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).
NASA is reviving discussions to rescue the Hubble Space Telescope, which is operating well but is on track to reenter Earth's atmosphere about six years from now.
The agency issued a request for information (RFI) on Oct. 29 for "in-space servicing" capabilities, which could include boosting Hubble's orbit (which is naturally degrading due to atmospheric drag), or even a mission to "enhance its capabilities" in some way.
Hubble, which launched in April 1990 in partnership with the European Space Agency, was serviced five times by astronauts on space shuttle missions, the most recent being in 2009. The observatory's groundbreaking achievements include helping to show that the expansion of the universe is accelerating — a discovery that won the Nobel Prize — as well as a swath of finds about planets, galaxies, stars and other parts of the universe.
Hubble also regularly teams up with other telescopes for science work, and its observations have led to the publication of at least 23,000 scientific papers, NASA figures suggest. And, despite its age, Hubble remains in high demand. "Astronomers request about seven times as much observing time as is available each year," the agency stated in September.
Hubble is also widely appreciated by the public. People have long enjoyed and celebrated its iconic images, such as the Eagle Nebula's "Pillars of Creation," a gorgeous shot that has been revisited several times over the decades. As such, this is not the first time in recent years that discussions have opened about keeping the famed observatory running for a while longer.
In 2022, for example, billionaire tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman proposed using SpaceX hardware to mount a Hubble-servicing mission. (Isaacman also purchased and commanded two crewed SpaceX missions to Earth orbit, which flew in September 2021 and September 2024.) NASA declined, however, citing possible risks to the healthy observatory.
But things have changed, apparently. Isaacman, who in December 2025 became NASA administrator, said in an Oct. 30 agency statement that Hubble's science return means the agency should "be looking at every reasonable opportunity to keep it delivering for as long as possible" — especially if doing so would be a cost savings compared with launching another mission.
In an Oct. 30 post on X, Isaacman added that it's "still worth exploring the options" and noted that NASA had previously considered "a far lower-cost solution" to keep the observatory flying. "That was then. Still worth the effort — Hubble deserves it," he added.
The new RFI also allows for alternative scenarios, however, which could include a "safe, controlled reentry into Earth's atmosphere or orbital disposal at the end of Hubble's mission."
Hubble will naturally enter the atmosphere in 2033 or 2034 due to orbital drag, so any attempt to service it would have to be in 2032, the agency stated.
Earlier this year, NASA worked with Katalyst Space Technologies on a $30 million mission that aimed to boost the orbit of the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, which is also falling back to Earth due to orbital drag.
That long-shot rescue mission — which was developed quickly to race against accelerated solar activity, which ballooned Earth's atmosphere and increased drag — launched successfully this summer. But control issues prevented Katalyst's LINK spacecraft from meeting up with Swift. Swift is expected to reenter Earth's atmosphere tomorrow (Nov. 4) after 22 years of operations — far past its two-year design lifetime.
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]."
Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), scientists have found that the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS was built from tiny grains of ice mixed with dust that are quite different from the solar system’s comets.
These ice grains do, however, bear striking similarities to some icy bodies located at the edge of the solar system, beyond the orbit of Neptune, so-called trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs).
3I/ATLAS was discovered entering the solar system in the summer of 2025. It was only the third object found entering the solar system from farther afield in the Milky Way after 1I/'Oumuamua, seen in 2017, and 2I/Borisov, detected in 2019. This meant the interstellar comet offered a rare chance to glimpse the conditions under which such bodies form in other star systems. Thus, the JWST was quickly on the trail of 3I/ATLAS.
"We designed [JWST] to be ready the moment an active interstellar comet was found and to follow it over time," Martin Cordiner of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the Catholic University of America said in a statement.
Cordiner leads the JWST program to study objects such as 3I/ATLAS, and he is a co-author on a new research paper describing some of the findings.
The unclear origins of 3I/ATLAS
Researchers know that 3I/ATLAS wasn't born in the solar system, but nobody knows around which star 3I/ATLAS formed. What scientists are more sure of is the fact that this interstellar comet was produced within a planet-forming disk of gas and dust around a young star, possibly as long ago as 10 to 12 billion years. That's over twice the age of our solar system. It was then ejected from its home system somehow and left to wander interstellar space before encountering our solar system.
Like the familiar comets in our solar system, 3I/ATLAS is composed of grains of ice less than a micron – a millionth of a meter – in size. When the surface of the comet is warmed by the sun, gas erupts outwards, carrying ice grains into the cloud of ice and dust surrounding the comet, its coma, and its tail, where JWST can detect them.
When viewed spectroscopically, the water-ice in comets native to our solar system creates a strong absorption line in a comet’s spectrum at a wavelength of three microns, as well as less-prominent absorption lines at 1.5 and two microns.
Comparison between ice in the interstellar invader comet 3I/Atlas and icy bodies in our solar system. (Image credit: SwRI/Silvia Protopapa/NASA/ESA/CSA JWST)
Yet when the JWST’s Near-Infrared spectrograph (NIRSpec) instrument viewed 3I/ATLAS three times between August 2025, before its closest approach to the sun, and after closest approach in April 2026, scientists found the 1.5- and two micron absorption lines were missing, though the three-micron line remained strong.
"That combination was a puzzle," research lead author Silvia Protopapa of the South-west Research Institute said. "The strong three-micron band points to water-ice in the coma, but the weak or absent shorter-wavelength bands suggest the ice is not in the form we usually see in solar system comets."
The JWST's muddy 3I/ATLAS findings
Whenever presented with an unusual observational signature such the JWST delievered for 3I/ATLAS researchers turn to modeling to find the physical characteristics that best fit the spectrum.
The modeling suggested to Protopapa’s team that 3I/ATLAS was composed of sub-micron grains of dirty water-ice, rich in dust. In comparison, the grains from the solar system’s indigenous comets are much cleaner, with almost pure water-ice relatively uncontaminated by dust.
"What seems to set [3I/ATLAS’ grains] apart is how much dust is mixed into the ice," said Protopapa. "Those grains hold clues to the conditions where the comet was born."
The chemical composition of 3I/ATLAS (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Martin Cordiner (CUA, NASA-GSFC); Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI))
Comets are made of primordial material found in the planet-forming disk of gas and dust that surrounds a young star, and therefore the composition of comets can provide a window into the conditions in which planets form.
Whereas solar system comets tell us about the birth of Earth, an interstellar comet can tell us about conditions in which planets formed around another star, and how similar or dissimilar those conditions were to the birth of the solar system.
Yet comets are not the only icy remnants that date back to such primordial times. There are various families of bodies in the outer solar system, and 3I/ATLAS’ spectrum bears a resemblance to the spectrum of some medium-sized TNOs that are rich in carbon-dioxide ice and organic compounds (organic meaning containing carbon atoms). Indeed, in a separate 2025 study led by Cordiner, the JWST found 3I/ATLAS to have one of the greatest abundances of carbon dioxide ever seen in a comet.
TNOs are sizable bodies that are located far beyond the orbit of Neptune, The TNOs in question would have formed in a different part of the Sun’s protoplanetary disk than most comets and their composition reflects that.
Artist's illustration of a planetary disk, a region of dust and gas where planets form. The zoom-in insert displays carbon monoxide molecules in the ice phase. (Image credit: M.Weiss/Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian)
On the other hand, the results imply that 3I/ATLAS was formed around its star of origin from similar icy material to that which produced some of the TNOs in our solar system, showing that the building blocks of planets around other stars share a common range of properties with the building blocks that formed our solar system. Indeed, 3I/ATLAS could even be a fragment of a TNO-like body that was shattered in a collision.
"At first glance, 3I/ATLAS looks different from the icy comets we know," said Protopapa. "But when we placed it alongside distant icy worlds in our own solar system, it no longer looked out of place.
"This suggests that the icy building block of planets, here and around other stars, may share ice in the form of tiny, micron-scale grains, ranging from relatively pure ice to ice mixed with dust, with 3I/ATLAS toward the dusty end."
What this tells us is that these sub-micron-sized icy grains must form first in planet-forming disks, to then be incorporated into large bodies such as comets and protoplanets.
In this image, we can see a colorful view of an ancient, rocky Martian hill. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UArizona)
This rainbow-hued rocky plain looks like the landscape of an alien world. And, it turns out, it is.
What is it?
In this image, we can see an ancient, rocky hill on Mars. In the Red Planet's Southern Highlands, this alien terrain is chock-full of minerals, which we can see clearly defined in this color-enhanced view of the region.
This image was snapped by the HiRISE camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which has been studying the planet's surface, atmosphere and climate since arriving in Martian orbit in March 2006.
But this isn't exactly what the surface of the planet would look like through our eyes; the image is color-enhanced. Why would scientists take a natural-color image and turn it rainbow? Doing so enhances the slight color differences in these rocks, allowing researchers to pick out the different minerals.
Why is it incredible?
As pointed to above, enhancing colors in scientific images can be an incredibly useful tool for exploration.
For instance, in this image, the blue- and green-toned rocks could be full of minerals like pyroxenes and olivine, according to scientists analyzing the image. And they think that the yellow, orange and red patches may contain minerals formed by past interactions with liquid water.
By exploring the mineral content of rocks like this, researchers can peel back the layers of history within the Martian bedrock. The discovery of certain minerals, for example, can show that water flowed on Mars long ago, pointing to potentially habitable conditions.
So, as we can see, this striking rainbow image isn't just a beautiful landscape; it's also hiding serious clues to Mars' history.
Something spooky is stirring in the shadows of the infamous star Betelgeuse, a cosmic poltergeist that is disrupting the atmosphere of the red supergiant.
New radio observations have shown Betelgeuse's smaller stellar companion, Siwarha (not Betelguese Betelguese, unfortunately), cutting through the supergiant's extended atmosphere and leaving a wake in its path, like a jet boat slicing through a lake.
Because the name of this red supergiant star located about 650 light-years away from Earth, marking the shoulder of constellation Orion, is Betelgeuse, which means "the hand of al-Jawza" in Arabic, the companion was named Siwarha, meaning "her bracelet."
"This companion is orbiting so close to the star that it actually passes through its extended atmosphere," Lynn Matthews, the principal research scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Haystack Observatory who led the new observations, said in a statement.
Astronomers turn cosmic ghost hunters
Using data collected from 2021 to 2026 using the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, Matthews and colleagues found that Betelgeuse's atmosphere stretches into an egg shape when the companion star is farthest away and rounds out when the companion passes in front of or behind it.
The same data also showed that Betelgeuse itself has largely recovered from the "Great Dimming" that made headlines in 2020. This recovery comes after the red supergiant "sneezed" in 2020, dramatically ejecting tons of gas and dust and fading to its dimmest in more than a century.
ALMA captures a stunning image of the doomed star Betelgeuse (Image credit: ALMA(ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/W. Dent et al.)
Among the long-standing mysteries of Betelgeuse, scientists have puzzled over a brightening and dimming cycle that lasts roughly 2,100 days. Recent studies pointed to a low-mass companion orbiting deep inside the star's atmosphere, and its existence was confirmed in early 2026.
Though Siwarha itself is too faint to detect directly at radio wavelengths, its influence shows up in the star's shape, the new study found. To confirm the effect, the researchers say, they will need to observe more of the companion's orbit, especially at radio frequencies that have so far been sparsely sampled.
The Next Generation Very Large Array, a planned telescope, should make this kind of monitoring far more routine, according to the team. With sharper vision, researchers could see how red supergiants like Betelgeuse shed their material as they near the end of their lives, and how a close companion might affect that process by tugging on that ejected matter.
This research is described in a paper published in The Astronomical Journal.
Three views of the Cat's Head Nebula. A visible light image captured by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (left); a mid-infrared image taken by James Webb Space Telescope (center); and the James Webb Space Telescope's near-infrared view (right). (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI))
This "cat's head" would work perfectly in a witch's cauldron, glowing red "eyes" and all.
Just in time for Halloween, we have new, ghostly views of the Cat's Eye Nebula haunting the outer reaches of the cosmos.
What is it?
This nebula earned its name from its distinctive "cat's head" shape, which you can see on the left-hand side of these two images snapped by both the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes. In these new images, you can even see the cat's glowing red "eye," which experts suggest could be a young star trapped in the nebula's dusty clutches.
A visible light image of the Cat's Head Nebula captured by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The nebula's distinctive "cat's head" shape was formed over eons by intense ultraviolet radiation and winds of gases streaming from massive stars in the Carina Nebula. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI))
Found about 7,500 light-years away from Earth, this star-forming region can be found within the larger Carina Nebula.
As the stars in the Carina Nebula continue to form, grow and evolve over time, the Nebula itself will change and eventually, this "cat's head" won't look much like a cat anymore. But for now, we can enjoy this vision of a domestic cat somehow depicted in this colossal tour of gas and dust.
Why is it incredible?
As a special Halloween treat, we have not one, but three new images of the cosmic cat's head.
In the snapshot captured by Hubble, we can see the nebula in visible light. This view shows the nebula as a brown pillar of dust embedded in a hazy, almost rainbow field of dust and gas. These colors are captured through Hubble's filters that can see the light coming from oxygen, hydrogen and sulfur and the light scattered by nebula dust.
JWST also took a look at this cat's head, observing the nebula in near- and mid-infrared wavelengths.
By looking at the same objects in space through different wavelengths and with different instruments and telescopes, we can uncover completely new and different details about these far-off celestial objects.
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."
