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Is Planet Nine real? A new study may have just found the strongest clue yet. By analyzing decades-old infrared data from IRAS and AKARI satellites, scientists have spotted a slow-moving object in the outer Solar System—exactly where Planet Nine is predicted to be. If confirmed, it would be the first new planet discovered in over 170 years. Dive into the science, the discovery, and what it means for our cosmic future in this exciting episode. Planet Nine: First Real Clue After Decades of Searching | 9:37 NASASpaceNews | 511K subscribers | 3,717 views | May 2, 2025 Chapters: 00:00 Introduction...

Fifteen observatories across the US, Mexico, and Hawai’i looked at the planet eclipsing a star. Uranus, its rings, and some of its moons as seen by JWST. Image credit: NASA, ESA,CSA, STScI, Joseph DePasqual ************************************************************ On April 7, 2025, star HIP 16271 was occulted by Uranus. As a star, it is by no means famous. A yellow-white star in the constellation of Taurus, not bright enough to be visible to the naked eye given its distance – about 400 light-years away – but bright enough to allow astronomers to look into the atmosphere of Uranus in great detail for the...

A strange new planet has been found circling two stars at a right angle — like something out of sci-fi. It’s the first solid evidence of a so-called polar orbit around a binary system. Credit: SciTechDaily.com *************************************************************************** Astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope have discovered a truly bizarre planet — one that orbits two stars at a perfect 90-degree angle. This “polar planet” circles a rare eclipsing pair of brown dwarfs, making it the first confirmed world with this kind of alignment. It was a surprising and accidental find, defying expectations and proving that planet formation in extreme orbital setups...

A team of astronomers have detected what they call the most promising signs to date of a possible biosignature, or signs of past or present life linked to biological activity, on an exoplanet named K2-18b. But the study authors, and other experts, remain cautious and have not declared a definitive discovery of life beyond our planet. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, the team detected chemical fingerprints within the atmosphere of K2-18b that suggest the presence of dimethyl sulfide or DMS, and potentially dimethyl disulfide or DMDS. On Earth, both molecules are only produced by microbial life, typically marine phytoplankton....

Scientists may be getting closer than ever to answering the question of whether we are alone in the universe. According to The New York Times, a team of astronomers now claims to have found the strongest indication yet for extraterrestrial life. The location in question is a giant planet known as K2-18b, which orbits a star 120 light-years away. Repeated analyses of the planet’s atmosphere have found a high concentration of a molecule that, on Earth, is produced exclusively by living organisms like marine algae. “It is in no one’s interest to claim prematurely that we have detected life,” said...

The search for life beyond Earth has led scientists to explore many suggestive mysteries, from plumes of methane on Mars to clouds of phosphine gas on Venus. But as far as we can tell, Earth’s inhabitants remain alone in the cosmos. Now a team of researchers is offering what it contends is the strongest indication yet of extraterrestrial life, not in our solar system but on a massive planet, known as K2-18b, that orbits a star 120 light-years from Earth. A repeated analysis of the exoplanet’s atmosphere suggests an abundance of a molecule that on Earth has only one known...

Using data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the astronomers, led by the University of Cambridge, have identified the chemical fingerprints dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and dimethyl disulfide (DMDS) – molecules that indicate life. Here on Earth, these molecules are only produced by living organisms – primarily microbial life such as marine phytoplankton. The molecules have been detected in the atmosphere of exoplanet K2-18b, which is located around 124 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Leo.

A dramatic twist in cosmic storytelling: A Jupiter-sized planet didn’t get swallowed by an expanding red giant, as astronomers once believed. Instead, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope uncovered that the planet spiraled inward over time, ultimately plunging into its star in a fiery cosmic demise. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford (STScI) ********************************************************************** Lingering Brightness Provides Evidence for How the Planet Met Its Demise Each year, scientists from around the world compete for a chance to use NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Proposals go through a rigorous review process, and approved projects are added to Webb’s observation schedule, which is...

Astronomers have just revealed that a day on Uranus is longer than was previously thought, at 17 hours, 14 minutes and 52 seconds. This is 28 seconds longer than the previous estimate, which was made by NASA's Voyager 2 probe during its flyby of the ice giant planet back in 1986. The new figure—which is 1,000 times more accurate—was calculated based on a decade's worth of observations of Uranus's aurorae made by NASA/ESA's Hubble Space Telescope. The long-term data on the planet's auroral emissions enabled the researchers to track the positions of the planet's magnetic poles and, by extension, its...

Some of the objects captured by ASKAP. (Author provided) ******************************************************************************* Radio astronomers see what the naked eye can’t. As we study the sky with telescopes that record radio signals rather than light, we end up seeing a lot of circles. The newest generation of radio telescopes – including the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) and MeerKAT, a telescope in South Africa – is revealing incredibly faint cosmic objects, never before seen. In astronomy, surface brightness is a measure that tells us how easily visible an object is. The extraordinary sensitivity of MeerKAT and ASKAP is now revealing a new...

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have discovered an object they've dubbed 'Big Wheel,' a gargantuan galaxy spinning through the early universe and growing larger by the second. The Big Wheel alongside some of its neighbors. (Image credit: Weichen Wang et al. (2025), CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) Deep observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have revealed an exceptionally large galaxy in the early universe. It's a cosmic giant whose light has travelled over 12 billion years to reach us. We've dubbed it the Big Wheel, with our findings published March 17 in Nature Astronomy. This giant disk galaxy...

New James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) images show the first carbon dioxide-containing planet discovered outside of Earth’s solar system, displaying the telescope’s ground breaking research capabilities. One hundred thirty thousand lightyears from Earth, the multiplanet system HR 8799 has been a primary target for astronomers studying planet formation. The new research confirms JWST’s ability to measure an exoplanet’s atmospheric chemistry and suggests the four planets formed similarly to Jupiter and Saturn, coalescing around a solid core. Viewing a Young Solar System At only 30 million years old, HR 8799 is relatively young compared to Earth’s 4.6 billion-year-old solar system. Due...

Astronomers have revealed new evidence that there are not just one but four tiny planets circling around Barnard's Star, the second-nearest star system to Earth. The four planets, each only about 20 to 30% the mass of Earth, are so close to their home star that they zip around the entire star in a matter of days. That probably means they are too hot to be habitable, but the find is a new benchmark for discovering smaller planets around nearby stars. "It's a really exciting find -- Barnard's Star is our cosmic neighbor, and yet we know so little about...

"We thought they were basically all going to be fried because the entire universe turned into a vat of boiling oil." ====================================================================== The newfound galaxy, Andromeda XXXV, is seen within the white ellipse. (Image credit: CFHT/MegaCam/PAndAS (Principal investigator: Alan McConnachie; Image processing: Marcos Arias)) Astronomers have discovered a collection of tiny galaxies located roughly 3 million light-years away that includes the smallest and faintest galaxy ever seen. This galaxy, designated Andromeda XXXV, and its compatriots orbiting our neighbor galaxy, Andromeda, could change how we think about cosmic evolution. That's because dwarf galaxies this small should have been destroyed in the...

The race between Jupiter and Saturn for the most moons in the Solar System may have just finally come screeching to a halt. A team of scientists has found a whopping 128 previously unknown moons hanging around Saturn, in a discovery officially recognized by the International Astronomical Union. This brings the planet's total number of known moons to 274, leaving Jupiter, with its mere 95 moons, in the dust. The first hint that there were more moons awaiting discovery came between 2019 and 2021, when 62 such objects were identified. Other small objects were also spotted at the time that...

Research led by Burkhard Militzer, University of California Berkeley This false color photograph of Neptune was made from Voyager 2 images taken through three filters: blue, green, and a filter that passes light at a wavelength that is absorbed by methane gas. (Credit: NASA/JPL) In a nutshell Uranus and Neptune have weird, disorganized magnetic fields because their interiors naturally separate into two distinct layers—a flowing water-rich upper layer and a stable hydrocarbon-rich lower layer. Using advanced simulations of 540 atoms under extreme pressure and temperature, Berkeley physicist Burkhard Militzer discovered that planetary ices (water, methane, and ammonia) spontaneously separate rather...

Explanation: How do stars and planets form? New clues have been found in the protoplanetary system Herbig-Haro 30 by the James Webb Space Telescope in concert with Hubble and the Earth-bound ALMA. The observations show, among other things, that large dust grains are more concentrated into a central disk where they can form planets. The featured image from Webb shows many attributes of the active HH-30 system. Jets of particles are being expelled vertically, shown in red, while a dark dust-rich disk is seen across the center, blocking the light from the star or stars still forming there. Blue-reflecting dust...

Studies of rock and dust from asteroid Bennu delivered to Earth by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security–Regolith Explorer) spacecraft have revealed molecules that, on our planet, are key to life, as well as a history of saltwater that could have served as the “broth” for these compounds to interact and combine. The findings do not show evidence for life itself, but they do suggest the conditions necessary for the emergence of life were widespread across the early solar system, increasing the odds life could have formed on other planets and moons. “NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission already is...

Scientists recently reported an unexpected deep-sea development in the Pacific: certain metallic rocks seem to be making oxygen in the dark, without light or sunshine, at the bottom of the ocean. This idea runs counter to the usual belief that oxygen only forms in sunlight through photosynthesis. Although these findings have stirred debate, the central claim is that potato-sized nodules found thousands of feet below the surface appear to split seawater molecules and release oxygen. Oxygen and photosynthesis – the basics Since the late 1700s, we’ve been taught that light creates oxygen through photosynthesis, a crucial natural process that keeps...

One of these exoplanets, HD 20794d, is likely to be a rocky planet in the habitable zone of its parent star, the G-dwarf HD 20794. This image shows the habitable zone around HD 20794 (green) and the trajectory of the three planets in the system. Image credit: Gabriel Pérez Díaz / SMM / IAC. “HD 20794, around which HD 20794d orbits, is not an ordinary star,” said UNIGE astronomer Xavier Dumusque. “Its luminosity and proximity makes it an ideal candidate for future telescopes whose mission will be to observe the atmospheres of exoplanets directly.” HD 20794 is a bright G6V...