stars visible to the unaided eye and represent the Universe in the extreme past, a few 100 million years after the Big Bang. The image itself was made with the significant addition of ultraviolet data to the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, an update of Hubble's famous most distant gaze toward the southern constellation of Fornax. It now covers the entire range of wavelengths available to Hubble's cameras, from ultraviolet through visible to near-infrared. Ultraviolet data...

Explanation: Ten thousand years ago, before the dawn of recorded human history, a new light would suddenly have appeared in the night sky and faded after a few weeks. Today we know this light was from a supernova, or exploding star, and record the expanding debris cloud as the Veil Nebula, a supernova remnant. This sharp telescopic view is centered on a western segment of the Veil Nebula cataloged as NGC 6960 but less formally known as the Witch's Broom Nebula. Blasted out in the cataclysmic explosion, an interstellar shock wave plows through space sweeping up and exciting interstellar material....

Explanation: A new visitor from the outer Solar System, comet C/2025 R2 (SWAN) also known as SWAN25B was only discovered late last week, on September 11. That's just a day before the comet reached perihelion, its closest approach to the Sun. First spotted by Vladimir Bezugly in images from the SWAN instrument on the sun-staring SOHO spacecraft, the comet was surprisingly bright but understandably difficult to see against the Sun's glare. Still close to the Sun on the sky, the greenish coma and tail of C/2025 R2 (SWAN) are captured in this telescopic snapshot from September 17. Spica, alpha star...

Explanation: A newly discovered comet is already visible with binoculars. The comet, C/2025 R2 (SWAN) and nicknamed SWAN25B, is brightening significantly as it emerges from the Sun's direction and might soon become visible on your smartphone -- if not your eyes. Although the brightnesses of comets are notoriously hard to predict, many comets appear brighter as they approach the Earth, with SWAN25B reaching only a quarter of the Earth-Sun distance near October 19. Nighttime skygazers will also be watching for a SWAN25B-spawned meteor shower around October 5 when our Earth passes through the plane of the comet's orbit. The unexpectedly...

Explanation: It may look like these comets are racing, but they are not. Comets C/2025 K1 ATLAS (left) and C/2025 R2 SWAN (right) appeared near each other by chance last week in the featured image taken from France's Reunion Island in the southern Indian Ocean. Fainter Comet ATLAS is approaching our Sun and will reach its closest approach in early October when it is also expected to be its brightest -- although still only likely visible with long exposures on a camera. The brighter comet, nicknamed SWAN25B, is now headed away from our Sun, although its closest approach to Earth...

We’re gonna need a bigger telescope. Scientists have discovered that the 3I/ATLAS — a Manhattan-sized interstellar object that potentially has alien tech — is much larger than previously thought, according to a new report. First discovered by NASA on July 1, the cosmic anomaly has been under watch by Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb and his team as it shoots across the solar system. The object, which is believed to be a comet, reportedly has interstellar origins, making it the third ever object from beyond the solar system ever detected after ‘Oumuamua, which was discovered in 2017, and 2I/Borisov in 2019....

The mysterious comet 3I/ATLAS appears to be extremely large, making it orders of magnitude more massive than two other confirmed interstellar objects observed in our solar system in years past, a new study suggests. Based on a new analysis of the most precise tracking data collected on the object since its discovery in July, the interstellar comet appears to be “anomalously massive,” a finding that raises new questions regarding our expectations about interstellar objects that occasionally traverse our solar system. The research was detailed in a new paper by Richard Cloete, Peter Vere, and Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, which places...

The IMAP mission will chart the boundary of the heliosphere, a bubble inflated by the solar wind that shields our solar system from galactic cosmic rays...NOAA's SWFO-L1 is designed to be a full-time operational space weather observatory...The Carruthers Geocorona Observatory is the first mission dedicated to recording changes in the outermost layer of our atmosphere, the exosphere...

Explanation: On the morning of September 24 a rocket crosses the bright solar disk in this long range telescopic snapshot captured from Orlando, Florida. That's about 50 miles north of its Kennedy Space Center launch site. This rocket carried three new space weather missions to space. Signals have now been successfully acquired from all three - NASA's Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe, NASA’s Carruthers Geocorona Observatory, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Space Weather Follow-On Lagrange 1 (SWFO-L1) - as they begin their journey to L1, an Earth-Sun lagrange point. L1 is about 1.5 million kilometers in the...

A New Asteroid Crater Was Just Discovered Under The Sea | 8:01 OzGeology | 149K subscribers | 106,346 views | September 24, 2025 00:00-00:36 - The Silverpit Impact Crater Is First Discovered 00:37-00:56 - The Silverpit Mystery 00:57-02:07 - The Silverpit Impact Structure 02:08-03:00 - The Geological Debate 03:01-03:57 - The Recent Data That Led To The Discovery 03:58-04:31 - What The Asteroid Collision Would've Looked Like 04:32-04:50 - The Mega Tsunami The Collision Generated 04:51-05:25 - Why The Silverpit Crater Has Survived Intact 05:26-06:11 - The Chance Discovery 06:12-06:43 - Life During The Eocene 06:44-07:16 - The Questions That...

Explanation: A new visitor to the inner Solar System, comet C/2025 R2 (SWAN) sports a long ion tail extending diagonally across this almost 7 degree wide telescopic field of view recorded on September 21. A fainter fellow comet also making its inner Solar System debut, C/2025 K1 (ATLAS), can be spotted above and left of SWAN's greenish coma, just visible against the background sea of stars in the constellation Virgo. Both new comets were only discovered in 2025 and are joined in this celestial frame by ruddy planet Mars (bottom), a more familiar wanderer in planet Earth's night skies. The...