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    Category Astronomy/Space

    3I/ATLAS: Interstellar object ‘may be oldest comet ever seen’

    July 15, 2025, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Newly discovered interstellar object 'may be oldest comet ever seen'
    Top view of the Milky Way galaxy showing the estimated orbits of both our sun and the 3I/ATLAS comet. 3I/ATLAS is shown in red dashed lines, and the sun is shown in yellow dotted lines. The large extent of 3I’s orbit into the outer thick disk is clear, while the sun stays nearer the core of the galaxy. Credit: M. Hopkins/Ōtautahi-Oxford team. Base map: ESA/Gaia/DPAC, Stefan Payne-Wardenaar, CC-BY-SA 4.0

    A mystery interstellar object discovered last week is likely to be the oldest comet ever seen—possibly predating our solar system by more than 3 billion years, researchers say.

    The “water ice-rich” visitor, named 3I/ATLAS, is only the third known object from beyond our solar system ever spotted in our cosmic neighborhood and the first to reach us from a completely different regi...

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    LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA detect most massive black hole merger to date

    July 14, 2025, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Artwork of a neutron star–black hole merger.
    Credit: Carl Knox, OzGrav-Swinburne University

    The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) Collaboration has detected the merger of the most massive black holes ever observed with gravitational waves using the LIGO observatories. The powerful merger produced a final black hole approximately 225 times the mass of our sun. The signal, designated GW231123, was detected during the fourth observing run of the LVK network on November 23, 2023.

    LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, made history in 2015 when it made the first-ever direct detection of gravitational waves, ripples in space-time. In that case, the waves emanated from a black hole merger that resulted in a final black hole 62 times the mass of our sun...

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    Life on Venus? Probe mission could search Venus clouds for unexplained hydrogen-rich gases

    July 11, 2025, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Life on Venus? UK probe could reveal the answer
    An artist’s impression of the proposed VERVE mission to Venus the answer whether tiny bacterial lifeforms really do exist in the planet’s clouds. Credit: Danielle Futselaar

    The answer to whether tiny bacterial life-forms really do exist in the clouds of Venus could be revealed once and for all by a UK-backed mission.

    Over the past five years, researchers have detected the presence of two potential biomarkers—the gases phosphine and ammonia—which on Earth can only be produced by biological activity and industrial processes.

    Their existence in the Venusian clouds cannot easily be explained by known atmospheric or geological phenomena, so Cardiff University’s Professor Jane Greaves and her team are plotting a way to get to the bottom of it.

    Revealing a new mission concept at ...

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    Astronomers Catch Planets in the Act of Being Born

    July 10, 2025, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    An artist’s impression of dust and tiny grains in a protoplanetary disc surrounding a young star (left) alongside an e-MERLIN map showing the tilted disc structure around the young star DG Tauri (top right) and the HL Tau disc captured by e-MERLIN is shown overlaid on an ALMA image, revealing both the compact emission from the central region of the disc and the larger scale dust rings (bottom right).
    An artist’s impression of dust and tiny grains in a protoplanetary disc surrounding a young star (left) alongside an e-MERLIN map showing the tilted disc structure around the young star DG Tauri (top right) and the HL Tau disc captured by e-MERLIN is shown overlaid on an ALMA image, revealing both the compact emission from the central region of the disc and the larger scale dust rings (bottom right).

    Credit
    NASA/JPL-Caltech/Hesterly, Drabek-Maunder, Greaves, Richards, et al./Greaves, Hesterly, Richards, and et al./ALMA partnership et al.
    Licence type
    Attribution (CC BY 4.0)

    Astronomers have spotted centimeter-sized “pebbles” swirling around two infant stars 450 light-years away, revealing the raw ingredients of planets already stretching to Neptune-like orbits...

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