Earth has caught itself a new mini-moon, and it is sticking around for Christmas.
The space rock, designated 2026 QQ8, was first observed in August 2026 after entering orbit around Earth in April 2026. The discovery was reported by the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center on Thursday (Oct. 29).
The stay of QQ8 is a temporary one. The mini-moon will remain in the thrall of Earth's gravity through December before breaking away in 2027.
Scientists have recreated the orbital path of QQ8, finding that it takes 359 days, or about 0.98 of an Earth year, to orbit the sun. QQ8 closely approaches Earth around once every ten years, but this time the object came so close that Earth has been able to gravitationally seize it.
According to the Minor Planet Center, the closest QQ8 will come to our planet during this stay is around 353,000 miles (568,000 kilometers). That is around 110,000 miles (177,000 km) further out than the average distance between Earth and the moon.
Even if QQ8 were to come close enough to collide with Earth, it would likely be completely destroyed in our planet's atmosphere before it reaches the surface, as it is only around 6 feet (2 meters) in diameter.
A fireball burns up in Earth's atmosphere. QQ8 would look like this if it entered Earth's atmosphere. (Image credit: Xiong Yi via Getty Images)
This is far from the first time Earth has snagged itself a mini-moon, more accurately called a temporary satellite. In fact, research last year suggested that our planet could be orbited by as many as six mini-moons at any given time, with many of these being fragments of our more permanent natural satellite, the moon.
While QQ8 is tiny, it is larger than the average mini-moon. That is according to modelling earlier this year that suggested the average size for a temporary satellite is 75 centimeters (30 inches) across.
The same modelling suggested the average stay for such an object would be around nine months.
So if QQ8 was captured in April 2026, that means it should move away in January 2027.
The researchers behind those findings suggested that, were Earth to gravitationally grip a space rock around 10 feet (3 meters) wide, it could serve as a mini-moon for 10 to 20 years.
Scientists have long suspected that Mars is geologically "dead," but new spacecraft observations suggest the Red Planet's volcanoes are merely sleeping.
That means that Olympus Mons, the extinct Martian volcano that at around 16 miles (26 kilometers) above the surrounding Martian plains is the largest mountain in the solar system, may in fact be a slumbering giant.
The observations were made with the European Space Agency (ESA) mission ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) as it studied volcanic fissures along the Alba Mons region of the Red Planet. Alba Mons is in the Tharsis region of Mars, the same area that is home to Olympus Mons. While the latter is the tallest volcano in the solar system, at 374 miles (600 km) across, about the size of Arizona, the Alba Mons region is the largest volcano when considering surface area.
TGO detected gas containing hydrogen chloride making its way to the surface of Mars through the Alba Mons fissures. The same gas is commonly found escaping from magmatic vents on Earth, with the compound coming from hot magma beneath the surface. Detecting it on Mars is a sign of dormant Martian volcanism.
Orbital imagery had previously shown some volcanoes appear to have been active within the last few million years, and seismometers have detected the rumbling of "marsquakes," both implying the Red Planet is volcanically active. However, eruptions and lava flows have been conspicuous by their absence.
"Our findings suggest that Mars has retained enough internal heat to support volcanic activity until recently, and possibly still does," team co-leader and scientist at the Space Research Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Daniel Mège, said in a statement sent to Space.com via email. "The TGO was able to find the smoking gun. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack."
Evidence of dormant Martian volcanism is rising
Mège and colleagues were first alerted to something strange happening on Mars when they noticed spikes of hydrogen chloride during Martian summer and on the northern hemisphere of the Red Planet. That is both a time and place at which hydrogen chloride shouldn't be detected.
The gas usually peaks in the northern hemisphere during winter on Mars, disappearing in the summer. This variation is connected to the water and dust cycle on Mars. An exception to the rule occurs over volcanic fissures on the flanks of the Alba Mons volcano, in early summer.
The TGO followed up on this by detecting fresh and narrow fissures, in some cases hundreds of feet long, in the Alba Mons region. A clear sign of volcanism.
"It's truly amazing that it spotted a handful of molecules from a perhaps intermittent source, whilst moving continuously along its orbit to monitor the whole Martian atmosphere," Mège said.
An animated gif of an Elongated Cloud over the Alba Mons. (Image credit: ESA/GCP/UVP/EHU Bilbao.)
The team thinks that these gases have been rising from the interior of Mars during the Martian winter, becoming blocked by ice. When this ice sublimates, changes directly from solid to gas, during summer, the gas is released, prompting spikes in hydrogen chloride seen by the TGO.
"Looking at the spatial distribution of the seeping, it became instantly obvious to me that there was something volcanic behind it, but it had to be demonstrated," said Mège. "A huge part of the work consisted of examining all the possible chemical processes going on in the Martian atmosphere.
"We needed to be rigorous, critical and creative to explain the presence of hydrogen chloride. The data were complex, but also excellent brain food."
Implications for life on Mars?
Mège and colleagues theorize that the gas is connected to "volcanic plumbing" in the form of a dormant magma chamber under the surface of Mars.
Regions like this could become hotspots (pun not intended) in the search for life on Mars. That is because magmatic gases like hydrogen chloride would have been more abundant in the past, creating a thicker Martian atmosphere and warmer climate.
Not only would this have led to liquid water covering much of the Martian surface, but when lava bubbled through the Martian crust and met groundwater, warm habitable niches ideal for microbial life could have been forged.
"Looking for Martian life in the seeping fissures of the Alba Mons region would make a lot of sense. If hydrothermal systems are active, they could contain the ingredients and energy needed for microorganisms to develop, and shield microorganisms from the hostile and changing environment above the surface," Mège concluded.
The team's research was published in the journalScience Advances on Wednesday (Nov. 4).
New research suggests that collisions between stars in the early universe were common, which could help explain the rapid growth of supermassive black holes and the existence of strange Little Red Dots seen by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
The team behind this research performed simulations of the early universe and found stellar systems were densely packed, leading to stars frequently slamming into each other. While rapid collisions would have destroyed the stars involved, slower collisions would have led to repeated mergers, creating single over-massive stars, which could collapse and form larger-than-usual black holes at the end of their lives. These could be the seeds of the first supermassive black holes.
Dense stellar environments do still exist in the modern universe at the hearts of galaxies; however, these aren't conducive to the types of collisions that would birth ultra-massive stars. That is because there are already supermassive black holes at the hearts of modern galaxies, and their immense gravitational influence speeds up orbiting stars, meaning collisions that do occur are high-speed and destructive, thus failing to birth overmassive stars.
"Perhaps the strangest outcome of our simulations is that stars can merge repeatedly within the cluster until they form one gigantic star with a mass equal to that of an entire cluster," team member Claire Williams, of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), said in a statement. "When a star this huge reaches the end of its life, models suggest that it may have no option but to collapse into itself and form a massive black hole."
My, haven't you grown? How did supermassive black holes get so big so fast?
The existence of supermassive black holes before the universe was even 1 billion years old is something that has puzzled astronomers since the JWST started spotting them in 2022.
This is because black holes should need at least 1 billion years to complete the feeding and merger processes that result in a "supermassive" status of possessing millions or billions of times the mass of the sun.
One suggestion put forward by scientists to explain this is that supermassive black holes don't start out from scratch. Instead, they form from black hole seeds called intermediate-mass black holes.
An illustration shows a massive black hole seed next to a standard stellar mass black hole (Image credit: Robert Lea (created with Canva))
Normally, when a massive star collapses, it births a stellar-mass black hole possessing a mass between 10 and 100 times the mass of the sun. This is considerably smaller than supermassive black holes that dominate the hearts of all modern galaxies with masses millions to billions of times the mass of our star.
Intermediate-mass black holes are thought to sit between these two families of cosmic titans with masses between 100 and 100,000 times that of the sun. The problem is, no single star should have enough mass to collapse and create an intermediate-mass black hole. But that is valid only for the conditions we see in the "modern" 13.8-billion-year-old universe in our immediate cosmic vicinity. Conditions were very different further out into the universe and further back in time.
Indeed, such seeds emerged from these new simulations in environments of dense star clustering, which could solve this mystery by allowing those growth processes to get a head start.
"Dense star clusters provide a natural birthplace for massive black-hole seeds in our model," Williams said. "The same environment that forms the black hole can also provide stars and gas that influence its subsequent growth."
However, this could be a two-for-one deal. The JWST has also been routinely discovering astronomical bodies called Little Red Dots in the early universe. Little Red Dots are curious because they seem to have completely disappeared by the time the cosmos reached 2 billion years old.
Little Red Dots the cosmic elephant in the room
Little Red Dots are extremely compact objects in the early universe that get their moniker from the fact that they look like red dots.
"Little Red Dots are a hot topic in astronomy. You can compare studies of people trying to understand Little Red Dots to the tale of blind people who are trying to describe an elephant by touching it, and each person describes it differently based on what part they’re touching," team member and UCLA researcher Smadar Naoz said. "Our research connects several of those perspectives together and may help us see more of the elephant."
There have been many suggestions about the true nature of these objects, but one theory suggests that they possess a rapidly growing black hole at their hearts.
The team's simulations suggest that Little Red Dots may be dense star clusters that are constantly being rocked by repeated stellar collisions. This results in a very large star, which eventually collapses to become an intermediate-mass black hole.
But if that is the case, why were there no Little Red Dots around to celebrate the 2 billionth birthday of the universe?
Just some of the "little red dot" galaxies discovered in the early universe by the JWST (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Dale Kocevski (Colby College))
Less than 1 billion years after the Big Bang, the universe was devoid of well-ordered spiral galaxies, but was instead filled with dense and chaotic clusters of star birth. As these regions were rocked with frequent star collisions, the conditions were right for ultra-massive stars to form and collapse into intermediate-mass black holes.
However, as the universe cooled and expanded, these sites became the building blocks of far less chaotic galaxies. Thus, if Little Red Dots are chaotic star clusters needed to form intermediate-mass black holes, progress toward an equilibrium state could explain why they suddenly disappeared from the universe. The cosmos just wasn't extreme enough to maintain Little Red Dots anymore.
Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have investigated a cosmic cat's tail, finding it likely formed after two Pluto-sized bodies smashed together.
The feature, nicknamed the Cat's Tail, extends out from the debris disk known as Beta Pictoris which is located in a planetary system located 63 light-years away. This tail would put that of the average tabby to shame: It's so long that it could curl around the sun-Earth system about 500 times. That's about as long as 200 trillion house cats.
The major difference between our solar system and the planetary system that hosts the Cat's Tail is the latter's relative youth. While our solar system is around 4.6 billion years old, Beta Pictoris is a cosmic kitten no more than a few million years old. That means it is still host to collisions between planetary bodies similar to the ones that rocked the solar system during its infancy.
The team behind this research gained new insights into the Cat's Tail using 14 years of observations. This allowed them to solve the long-standing mystery of the violent conditions under which it formed.
"The Cat's Tail is thought to be the aftermath of a collision between large bodies — think something like Pluto," team leader Arin Avsar of the University of Arizona said in a statement. "Oddly, this feature had previously only been seen with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which detects infrared light, but remained invisible at shorter wavelengths, which has puzzled the community for a while."
Cosmic cat tail is also pleasingly fluffy
Comparing Beta Pictoris and our solar system, one thing rapidly becomes apparent: our cosmic neighborhood is relatively well-ordered. The planets orbit the sun with most space rocks neatly delegated into bands: the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and the Kuiper belt out beyond the orbit of Neptune.
However, this is a stark contrast to the solar system's violent and chaotic youth. Back then, the solar system was host to an infant star surrounded by a swirling disk of gas and dust in which collisions between bodies called planetesimals — the building blocks of planets — were commonplace.
Astronomers can't look back to the solar system's infancy, so to learn more about how our cosmic backyard took shape, they study nearby young planetary systems. Systems like Beta Pictoris. That doesn't mean it has been quick to divulge its secrets, though.
"We think the Cat's Tail has eluded our observations in visible light until now because of what it's made of," Avsar explained. "It consists almost entirely of what we call organic refractory material, which is heavily carbon-based. These long chains of carbon atoms absorb visible light, so they're quite black."
This new study revealed that the feline feature is cat-like in more ways than just its shape. It's also pleasingly fluffy, Hubble observations suggest. That's because the grains that compose it are extremely porous.
"How you can get dust grains that small that are as porous as we see here no one really understands, and that's part of why we study this feature," Avsar said.
"It's possible that the velocities involved in the collisions were so high that the carbon grains vaporized, turned into gas, and then recondensed as they cooled, and that's how they became so porous," team member Kevin Wagner of the U of A said.
An illustration of the exoplanet Beta Pictoris b. (Image credit: NASA)
The scientists also discovered a hitherto undiscovered feature in the Cat's Tail — a warp that seems to be the result of an interaction between the trail of material and one of the planets in the system, Beta Pictoris b, a gas giant planet 10 times more massive than Jupiter.
"This gives us another line of evidence into how giant planets influence comets through their immense gravitational force," Avsar said. "It's a testament to how much these massive planets really influence their surrounding dust and icy bodies out to hundreds of astronomical units [one astronomical unit being the distance between Earth and the sun]."
In space, no one can hear you scream... not unlike in the empty theater screens that aging horror franchises play to when the lustre has gone and their final installments limp to the public. It is perhaps little wonder that some horror franchises go to space to die... or take long breaks, at least.
In celebration of Halloween, we're running down some horror franchises that made the journey to the final frontier, resulting in films that range from the sublime and outrageously campy fun to just pure awful.
Absent from the list are space horror movies that have space baked into their natural fabric. So no Event Horizon, no Alien, and no Critters 4 (they were aliens, so they just went back to space; that doesn't count).
1. Jason X (2001)
(Image credit: New Line Cinema / Crystal Lake Entertainment)
2001 was a really weird time for the Friday the 13th franchise. New Line had acquired the series in the wake of the terrible box office returns and critical panning of Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan. Known as "the house that Freddy built," New Line's plan was clear: pit Voorhees vs. Kruger in a battle of horror icons for the ages.
However, the studio had to keep Jason in the public eye to ensure the eventual crossover lived up to expectations. The first move in that effort, 1993's Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, was an odd start. The movie apparently kills Voorhees, with his iconic hockey mask seized by the equally iconic bladed glove of Freddy Krueger at the end of the film and dragged into the dirt.
Fun bit of trivia: the hand wearing the glove isn't that of Freddy actor Robert Englund but belongs to Kane Hodder, arguably the best Jason Voorhees, meaning Hodder played both Jason and Freddy!
Still, the crossover has stalled in the preproduction process by 2001, as a script couldn't be agreed upon. New Line wanted a new Friday film but in a different environment than the typical Crystal Lake setting. After rejecting a winter-themed movie that would see Voorhees killing cross-country skiers in a snow-covered Camp Crystal Lake, New Line decided to put Jason on ice in a different way, cryogenically freezing Pamela Voorhees' baby boy and sending him to space in Jason X, the tenth movie in the series.
Jason X would see the Crystal Lake Killer slaughter David Croenberg, get his ass kicked by a feisty robot, and double up on his iconic sleeping bag kill from Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (one of my favorites, massively underrated), all on the way to getting a major upgrade from some very unhelpful nanobots to become Uber Jason.
Jason X has a mixed reputation and isn't regarded as one of the better entries in the series, but the movie has a load of positives going for it.
The kills are super inventive, the nitrogen head smash being arguably one of the best in a series known for over-the-top brutality; Kane Hodder is great during his final shift as Jason, and there are a load of laughs. Jason X isn't as tongue-in-cheek as one of the following movies on this list, but it is definitely self-aware and so much better for it.
In honor of arguably the best of these space-relocated horror movies, we'll rate this and the following movies in Uber Jasons out of five. For campy space-based horror featuring a character that is a fish out of water, Jason X is near perfect.
4.8 Uber Jasons out of 5. Hail to the king, baby.
2. Amityville in Space (2022)
(Image credit: Polonia Brothers Entertainment)
Alien is often referred to as "a haunted house movie in space." The elements are all there: isolation, a hidden, poorly understood danger lurking in the shadows, victims picked off one by one. Of course, that is figurative, but Amityville in Space shows why filmmakers should never make things too literal.
Amityville in Space is bad. Not so bad that it is good. So bad, it is bad.
Your opinion on Amityville as a franchise likely depends on your tolerance for utter hogwash. The first movie, The Amityville Horror, released in 1979, is an effective, often quite creepy horror. Since then, the loose Amityville Horror franchise spans nine core Amityville movies and between 50 and 90 low-budget independent additions to the franchise.
Amityville in Space is definitely at the cheapest end of the low-budget spectrum, and as the name suggests, it takes 112 Ocean Avenue further than ever before, to the year 3015 and the edge of a distant black hole.
Literally, the only thing worth watching in Amityville in Space is the hilarious opening that sees a failed exorcism attempt cause the Amityville house to literally blast off the surface of Earth like a rocket.d
Unfortunately, Amityville in Space isn't a corny "so-bad it's good" movie. It's just frustratingly bad. Perhaps disappearing into a black hole is the fate Amityville deserved all along, though with the name being in the public domain, Amityville movies will just keep coming. At least I didn't have to watch Amityville Death Toilet (yes, that really exists).
0 Uber Jasons out of 5. Avoid like a demonic pig called Jodie
3. Leprechaun 4: In Space (1996)
(Image credit: Trimark Pictures)
Leprechaun 4 sees the franchise that launched the career of Jennifer Aniston blast its titular antagonist into space. The Leprechaun, played by the unparalleled Warwick Davis, makes the voyage to the final frontier with tongue planted firmly in cheek, and the results are bloody glorious.
The film sees the Leprechaun's attempts to woo a space princess rudely interrupted by space marines and the minor inconvenience of being blown apart by a grenade.
The Leprechaun then exacts his revenge on the spacecraft of the marines, an impressively realized set for a straight-to-video horror movie in the mid-90s.
If you want some camp horror fun on Halloween, the sight of the Leprechaun emerging fully formed from the pants of a space marine is probably going to be unbeatable.
Fans of British sitcoms will be equally delighted by the appearance of Guy Siner ('Allo 'Allo's Lt. Hubert Gruber) as Dr. Mittenhand. While the rest of the cast play the ludicrousness of a leprechaun rampaging through a spaceship offing space marines relatively straight, Davis and Siner don't just chew the scenery; they suck it in like thespian black holes.
As Mittenhand says: "Thank you, Harold, I do the jokes!"
Of course, there is plenty of ropey CGI, as is standard for a 90s genre movie, but there is a wonderful practical creature at the movie's conclusion that pays tribute to David Cronemburg's The Fly. Less Brundle-Fly, more Mitten-Spider. Plus a death that is pure Looney Tunes and a Kaiju-sized leprechaun. Take that, Uber Jason.
4.5 Uber Jasons out of 5. Thank your Lucky Charms
4. Hellraiser 4: Bloodline (1996)
(Image credit: Miramax Films)
Another horror franchise heading to space for its fourth installment, and this one also came out in 1996. Hellraiser 4: Bloodline marks a real downturn in the fortunes of Hellraiser, being the last in the series to receive a theatrical release and the last to benefit from input from creator and horror maestro Clive Barker.
The film has a portmanteau style beginning in 2127, as Dr. Paul Merchant attempts to solve the mystery of the Lament Configuration, then flashing back to its creation by Merchant's ancestor Phillip LeMarchand in France in 1796. The movie then jumps to 1996, when the Lament Configuration has inspired a skyscraper built by another of Merchant's ancestors.
This second section also sees the franchise's figurehead Pinhead, played by Doug Bradley, come into conflict with the demonic Angelique. A conflict that is carried into 2127.
Arguably, the CGI in Hellraiser: Bloodline is no better or worse than that of Leprechaun 4; the problem is the latter isn't taking itself seriously, but the former really is.
You can't really expect a "fun" Hellraiser movie; that has never been their vibe, and they are better for the serious tone. But it means a poorly realized move to space really doesn't work.
Arguably, the biggest crime of Hellraiser 4: Bloodline is that it's a bit dull. The in-depth investigation of the Lament Configuration is only going to appeal to hardcore Hellraiser fans who will probably just end up wishing they'd watched Barker's original 1987 magnum opus movie instead.
And it was all downhill for Hellraiser after this. The franchise became the poster boy for straight-to-video horror, with some later installments developed from scripts that initially had nothing to do with Hellraiser at all. A real insult to a franchise that felt fresh, daring, and even dangerous at its outset.
Pinhead probably wished he'd stayed in space.
2 Uber Jasons out of 5. You'll need your eyes pinned back to finish it
5. Dracula 3000 (2004)
(Image credit: Film Afrika / ApolloProMedia)
When you have been around since 1897, it is pretty hard to keep your routine fresh. By 2004, Dracula had pretty much exhausted gothic horror; a relocation to a modern setting hadn't saved Christopher Lee's Dracula in the 1970s and had arguably resulted in the worst entries in the Hammer series.
Where else to take the Count in a new millennium but into space? That's the approach taken by Dracula 3000, which doesn't connect to any other Dracula cinema outings but features character names and locales that pay homage to Stoker's original novel.
The primary protagonist is Captain Abraham Van Helsing, played by Casper Van Dien, fresh from battling space bugs in Starship Troopers. Dracula — here bizarrely called Count Orlok in an unnecessary nod to Nosferatu — is found on the abandoned ship Demeter by Mother III salvage crew member Mina Harker. Unfortunately, the connections to the source material and the infinitely better Nosferatu are present in name alone. The gothic goodness is gone.
However, something strange happened to me as I was watching Dracula 3000. I found myself enjoying it. Dracula 3000 is... fun?
The acting is more wooden than a stake, the dialog is cringy, the characters are so 2D that it is a wonder Drac could draw any blood at all, and the effects are poor. But there is so much here I found myself wanting to show my friends.
Vampire Coolio is a show-stealer; Dracula looks like he has wandered in from a neighboring studio, swanning around a sci-fi setting in full Victorian cape and collar garb. The Demeter hails from the planet Transyvannia, known to be populated by vampires. Drac had no issue procuring oak coffins for his thrall in space. It's all wonderfully silly, and I loved it.
Dracula 3000 isn't as fun as Leprechaun 4, but it definitely isn't boring like Hellraiser 4: Bloodline, and it isn't whatever the heck Amityville is Space is.
3.5 Uber Jasons out of 5. Livin' in a vampire's paradise.
For my money, Leprechaun 4, Dracula 3000, and Jason X would make a cool triple-header of space-horrors for Halloween night. But only 'cause we didn't get the following franchise entry....
Dishonorable mention: Howling IV: Werewolves on the Moon (1988)
(Image credit: Allied Vision)
OK. Don't Google it. This isn't the Mandela effect at work. The Howling franchise never went to space.
The Howling IV was released in 1988 under the tagline "The Original Nightmare," and though in modern parlance that would indicate a prequel to Joe Dante's 1981 classic, this film is actually a far inferior remake of that first entry in the series.
What a missed opportunity! Though the trope of a fourth film in a franchise going to space, or returning to space in the case of Critters 4, wouldn't be firmly established until 1996, The Howling could have set the ball rolling with its fourth installment.
After all, few horror franchises had suffered the drops in quality seen between the first Howling, a stone-cold classic, and Howling III: The Marsupials (they aren't even werewolves, guys!), with the awful Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf between the two.
The Howling was dying like a werewolf with a silver bullet in its guts already by the fourth film; so an early move to space would have been justified. Come on, at least give us werewolves on the moon!
The franchise would limp on for another four films after the Original Nightmare, including a lame duck reboot in 2011, never answering the question: what would happen to a werewolf on the moon? Is the moon always full on the moon, or is it never full because the werewolf can't see it?
Fans would forgive this missed opportunity. OK, maybe just me.
1,000 Uber Jasons out of Five. It's werewolves on the moon, people. C'mon!
Earth would be terrifying if we celebrated Halloween every 11 hours, a possibility on a super-Earth investigated by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). That is, if this extrasolar planet, or exoplanet, wasn't so hellishly hot that no life could survive on its surface.
The exoplanet in question is the rocky lava planet TOI-561 b, located around 280 light-years away, which was discovered by NASA's exoplanet-hunting spacecraft TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) in 2020. The planet is located so close to its star, TOI-561, that not only does it complete an orbit every 11 hours, but its surface temperatures reach in excess of 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,800 degrees Celsius).
That is so hot that astronomers once believed that TOI-561 b couldn't possibly possess an atmosphere. With 37 hours of JWST observations covering nearly four full orbits of TOI-561, scientists have now found this horrific planet is buried in a reflective layer of vaporized silicate mineral clouds, the same family of compounds that make up quartz and sand.
"We measured how the planet's brightness and heat changed throughout its orbit," team member Lisa Dang of the University of Waterloo said in a statement. "This technique, known as a phase curve, revealed that the planet reflects a significant amount of light from its star, and that heat is being redistributed around the planet instead of only on the sunlit side. Together, these point to the presence of an atmosphere."
The hemispheres of lava super-Earth are day and night
The proximity of TOI-561 b to its star has another consequence. The planet is tidally locked, meaning it doesn't turn like Earth. Thus, TOI-561 b has one blisteringly hot "dayside" permanently facing its star, and a cooler "nightside" facing out into space in perpetuity.
Dang and colleagues investigated the fact that the bare rock of the dayside seemed to be cooler than should be expected. They theorized that missing heat could be carried around to the night side or the heat may be reflected away before TOI-561 b can absorb it.
By using the JWST to observe full orbits of TOI-561 b, the team was able to observe the planet's nightside for the first time. They found it isn't warm enough to account for all the heat missing from the dayside.
That means TOI-561 b must reflect roughly three-quarters of the starlight that hits it. That is comparable to the most reflective planet in the solar system, Venus, which reflects around 75% of incident sunlight compared to the 30% reflected by Earth.
The team determined that this high reflectivity is the result of clouds of silicate minerals, including silicon dioxide and magnesium silicate, forming on the planet's dayside and acting like sunscreen. These clouds could also help TOI-561 b hang on to an atmosphere.
A diagram shows that TOI-561 b and its two exoplanet siblings would fit well within the orbit of Mercury around the sun (Image credit: NASA)
Of course, the team can't yet be sure what this atmosphere is composed of. It could be a dense carbon dioxide fog like that seen on Venus, or it could be a blanket of sulfur dioxide like that of the most volcanic body in the solar system, Jupiter's moon Io. That would be the case if, like on Io, volcanic activity is replenishing the atmosphere of TOI-561 b.
"The next big question we will seek to answer is whether TOI-561 b's atmosphere resembles Venus or an extreme version of Io," Dang said. "Observing the planet at longer wavelengths with JWST could give us insights and help explain how a planet this hot has held on to an atmosphere for billions of years."
"Sometimes dead is better." Who can forget the immortal words of Jud Crandall, delivered by the incomparable Fred Gwynne in the 1989 film adaptation of Stephen King's Pet Sematary? Turns out Crandall could have been talking about somewhere just as otherworldly as the cursed Chumash burial ground at the heart of one of King's most terrifying works of fiction.
That's because astronomers have discovered two husks of two zombie planets shuffling through the gory remains of what was once their planetary neighbors around a long-deceased star, or white dwarf. The shattered planets were revealed by a clear gap in the debris around the white dwarf J1328−1450, located around 1,600 light-years away from Earth. One of the remnants is estimated to be no larger than the size of the average solar system asteroid, while the other is estimated to be between the size of the moon and the dwarf planet Pluto.
If this wasn't creepy enough, this haunting planetary system could be a grisly warning about the future of our own solar system after the inevitable death of the sun.
White dwarfs like the one at the heart of this system are formed when stars around the same mass as the sun run out of hydrogen in their cores. This means they can no longer fuse hydrogen into helium, the nuclear fusion process that provides the outward push that supports a star against the inward push of its own gravity.
As a result, the stars' cores collapse while the outer layers, where nuclear fusion is still proceeding, puff out. This so-called red giant phase can see stars increase their radius by many 100s of times. When it happens to the sun in around 5 billion years, our star will expand to consume the inner planets, including Earth.
The red giant phase ends when the outer layers disperse along with the wreckage of consumed planets, leaving a smoldering stellar core, now a white dwarf, surrounded by the disk-shaped remains of its outer layers and cannibalized planetary children. But this may not be the final death of all the planets that once orbited the now-dead star.
"We have known for some time that planets may survive beyond the transformation of their central star, but this is the first example of a complex system with a double debris disc and potentially two surviving planetesimals," research leader Nicola Gentille Fusillo, an astronomer at the Università degli Studi di Trieste, Italy, said in a statement.
Violent stellar death can't kill these two planetary Jason Voorhees
This system differs from others seen because of the large gap between the remarkably stable inner and outer rings. All previously known debris discs around white dwarfs have been surrounded by single, flat, rotating disks, not a double structure like this.
"The system is a rare glimpse of the violent, chaotic process by which a planetary system meets its end, and it hints that dead stars can have disc structures far more complex than previously realized," team member Gentle Fusillo of the Astronomical Observatory of Trieste said.
The team thinks that this unique double structure is evidence of planets that weren't completely vaporized during this white dwarf's red giant phase.
That means just like the residents and campers of Crystal Lake couldn't finish off Pamela Voorhees' baby boy, even an expanding star couldn't finish these two planets.
An illustration shows a massive black hole seed next to a standard stellar mass black hole (Image credit: Fortuna and Gentile Fusillo)
The team's observations, made with the Very Large Telescope (VLT), revealed the presence of calcium, oxygen, magnesium, and iron in the disk around the white dwarf. This indicates the destroyed planets had a composition similar to the rocky planets of the inner solar system.
The researchers also found evidence of a diversity of composition in the destroyed planets. The chemistry of the outer rings deviated from that of the inner rings, indicating that at least two of the consumed planets had very different compositions.
"The system therefore offers a remarkable glimpse of what the future of planetary systems, including systems like our own, might look like," Lagos-Vilches explained.
The team's research was published on Monday (Oct. 26) in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Scientists have long known that when two black holes collide, they merge to create a more massive black hole. These events are so violent that they set the very fabric of space ringing with ripples called gravitational waves.
Now, new research suggests that the opposite may happen, too: single black holes may be able to split in two. But this can only happen if that progenitor black hole is spinning at maximum possible speed. That speed prevents the black holes from immediately falling back on each other.
There are physical laws in place that would usually prevent black holes from splitting in two; the team behind this research investigated whether there are conditions in which these laws can be temporarily bypassed.
One of the key aspects of physics that prevents black holes from bifurcating comes from thermodynamics. Black holes possess a characteristic called "entropy," which is essentially a measure of disorder within a system.
Imagine a toddler's crayon box. When entropy is low, the crayons are neatly arranged by color. As entropy is increased, the crayons are scattered and no longer in order. To get the crayons back in order, it requires a parent to put energy into the system and neatly reorder the crayons. In other words, the entropy of a system can't be reduced without some intervention and energy being added from outside that system. Parenting would be a little easier if it could.
A black hole splitting in two would represent a decrease in entropy, strongly disfavored by the laws of thermodynamics, but only if the black hole is not rotating. The situation could be different for a rapidly rotating black hole.
This team of scientists found that a loophole exists for such a black hole.
"The two resulting black holes must also be able to separate rather than immediately fall back together," team member Francesco Sannino of the University of Naples Federico II in Italy said in a statement. "When we include this requirement, the window largely closes again, except possibly for black holes rotating close to their maximum possible rate."
Black hole trousers?
The team calculated just how such a black hole split could occur, finding that the division of the black hole's outer boundary, or "event horizon," proceeds in an oddly trouser-like shape, with one resulting black hole slipping down each "leg."
They termed this "pair-of-pants topologies."
The researchers also determined that a split is more likely to take place if one of the resultant black holes is considerably smaller than its newly born twin.
An illustration of a black hole splitting in two, creating the shape of pants. (Image credit: Francesco Sannino)
"We cannot yet give a single probability for a black hole to split. It depends on how gravity behaves beyond Einstein's theory, and we are working to quantify this," Sannino said. "We expect small primordial black holes to be more prone to splitting than much larger astrophysical black holes."
Sannino added that such black hole splits may be detectable in high-energy light called gamma-rays.
"We may detect a split indirectly: gamma-ray telescopes such as Fermi-LAT can search for signals from tiny black-hole fragments that might form during mergers," the researcher concluded.
The team's research was published on Oct. 22 in the journal Physical Review D.
Scientists are still learning about a cosmic "string of pearls," a unique celestial relic left by a supernova explosion that humanity witnessed around 850 years ago.
That is thanks to the most detailed observation of the dandelion-shaped chains of gas and supernova debris that comprise Pa 30, the only supernova remnant of its type observed in the Milky Way. What makes Pa 30 even more unique is that it has a rare "zombie star" at its heart.
Supernovas like the one that created Pa 30 are called Type Ia supernovas; they happen when a dead star called a white dwarf overfeeds on a companion star like a cosmic vampire. This overfeeding triggers a runaway nuclear explosion that usually destroys the white dwarf. But on rare occasions, the supernova doesn't completely destroy the star, and a shattered stellar body remains, called a zombie star. These events are called Type Iax supernovas.
Pa 30 was first identified in 2013 by a citizen scientist in 2013, but scientists soon linked it to a cosmic explosion recorded independently in the year 1181 in Japanese, Chinese, and Arabic historical documentation. That makes this one of only five supernovas seen before the invention of the telescope.
"Reliable historical records of stellar explosions extend back only about a thousand years. For all we know, there might well be similar remnants still lurking in the dark in our own galaxy," team member Ilaria Caiazzo, assistant professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), said in a statement.
"Today, we are lucky to study an intriguing object we know was observed by astronomers who made three independent historical records of the event centuries before the invention of the telescope."
Solar system-sized pearls
Pa 30 is a good laboratory to study supernovas because, at around 7,500 light-years away, it is relatively close to Earth on cosmic scales. For instance, the heart of our galaxy is around 26,000 light-years away. "We can see this much detail because of Pa 30's proximity to Earth," said Caiazzo. "This proximity makes Pa 30 uniquely valuable for study."
It is also an important subject of study because it is the only supernova remnant in which we can see a zombie star.
Using the Gemini North telescope, Caiazzo and colleagues zoomed in on Pa 30, discovering knots along the strands of gas radiating out from the site of the cosmic explosion, like pearls on a string.
These pearls are each wide enough to encompass the orbit of Neptune, the most distant planet from the sun, ten times over.
"The planetary region of our solar system could fit in each knot about ten times with room to spare," said Caiazzo. "The knots are quite strikingly uniform. We are excited to try to model them."
The team also discovered that the zombie star sits almost perfectly at the heart of Pa 30. When these cosmic explosions happen, they should provide any debris, including zombie stars, with a kick. The fact that this "living dead" star still sits dead center of this wreckage suggests that when this explosion happened, it was roughly symmetrical and the kick was relatively light.
"Explosions conserve momentum. If the explosion itself was perfectly symmetric, the ejecta should also be symmetric, and the surviving star should not receive a substantial kick," Caiazzo said. "We were able to measure a precise upper limit of the remnant star's transverse kick speed, showing that it was surprisingly small. We practically don't see the star moving away at all."
An image of the nebula Pa 30. (Image credit: Robert Fesen)
While there are still many mysteries surrounding Pa 30 and its zombie occupant, one of the most exciting prospects emerging from this research is the possibility it will help identify the wreckage of other Type Iax supernovas in our galaxy.
"While we can see Type Iax supernovas in distant galaxies as point sources of light, resolving the remnants of such explosions is only possible in our own galaxy and in very few nearby ones," Caiazzo concluded. "Eventually, we plan to use Pa 30's distinctive properties to search the Milky Way and nearby galaxies for similar objects."
Astronomers have spotted a remarkable gamma-ray burst (GRB) that's a real Incredible Hulk compared to other cosmic explosions of the same type.
What makes this GRB so special is the fact that the central engine powering it remained active for around 27 days, flaring in X-rays following the initial blast. That's 20 days longer than the longest previous GRB on record.
This record-breaking burst — which is designated GRB 220706A and was spotted on July 6, 2022 — is even more exciting because scientists don't know what the central engine powering it actually is.
"In a nutshell, GRB 220706A is an extremely late X-ray flare. X-ray flaring is common following GRBs, but previously it has always come within the first few days after we detect the burst," study team member Benjamin Gompertz, of the University of Birmingham in England, told Space.com.
"The fact that we see flaring at around 27 days in the GRB’s rest frame tells us that there’s an ongoing active process, and that’s unprecedented in the known population," Gompertz added. "The previous record for delayed flaring was about six days after the GRB."
What created the Incredible Hulk of gamma-ray bursts?
GRBs are some of the most powerful explosions in the cosmos. They have been linked to the collapse of a massive star, which also triggers a supernova and creates a black hole. This results in a long-duration GRB, while short-duration GRBs are thought to be triggered when two stellar remnants called neutron stars collide.
GRB 220706A is an example of an ultra-long GRB, a rare cosmic blast of gamma rays in which the engine powering the GRB stays active for longer. They are incredibly rare, with their cause still unknown.
"We don’t know what the central engine driving this outburst is, and that’s what makes this such a compelling event," Gompertz said. "The fact that we see a supernova tells us that a star has collapsed, which is the standard power source for GRBs, but it doesn’t immediately account for the extremely late flaring or unusually bright supernova. We can interpret that through previous events to some degree."
Gompertz added that another ultra-long GRB detected in 2011, GRB 111209A, was associated with an unusually bright supernova (SN2011k) that had clear evidence for a central engine. The team behind that research determined that GRB 111209A is powered by a magnetar, a neutron star with a particular powerful magnetic field. In this case, the magnetic field is rotating at around 1,000 times per second.
"Our supernova looks a lot like that one, so a magnetar might be present here. That ties in nicely with super-luminous supernovas, which are also thought to be magnetar-driven," Gompertz said. "Another possibility could be that the GRB jet and the supernova are colliding with shells of dense material that were ejected towards the end of the parent star’s life, as it became unstable and began ejecting its outer layers. This sort of event is also seen in the super-luminous supernova population."
An illustration showing a magnetar surrounded by green magnetic field lines at the heart of supernova wreckage (Image credit: Robert Lea (created with Canva))
The team isn't quite sure how the central engine of this ultra-long GRB differs from that of others and why that resulted in 27 days of flaring.
"One possibility is that it’s a much bigger star than we usually see producing GRBs," Gompertz said. "A bigger star would take longer to fall in on itself and so provide a longer-lived source of energy to power the jet."
GRB sources may be members of a stellar population of massive, compact stars called Wolf-Rayet stars. These are 10 times wider that the sun, with around 10 times the mass of our star. However, even the collapse of such a star can't explain GRB 220706A.
"To power GRB 220706A, we estimated we need a star more like 1,000 times the radius of the sun, which would require a population of stars known as blue supergiants," Gompertz said. "On the other hand, it may be the remnant that’s different. If this star produced a magnetar, it may be that 'normal' GRBs just collapse to black holes."
The team thinks that the big question with GRBs like this one is whether they are members of the normal GRB population or a different kind of event. Having this second event, in addition to GRB 111209A, with an unusually bright supernova potentially adds weight to the idea that these are different stars. But the problem is not yet solved.
"The incredibly late flares also strain our models for how jets are powered," Gompertz said. "It will be fascinating to see how future theoretical work can incorporate a power source from a collapsing star that can last for a month!"
A core collapse supernova births a black hole and launches a GRB (Image credit: Robert Lea (created with Canva))
There could be even longer-lasting GRBs out in the cosmos that we have thus far failed to detect. Gompertz explained why such detections are tricky.
"GRBs this long are hard to detect because most of the satellites we use to find them are in low Earth orbit, which means the target is periodically blocked every 90 minutes or so," he explained. "That's fine for your typical 10- to 100-second-long GRB but becomes a nuisance when tracking much longer events. Long-lasting GRBs also seem to be more active in the X-rays rather than the gamma rays."
The University of Birmingham researcher added that newly launched missions like the Einstein Probe, which is more sensitive in X-rays than gamma rays, may be the perfect instruments to find more ultra-long GRBs.
"With any luck, we’ll get a few more of these to chase so that we can start trying to understand the incredible power sources that drive them," Gompertz concluded.
A pre-peer-reviewed version of the team's research is featured on the repository site arXiv.
