Tag: astronomy

Comet C/2025 K1 — NOT interstellar 3I/Atlas — breaks up as it passes closest to the Sun

12:10 pm

The broken apart nucleus of Comet 3I/Atlas
Click for original image.

CORRECTION: I originally posted this story thinking the comet imaged was the interstellar Comet 3I/Atlas. It is not. It is a different one. I have changed to post below to correct my error.

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Sometime on November 11, 2025, the nucleus of interstellar C/2025 K1 broke into three pieces as it passed through its closest and hottest point to the Sun.

The image to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, comes from images of the break-up taken by the Virtual Telescope project, which gathers data from many small telescopes remotely.

From the first link, translated by Google from the Italian:

Its trajectory led it, in early October, to pass through a point of minimum distance from the Sun (perihelion) quite close to our star, about 0.33 astronomical units, just outside the orbit of Mercury. Because of this “short” distance from the Sun, it experienced high solar irradiation, which caused a significant increase in the temperature of the surface and internal layers of the nucleus.

These are precisely the conditions under which a “breakup” event is expected: depending on the internal properties of the nucleus—namely, its porosity, its state of cohesion, its composition, and the percentage of ice—it is possible that the increase in temperature could cause significant “outgassing,” a sudden and violent outflow of gaseous and dusty material, and the consequent fragmentation of the nucleus, sometimes into a few pieces of roughly similar size, sometimes into a cloud of fragments and debris that spread along the trajectory of the original comet.

…”From an initial quick analysis of the images, we can confirm that there are certainly two fairly similar pieces, whose brightness maxima are separated by approximately 2,000 km (distance projected on the star field); “Furthermore, we can intuit the presence of a third, smaller and fainter fragment to the left of the pair,” observes Mazzotta Epifani.

It will be interesting to see if the same thing happens to interstellar Comet 3I/Atlas as it makes its own pass close to the Sun.

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The earliest observations ever of a supernova exploding suggest the blast was bi-polar

9:29 am

Figure 4 from the paper
Click for full graphic. CSM stands for the
circumstellar matter that surrounded the star
prior to eruption.

Using the Very Large Telescope in Chile, astronomers were able to observe a supernova in its very earliest moments after eruption, the earliest yet, and determined the eruption did not flow outward in all directions, but appeared to be bi-polar, as indicated by the cartoon to the right.

To capture the snapshot of the April 2024 supernova, astronomers used the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, which was able to look at the polarization, or orientation, of the supernova’s light. Using a technique called spectropolarimetry, the researchers used the light’s polarization to re-create the explosion’s shape in its first moments. Their results showed that the light emanated not uniformly, like the light from a typical star, but elongated, shaped like an olive.

You can read their paper here. The cartoon comes from Figure 4, and is their “most plausible” interpretation of the data.

This bi-polar shape suggests that in the initial stages of the eruption the material shot out the star’s poles, as seen routinely in planetary nebulae as well as other eruptive stars like Eta Carina. The data also suggests the initial explosion was shaped by the circumstellar material surrounding the star. Such material tends to concentrate at a star’s ecliptic, like our solar system, With less material at the poles, the initial blast favored those directions.

Theorists will now use this data point to better refine the models that attempt to explain how supernovae explode.

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Webb tracks volcanic eruptions on Io

9:59 am

Different Webb infrared detections of Io over time
Click for original image.

Using the Webb Space Telescope, scientists have tracked two different volcanic eruptions on Io that too place from 2022 to 2023, detecting sulfur monoxide both from those eruptions as well as sulfur from the magnetic plasma torus produced as the planet travels through Jupiter’s strong magnetic field. From the paper’s abstract:

Volcanic thermal emission was detected from Loki Patera and Kanehekili Fluctus [two volcanic vents]. The main changes in the shape of the thermal emission spectra since [Webb] observed Io in November 2022 were consistent with the continued cooling of emplaced lava flows in the Kanehekili Fluctus region, and the crust that had formed on the surface of the lava lake in Loki Patera. Images of Io in the SO 1.707 μm emission band [sulfur monoxide] show a concentration above Kanehekili Fluctus and in two regions in the northern hemisphere. The emissions are sourced from SO molecules ejected from volcanic vents. We further detected, for the first time, sulfur line emissions at 1.08 and 1.13 μm. These emissions are distributed homogeneously across a band in Io’s northern hemisphere. They are mainly produced through excitation by electrons from the plasma torus, penetrating Io’s atmosphere.

The top image to the right shows the heat signature above the two volcanoes, one to the southwest and the second to the northeast. The middle image shows the sulfur monoxide emissions detected by Webb above those volcanoes from their on-going eruptions. The bottom image shows the more diffuse sulfur emissions, mostly in the northern hemisphere, believed produce by interactions with the plasma torus.

This research also relied on data obtained by both the Keck telescopes in Hawaii and the Hubble Space Telescope.

There are of course uncertainties with these results. For example, the conclusion that the more diffuse sulfur is produced by interactions with the plasma torus is not as certain. First, those sulfur emissions still appear closely linked to the volcanoes, which suggests this still could be a source.

Second, the observations also cover only two data points in time, in 2022 and 2023. To get a more precise map of the activity on Io we really need an orbiter there observing the planet on a continuous basis, something that is at this time impossible, not only because no mission is planned but because the hostile radiation environment this close to Jupiter makes the engineering quite challenging. It is this reason why Europa Clipper is not going into orbit around Europa when it arrives there in 2031. Better to orbit Jupiter and only periodically dip into that harsh radiation environment.

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Webb captures spectacular false-color image of planetary nebula

10:25 am

The Red Spider Nebula
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, reduced to post here, was taken by the Webb Space Telescope and released this week by the European Space Agency (ESA). It shows in the near-infrared what the scientists have labeled “The Red Spider Nebula”, a planetary nebula of eruptive gases formed near the end of a star’s life.

Webb’s new view of the Red Spider Nebula reveals for the first time the full extent of the nebula’s outstretched lobes, which form the ‘legs’ of the spider. These lobes, shown in blue, are traced by light emitted from H2 molecules, which contain two hydrogen atoms bonded together. Stretching over the entirety of NIRCam’s field of view, these lobes are shown to be closed, bubble-like structures that each extend about 3 light-years. Outflowing gas from the centre of the nebula has inflated these massive bubbles over thousands of years.

Gas is also actively jetting out from the nebula’s centre, as these new Webb observations show. An elongated purple ‘S’ shape centred on the heart of the nebula follows the light from ionised iron atoms. This feature marks where a fast-moving jet has emerged from near the nebula’s central star and collided with material that was previously cast away by the star, sculpting the rippling structure of the nebula seen today.

It is theorized that a not yet detected second star circles the primary, with both acting as the blades in a blender to mix the gases and help produce these shapes.

Be sure to click on the image to see the full resolution version. It shows the details in the central region much more clearly.

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New data supports theory of dark matter, but suggests inexplicably that it acts differently depending on the galaxy’s mass

9:13 am

The uncertainty of science: Astronomers analyzing twelve small and faint galaxies have determined that the existence of some form of mysterious undetected dark matter is necessary to explain the motions of their stars, and that another theory dubbed MOND that would make dark matter unnecessary fails to explain the data.

The authors found that the galaxies’ internal gravitational fields cannot be explained by visible matter alone, and that MOND predictions fail to reproduce the observed behaviour. They then compared their results with theoretical models that assume instead that these galaxies are surrounded by a massive halo of dark matter. Run on the UK’s DiRAC National Supercomputer facility, these dark matter models gave a much better match to the data.

Sounds good, eh? Not so fast. The research also found that large and small galaxies inexplicably interact with gravity and dark matter differently.

The research, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, also challenges a long-standing assumption about how galaxies behave. Astronomers have long believed there is a simple link between the amount of visible matter in a galaxy and the strength of the gravitational pull it produces – known as the “radial acceleration relation.” While this relationship still holds for larger systems, the new study shows that it starts to break down in the smallest galaxies.

In other words, we don’t know enough yet to really explain the formation and behavior of galaxies. This really isn’t surprising, considering the time scales involved (billions of years) and the distances (millions to billions of light years).

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Betelgeuse’s long predicted companion star confirmed

9:23 am

The image released in July 2025
The image of the companion, released previously
in July 2025.

Astronomers have now confirmed prior observations announced in July 2025 of Betelgeuse’s long predicted companion star.

The July conclusions found faint evidence of the companion, shown to the right, from data collected by the Gemini telescope in Hawaii, when the modeling said the companion was at its farthest point from the central star.. This new research was based on new observations in December 2024 by the Hubble and Chandra space telescopes, taken at the same time.

During this ideal observational window, the Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii captured a faint image near Betelgeuse that could be its tiny companion. In a separate study, the Carnegie Mellon-led team used Chandra to collect X-ray data to determine the nature of the mysterious object. “It could have been a white dwarf. It could have been a neutron star. And those are very, very different objects,” O’Grady said. “If it was one of those objects, it would point to a very different evolutionary history for the system.”

But it wasn’t either. O’Grady and her collaborators found no evidence of accretion — a hallmark of compact objects like neutron stars or white dwarfs. Their findings, to be published in The Astrophysical Journal, point instead to a young stellar object roughly the size of the Sun. A companion paper from researchers at the Flatiron Institute, using Hubble data, helped narrow down the companion’s size.

You can read their paper here [pdf]. It estimates the companion to have a mass about 1.4 to 2 times that of the Sun.

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The second known asteroid discovered orbiting closer to the Sun than Venus

8:56 am

Using ground-based telescopes scanning the morning and evening sky, an astronomer has discovered only the second known asteroid circling the Sun within the orbit of Venus.

The manner of the discovery itself, by Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution, also illustrated our modern world.

He first observed it using the Cerro Tololo Dark Energy Camera the night before leaving on a hiking trip. Because the object was moving fast, he knew it must be very close to the Sun, so he’d need to image it again and soon to confirm its orbit before it became lost in the Sun’s glare.

“I had to schedule new observations to re-observe the object while deep in the forest of Pennsylvania,” he says. “It is just amazing that even camp sites today have good Wi-Fi access — that allowed me to download the new second observations of this asteroid and determine its unique orbit that is interior to Venus.”

Astronomers have found so few asteroids close to the Sun because the Sun’s glare makes observations difficult. Some scientists like to speculate to the press that there could be a large unknown population, with some posing a threat to Earth. The computer predictions however say the population is small, because the push of the Sun’s light and radiation should easily shift their orbits outward or make them unstable.

The two asteroids so far found confirm these models in a counter-intuitive way. The new asteroid is estimated to be a little less than a half mile across, while the previously discovered asteroid is thought to have a diameter of more than a mile. Their larger size makes it harder for the Sun’s light and radiation to shift their orbit.

In other words, this inner population of asteroids is likely to be low in number, but made up of larger objects.

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Faced with loss of the federal gravy train, Lowell Observatory makes major changes

8:58 am

According to a press release last week, the Lowell Observatory in Arizona is now making major changes to it management and operations due to “declines in federal research funding.”

The new framework centers on two defining pursuits: Planetary Defense, safeguarding our world from cosmic hazards, and Exoplanetary Research, seeking to understand distant worlds and the potential for life beyond Earth.

Declines in federal research funding, coupled with uncertainty about future national priorities, have impacted research institutions across the country. At the same time, Lowell’s historic reliance on internal funding to sustain research is no longer a viable long-term model. To ensure stability and growth, the Observatory will focus its efforts on key scientific areas while building new endowments to support the scientists and technology that drive discovery.

Essentially, it can no longer depend on easy federal cash (thank you Donald Trump!), and thus needs to actually do real research work in fields that others consider important. It will also abandon its “traditional academic tenure system.” Scientists who use the facility will now have to earn that right, in a case-by-case basis. And such researchers will have to be funded by “private, endowed support.”

In other words, Lowell is returning to the model that had been used by American researchers for most of the nation’s history, until World War II, getting their funding from private sources rather than the federal teat.

We should expect therefore the work at Lowell to become more effective and focused, something it has not been for decades.

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Astronomers take first radio image of the supermassive binary system OJ287

9:41 am

First image of OJ287

Using archive data from the now retired Russian orbiting radio telescope RadioAstron, scientists have now obtained the first image of the binary supermassive black hole system OJ287 that was previously detected flaring as predicted when the smaller black hole (150 million solar masses) circled near the larger (18 billion solar masses).

That image is to the right, cropped and annotated to post here. The cartoon in the lower right shows the theorized orientation of the system, taken from figure 2 of the published paper [pdf]. According to the paper the elongation of the three objects is an artifact of the data and is “not real.” From the press release:

In this latest study, the astronomers compared the earlier theoretical calculations with a radio image. The two black holes were there in the image, just where they were expected to be. This gave the researchers an answer to a question that has been open for 40 years: whether black-hole pairs exist in the first place. “For the first time, we managed to get an image of two black holes circling each other. In the image, the black holes are identified by the intense particle jets they emit. The black holes themselves are perfectly black, but they can be detected by these particle jets or by the glowing gas surrounding the hole,” Valtonen says.

The researchers also identified a completely new kind of a jet emanating from a black hole. The jet coming out of the smaller black hole is twisted like a jet of a rotating garden hose. This is because the smaller black hole moves fast around the primary black hole of OJ287, and its jet is diverted depending on its current motion. The researches liken it to “a wagging tail” which should be seen twisting in different directions in the coming years when the smaller black hole changes its speed and direction of motion.

This image is cropped from the full dataset. The jet continues upward and then curves to the right as it “wags” away.

This incredible black hole binary system, estimated to be about 3.5 billion light years away, has been posited since 1982, when one astronomer noticed that it repeatedly flared every twelve years. Since then scientists have successfully predicted several flares, based on the system’s theorized orbit. These images further confirm the system’s shape.

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A galaxy with a starburst ring within its nucleus

12:49 pm

A galaxy with a starburst ring
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, sharpened, and annotated to post here, was released today by the science team of the Hubble Space Telescope as the picture of the week. This crop focuses on the central regions of this barred spiral galaxy, about 70 million light years away, with an unusual extra feature, a starburst ring encircling its nucleus. From the caption:

NGC 6951’s bar may be responsible for another remarkable feature: a white-blue ring that encloses the very heart of the galaxy. This is called a circumnuclear starburst ring — essentially, a circle of enhanced star formation around the nucleus of a galaxy. The bar funnels gas toward the centre of the galaxy, where it collects in a ring about 3800 light-years across. Two dark dust lanes that run parallel to the bar mark the points where gas from the bar enters the ring.

The dense gas of a circumnuclear starburst ring is the perfect environment to churn out an impressive number of stars. Using data from Hubble, astronomers have identified more than 80 potential star clusters within NGC 6951’s ring. Many of the stars formed less than 100 million years ago, but the ring itself is longer-lived, potentially having existed for 1–1.5 billion years.

This galaxy has also seen about a half dozen supernova, which raises the question: Does intense star formation trigger more supernovae? That is a question that can’t be answered with the data presently available.

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Update on the plans to observe interstellar Comet 3I/Atlas using interplanetary spacecraft

10:16 am

Link here. The key take-away is that nothing is being repurposed to attempt to fly to Comet 3I/Atlas. Instead, as expected the science teams for all the Mars orbiters will turn their instruments to the comet when it is at its closest point to Mars, about 19 million miles away.

Don’t expect any Earth-shattering revelations:

The cameras on these spacecraft were designed to photograph the surface of Mars from Mars orbit, and won’t be able to pick out much detail on such a relatively small comet 30 million km away. But the cameras may be able to capture images of its long tail and also gather data that scientists can use to find out more about what 3I/ATLAS is made of.

Some spectroscopic data will be obtained, but it likely will not be much better than what Webb and other Earth-based telescopes have gotten already.

Similarly, the science team for Europe’s Juice mission, on its way to Jupiter, will take a look, but the distances and orbital positioning will likely limit what it can detect as well.

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The growing mystery of the little red dots in the early universe

12:09 pm

The uncertainty of science: A review of the population of what scientists call “Little Red Dots” (LRDs) — discovered in the early universe by the Webb Space Telescope — has found that 30% do not appear to be compact objects when viewed in ultraviolet wavelengths.

The team studied 99 LRDs, and found that about 30% are not simply compact dots when observed in the ultraviolet.Instead, they reveal disturbed or clumpy structures, in stark contrast to their smooth, point-like appearance at optical wavelengths. Because these galaxies are so far away, their optical light is stretched, or “redshifted,” into the long-wavelength channel of JWST, where the resolution is not sharp enough to see structure, so they look like simple dots.

Rinaldi: ‘But their ultraviolet light is shifted into JWST’s short-wavelength channel, where the telescope has much finer resolution, and there we suddenly see clumps, asymmetries, and signs of interaction. On top of this, in the spectra of some of our LRDs we directly detect the fingerprints of active black holes, with gas moving at thousands of kilometres per second.’ This shows that at least part of this population is powered by growing black holes, while others seem to be dominated by star formation, making LRDs a mixed and diverse family of sources. This is a crucial clue, suggesting that mergers and galaxy interactions may be the trigger for the “LRD phase”.

In other words, astronomers don’t really know what these dots are at present. If some are supermassive black holes, this poses a problem for Big Bang cosmology, as there should not have been enough time since the Big Bang for these black holes to have formed.

That 70% still appear to be compact single objects might mean that’s what they are, but it could also mean that our present observations tools don’t yet have the ability to resolve them.

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Astronomers snap picture of a baby exoplanet

10:08 am

Baby planet
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped to post here, was taken using Magellan Telescope in Chile and the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona. The exoplanet is the small purple dot to the right of the star and the accretion ring that surrounds it.

This exoplanet is very young, only about five million years old, and is thus still accumulating material. Even so, its mass is presently estimated to be five times that of Jupiter.

Following [the first] observations of the system, researchers looked at WISPIT 2, and spotted the planet WISPIT 2b for the first time, using the University of Arizona’s MagAO-X extreme adaptive optics system, a high-contrast exoplanet imager at the Magellan 2 (Clay) Telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. This technology adds another unique layer to this discovery. The MagAO-X instrument captures direct images, so it didn’t just detect WISPIT 2b, it essentially captured a photograph of the protoplanet.

…In addition to discovering WISPIT 2b, this team spotted a second dot in one of the other dark ring gaps even closer to the star WISPIT 2. This second dot has been identified as another candidate planet that will likely be investigated in future studies of the system.

You can read the paper here [pdf]. The other candidate exoplanet is the bright spot below the star, inside the ring.

The technology of astronomy continues to advance.

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Webb: Accretion disk surrounding exoplanet rich in carbon molecules

10:14 am

Using the Webb Space Telescope, scientists have detected a host of carbon molecules inside an accretion disk that surrounds an exoplanet circling a baby star 625 light years away.

Infrared observations of CT Cha b were made with Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) using its medium resolution spectrograph. An initial look into Webb’s archival data revealed signs of molecules within the circumplanetary disk, which motivated a deeper dive into the data.

…Ultimately, the team discovered seven carbon-bearing molecules within the planet’s disk, including acetylene (C2H2) and benzene (C6H6). This carbon-rich chemistry is in stark contrast to the chemistry seen in the disk around the host star, where the researchers found water but no carbon. The difference between the two disks offers evidence for their rapid chemical evolution over only than 2 million years.

You can read the original paper here [pdf]. The exoplanet itself is thought to have a mass 14 to 24 times that of Jupiter, making it almost a brown dwarf star. The NASA makes a big deal claiming this disk is forming a moon around the exoplanet, but that is not what the paper finds. This research did not find any evidence of a new moon exoplanet.

Instead, the paper found an accretion disk rich in carbon molecules, a finding that is significant on its own. It also found that that the accretion disk around the central star, while lacking carbon molecules, appears rich in water.

In other words, this baby solar system is packed with the right material for eventually producing life. Moreover, in this system’s relatively short life, two million years, these materials were able to sort themselves out so that the star has one concentration of material while the exoplanet has another. Both facts suggest that organic chemistry is common in the universe, and can evolve fast.

That is the important discovery here.

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Astronomers detect the spiral motion of the accretion disk surrounding a star 515 light years away

10:04 am

The changes to the spiral over seven years
Click for movie.

A team of Japanese astronomers have used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile to detect for the first time the rotation of the spiral accretion disk that surrounds a young star, rotation that showed the spiral was in the process of forming new planets.

Observations have revealed a spiral pattern in the disk of gas and dust around the young star IM Lup located 515 light-years away in the direction of the constellation Lupus. Spiral patterns are thought to be one of the signs that a new planet will form soon, but other things, such as an already formed planet, can also form spirals. These different types of spirals cannot be distinguished by visual inspection, but they are expected to move differently over time.

To determine the origin of the spirals around IM Lup, an international research team led by Tomohiro Yoshida, a graduate student at The Graduate University for Advanced Studies, SOKENDAI and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), created a stop-motion animation of the spiral pattern using four observations taken by ALMA over the course of seven years. The motion of the spirals in the stop-motion animation shows that they were not caused by an already formed planet, and instead the spirals might be helping to form a new planet.

The two images to the right, taken from the movie, show the spiral’s shift over seven years. I have added the vertical line down the center to help highlight that change.

This discovery once again illustrates the increasing sophistication of our astronomical tools, able to observe such changes at such a great distance.

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A galaxy sunnyside up

9:23 am

A galaxy sunnyside up
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, is the Hubble picture of the week. It shows a strange galaxy that defies categorization. From the caption:

The galaxy in question is NGC 2775, which lies 67 million light-years away in the constellation Cancer (The Crab). NGC 2775 sports a smooth, featureless centre that is devoid of gas, resembling an elliptical galaxy. It also has a dusty ring with patchy star clusters, like a spiral galaxy. Which is it, then: spiral or elliptical — or neither?

Because we can only view NGC [2775 from one angle, it’s difficult to say for sure. Some researchers have classified NGC 2775 as a spiral galaxy because of its feathery ring of stars and dust, while others have classified it as a lenticular galaxy. Lenticular galaxies have features common to both spiral and elliptical galaxies. It’s not yet known exactly how lenticular galaxies come to be, and they might form in a variety of ways.

To me, the galaxy most resembles a fried egg, sunnyside up, though I very strongly doubt that was the process that formed it. The bright center however suggests that something there has in the past emitted a lot of energy and radiation, thus clearing out the gas and dust from that center.

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Astronomers refine the spin and size of Hayabusa-2’s next target asteroid

10:15 am

Using a number of ground-based telescopes, astronomers have determined that asteroid 1998 KY26, which Japan’s Hayabusa-2 probe will visit in 2031, spins much faster and is much smaller than previously estimated.

The new observations, combined with previous radar data, have revealed that the asteroid, 1998 KY26, is just 11 meters wide. It is also spinning about twice as fast as previously thought: “One day on this asteroid lasts only five minutes!” he says. Previous data indicated that the asteroid was around 30 meters in diameter and completed a rotation in approximately 10 minutes. The smaller size and faster rotation will make the spacecraft’s touchdown maneuver more difficult to perform than anticipated.

The observations also found that 1998 KY26 is bright, suggesting it is a solid object, not a rubble pile. Its fast rotation adds weight to this conclusion.

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Strange unexplained polarization shifts in M87’s supermassive black hole

12:25 pm

The changing magnetic field of M87
Click for original image.

Using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), astronomers have detected unexpected and so far unexplained polarization shifts in the supermassive black hole that resides at the center of the galaxy M87, located 55 million light years away.

That black hole is estimated to have a mass six billion times that of our Sun, and was the first ever imaged by EHT. By using observations made in 2017, 2018, and 2021, as shown in the images to the right, found its magnetic field changing in unexpected ways.

Between 2017 and 2021, the polarization pattern flipped direction. In 2017, the magnetic fields appeared to spiral one way; by 2018, they settled; and in 2021, they reversed, spiraling the opposite direction. Some of these apparent changes in the polarization’s rotational direction may be influenced by a combination of internal magnetic structure and external effects, such as a Faraday screen. The cumulative effects of how this polarization changes over time suggests an evolving, turbulent environment where magnetic fields play a vital role in governing how matter falls into the black hole and how energy is launched outward.

The changes were more puzzling in that the size of the black hole’s event horizon, the ring surrounding it, did not change. According to the scientists, this suggests “magnetized plasma swirling near the event horizon is far from static; it’s dynamic and complex, pushing our theoretical models to the limit.”

That the magnetic field flipped polarity however should not be surprising to scientists. Consider the same polarity flips we see in our own Sun every eleven years. It should be expected that the magnetic field around a super massive black hole would be equally variable, if not more so.

The problem is that there remains no understanding about why such changes happen. We know the magnetic field exists. We know it flips polarity. With the Sun we know it does so regularly every eleven years. Why it does so however remains unknown, though there are theories. With M87 the data is far less certain.

Tracking the changes at M87 however should help us build our knowledge base so that someday we might finally grasp those fundamentals.

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The central star-forming cauldron of M82, the most well known star-forming galaxy

12:40 pm

The central star-forming region of M82
Click for original. For original of inset go here.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and annotated to post here, was released today by the Hubble Science team. It shows the central star-forming core of the galaxy M82, only about 12 million light years away and long known as a “peculiar” galaxy by earlier research from the 20th century. For this reason I used the 1963 optical image taken by the 200-inch Hale Telescope at Palomar in California as the inset, showing the entire galaxy. At the time the data only suggested some major energetic events were occurring in the galaxy’s core, as indicated by what looked like filaments shooting out from that core at right angles to the plane of the galaxy.

Data since then, from Hubble and Webb and other space telescopes, have revealed that this galaxy, which some have nicknamed the “Cigar Galaxy”, is forming stars at a prolific rate.

Forming stars 10 times faster than the Milky Way, the Cigar Galaxy is what astronomers call a starburst galaxy. The intense starburst period that grips this galaxy has given rise to super star clusters in the galaxy’s heart. Each of these super star clusters contains hundreds of thousands of stars and is more luminous than a typical star cluster.

The red indicates the dust that permeates the galaxy. The blue comes from the radiation emitted from the clusters near the center, illuminating and ionizing that dust.

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Clumps of dust in a star-forming cluster

12:28 pm

Clumps of dust in a star-forming region
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of a study of the dusty clouds inside star-forming regions. From the caption:

Stars in a star cluster shine brightly blue, with four-pointed spikes radiating from them. The centre shows a small, crowded group of stars while a larger group lies out of view on the left. The nebula is mostly thick, smoky clouds of gas, lit up in blue tones by the stars. Clumps of dust hover before and around the stars; they are mostly dark, but lit around their edges where the starlight erodes them.

This cluster sits inside the Large Magellanic Cloud, about 160,000 million light years away and the largest of the several known dwarf galaxies to orbit the Milky Way. It is the second largest such star-forming region with that dwarf galaxies, and thus is a prime research target for studying the birth of stars.

I especially like this image because of the small dust clouds that sit in the foreground, blobs of material that is slowly being ionized away by the radiation from the stars.

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Gemini South telescope captures Comet 3I/Atlas’s growing tail

1:43 pm

Comet 3I/Atlas
Click for original image.

Using the Gemini South telescope in Chile, astronomers have taken new images of interstellar Comet 3I/Atlas as it moves through the solar system, this time capturing the slow growth of its tail.

The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, shows that tail trailing off to the left. The stars are streaks because it required four exposures in different wavelengths to produce the image. The comet was held steady while the stars shifted after each exposure.

In the images captured during the session, the comet displays a broad coma — a cloud of gas and dust that forms around the comet’s icy nucleus as it gets closer to the Sun — and a tail spanning about 1/120th of a degree in the sky (where one degree is about the width of a pinky finger on an outstretched arm) and pointing away from the Sun. These features are significantly more extended than they appeared in earlier images of the comet, showing that 3I/ATLAS has become more active as it travels through the inner Solar System.

So far, all the evidence continues to show that though 3I/Atlas has an interstellar origin, it is a relatively ordinary comet, simply unique in the manner all objects of a category are unique. As the scientists pour over the comet’s spectroscopy we might find its make-up is somewhat different than comets from our own solar system, but the data so far suggests that the differences are not likely to be that startling.

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Radar images reveal near Earth asteroid to be a contact binary

12:06 pm

Peanut shaped asteroid
Click for original image.

Just after asteroid 1997 QK1 made its first really close pass of the Earth on August 20, 2025, scientists used the Goldstone radio antenna take 28 high resolution images and discovered that the asteriod is peanut shaped, meaning that it is a contact binary of two objects that have fused together.

Those images, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, are shown to the right.

The asteroid is about 660 feet (200 meters) long and completes one rotation every 4.8 hours. It passed closest to our planet on the day before these observations were made at a distance of about 1.9 million miles (3 million kilometers), or within eight times the distance between Earth and the Moon. The 2025 flyby is the closest that 1997 QK1 has approached to Earth in more than 350 years. Prior to the recent Goldstone observations, very little was known about the asteroid.

These observations resolve surface features down to a resolution of about 25 feet (7.5 meters) and reveal that the object has two rounded lobes that are connected, with one lobe twice the size of the other. Both lobes appear to have concavities that are tens of meters deep.

Though this asteroid is classified as potentially dangerous, calculations of its orbit show it poses no threat for the “foreseeable future.”

That it is a contact binary reinforces the present theory that about 15% of all larger asteroids belong to this class.

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Exoplanet detected inside gap in accretion disk surrounding a Sunlike star

9:30 am

Exoplanet in gap of disk

For the first time since 2018, scientists have obtained a clear detection of an exoplanet inside the accretion disk surrounding a Sunlike star. Furthermore, the planet sits inside a gap in that accretion disk, the first time such an exoplanet has been found.

The image to the right, taken from figure one of the research paper [pdf], shows the exoplanet, dubbed WISPIT 2b. The star, located about 435 light years away, has a mass only slightly larger than our Sun, and is considered a close match. The planet itself is estimated to be about the mass of Jupiter, though its orbit within that gap is much farther away, 57 astronomical units versus 5.2. It is these details that make the discovery significant. From the paper’s conclusion:

As the planet resides in the cleared gap and its mass is consistent with the modeled planet mass required to open such a gap, we argue that it likely formed in situ through core accretion and that there is no rapid migration on dynamical timescales. Future follow-up observations of WISPIT 2b with ALMA and [Webb] will enable studies of its atmosphere and the impact of the embedded planet on the disk’s gas kinematics and surface density structure. This will allow us to calibrate ALMA observations of other embedded planet candidates, to unlock the full potential of this complementary technique.

…The discovery of WISPIT 2b embedded in the gap of a seemingly unperturbed disk demonstrates, for the first time, that wide-separation gas giants, discovered by direct imaging around older systems, can indeed form in situ. Thus, WISPIT 2b marks a promising starting point to study wide separation planets in time.

It has long been theorized that gas giants can form much farther from their star, and then migrate inward as the system evolves. This discovery counters that supposition, or least demonstrates that it does not have to occur in every new solar system.

The image also shows that the accretion disk has a second gap farther out, as well as a cleared area close to the star, comparable in size to our solar system. Though other exoplanets have not been detected yet, these gaps suggest they exist, thus indicating that a solar system comparable to our own is now forming.

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A baby star and its protoplanetary disk

2:38 pm

A baby star and its protoplanetary disk
Click for originial.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, rotated, reduced, and sharpened to post here, is the Webb picture of the month from NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), released today. It shows a baby star about 525 light years away.

IRAS 04302+2247, or IRAS 04302 for short, is a beautiful example of a protostar – a young star that is still gathering mass from its environment – surrounded by a protoplanetary disc in which baby planets might be forming. Webb is able to measure the disc at 65 billion km across – several times the diameter of our Solar System. From Webb’s vantage point, IRAS 04302’s disc is oriented edge-on, so we see it as a narrow, dark line of dusty gas that blocks the light from the budding protostar at its centre. This dusty gas is fuel for planet formation, providing an environment within which young planets can bulk up and pack on mass.

When seen face-on, protoplanetary discs can have a variety of structures like rings, gaps and spirals. These structures can be signs of baby planets that are burrowing through the dusty disc, or they can point to phenomena unrelated to planets, like gravitational instabilities or regions where dust grains are trapped. The edge-on view of IRAS 04302’s disc shows instead the vertical structure, including how thick the dusty disk is. Dust grains migrate to the midplane of the disc, settle there and form a thin, dense layer that is conducive to planet formation; the thickness of the disc is a measure of how efficient this process has been.

The dense streak of dusty gas that runs vertically across this image cocoons IRAS 04302, blotting out its bright light such that Webb can more easily image the delicate structures around it. As a result, we’re treated to the sight of two gauzy nebulas on either side of the disc. These are reflection nebulas, illuminated by light from the central protostar reflecting off of the nebular material.

As this is a baby star, the cones above and below the disk indicate the original spherical cloud, with the upper and lower halves now being pulled downward into a spinning disk, where the solar system is forming.

This image is not simply an infrared Webb image. The Hubble Space Telescope provided the optical view, which the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA) in Chile provided data in those wavelengths. Note also the many background galaxies. The universe is not only infinite, it is infinitely populated.

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Using Webb astronomers have for the first time identified the source of a fast radio burst

12:02 pm

Fast Radio Burst source

Astronomers using the Webb Space Telescope have now successfully pinpointed a specific object that appears to be the source for a fast radio burst (FRB), extra-galactic short bursts of radio energy whose cause and origin have up-to-now been unexplained.

Blanchard and his team used a discovery of an FRB in a nearby galaxy made with the CHIME Outriggers array, a radio telescope in Canada, which was recently upgraded to enable FRB detections with precise positions. The researchers then turned to NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to look for an infrared signal from the same location.

…The infrared data revealed an object, dubbed NIR-1, that is likely a red giant star or possibly a middle-aged massive star. A red giant is a Sun-like star near the end of its life that has expanded and brightened, while the other possibility is a star much more massive than the Sun.

Although these stars are unlikely to directly produce FRBs, the scientists say, they may have an unseen companion, such as a neutron star, pulling material away from the red giant or massive star. This process of transferring mass

The burst itself occurred on March 16, 2025 about 130 million light-years away in the galaxy NGC 4141. You can read the discovery paper here [pdf].

There remain of course great uncertainties. For one, NIR-1 is itself not likely the cause of the FRB, but related to its source in some manner. The scientists posit a number of explanations, from either an unseen magnetar (a pulsar with a powerful magnetic field), or a flare from this massive star reflecting off that unseen magnetar.

Regardless, this discovery helps narrow the theories considerably.

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Webb discovers another “oldest black hole”

12:34 pm

The uncertainty of science: Using the Webb Space Telescope, astronomers now claim they have detected a super-massive black hole at a new record-setting distance that puts it far closer to the Big Bang that cosmologists have predicted.

A global team of astronomers, led by The University of Texas at Austin’s Cosmic Frontier Center, has confirmed the discovery of the most distant black hole ever observed. This black hole resides within a galaxy known as CAPERS-LRD-z9, which existed only 500 million years after the Big Bang.

In other words, the light we see from it has traveled 13.3 billion years, revealing the universe at just 3% of its current age.

The black hole, estimated to have the mass of 300 million suns, sits in the center of one of the mysterious “little red dots” that Webb has discovered in the early universe that remain a mystery. This black hole suggests each is an early galaxy with its own super-massive black holes.

I must note that there is great uncertainty in the claim of a black hole discovery. It is based on the spectroscopic emissions detected by Webb, which had features generally seen only in super-massive black holes in the recent universe. Thus, the scientists are making some large assumptions in concluding those emissions also indicate a super-massive black hole in this little red dot.

We must also note that if this black hole really exists, it confounds the theories of cosmologists as to the formation of the universe. It is too soon after the Big Bang for such a black hole to have formed, according to those theories.

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Colorful spiral galaxy

9:25 am

A colorful spiral galaxy
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, reduced and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of a survey of nineteen nearby galaxies. The galaxy, NGC 2835 and 35 million light years away, has been imaged many times in the past, but the new image contacts new wavelength data designed to identify nebulae. From the caption:

This image differs from previously released images because it incorporates new data from Hubble that captures a specific wavelength of red light called H-alpha. The regions that are bright in H-alpha emission can be seen along NGC 2835’s spiral arms, where dozens of bright pink nebulae appear like flowers in bloom. Astronomers are interested in H-alpha light because it signals the presence of several different types of nebulae that arise during different stages of a star’s life. Newborn massive stars create nebulae called H II regions that are particularly brilliant sources of H-alpha light, while dying stars can leave behind supernova remnants or planetary nebulae that can also be identified by their H-alpha emission.

Compare this image with the 2020 photo. The spiral arms are now alive with red and blue features not seen previously.

This survey hopes to find 50,000 nebula in the galaxies being observed.

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Webb: An Earth-sized exoplanet in habitable zone appears to lack an atmosphere

10:17 am

Scientists using the Webb Space Telescope have concluded that an Earth-sized exoplanet, orbiting the red dwarf star Trappist-1 in the habitable zone, does not appear to have an atmosphere, or if it does have one it is not like Earth’s.

The TRAPPIST-1 system is located 40 light-years away and was revealed as the record-holder for most Earth-sized rocky planets around a single star in 2017, thanks to data from NASA’s retired Spitzer Space Telescope and other observatories. Due to that star being a dim, relatively cold red dwarf, the “habitable zone” or “Goldilocks zone” – where the planet’s temperature may be just right, such that liquid surface water is possible – lies much closer to the star than in our solar system. TRAPPIST-1 d, the third planet from the red dwarf star, lies on the cusp of that temperate zone, yet its distance to its star is only 2 percent of Earth’s distance from the Sun. TRAPPIST-1 d completes an entire orbit around its star, its year, in only four Earth days.

Webb’s NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) instrument did not detect molecules from TRAPPIST-1 d that are common in Earth’s atmosphere, like water, methane, or carbon dioxide.

You can read the paper here [pdf].

The likelihood of life on this exoplanet has always been slim, simply because it orbits so close to the red dwarf, where it is vulnerable to the high energy flares the star periodically releases.

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Radar images of near Earth asteroid as it zipped past the Earth

9:11 am

Radar images of near Earth asteroid
Click for original. Go here for movie made from these images.

Using the Goldstone radar antenna in California, astronomers have produced a series of 41 radar images of the near Earth asteroid 2025 OW as it made a close pass of the Earth on July 28, 2025.

Those images, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, are to the right.

The asteroid safely passed at about 400,000 miles (640,000 kilometers), or 1.6 times the distance from Earth to the Moon.

The asteroid was discovered on July 4, 2025, by the NASA-funded Pan-STARRS2 survey telescope on Haleakala in Maui, Hawaii. These Goldstone observations suggest that 2025 OW is about 200 feet (60 meters) wide and has an irregular shape. The observations also indicate that it is rapidly spinning, completing one rotation every 1½ to 3 minutes, making it one of the fastest-spinning near-Earth asteroids that the powerful radar system has observed. The observations resolve surface features down to 12 feet (3.75 meters) wide.

The asteroid’s fast rotation suggests it is a solid object, structurally strong, rather than a rubble pile held together loosely by gravity. It would thus be very damaging if it should ever hit the Earth.

No worries however. The refined orbital data says this asteroid will not come this close again in the foreseeable future.

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Webb: Evidence of gas giant exoplanet orbiting the central star of Alpha Centuri

2:54 pm

Webb infrared data
Click for original image.

The uncertainty of science: Astronomers using the Webb Space Telescope now think they have detected a gas giant exoplanet orbiting the central star of the Alpha Centuri triple star system, the closest star to our Sun at only four light years distance.

The false-color image to the right shows the candidate exoplanet labeled as S1, with the light of the central star blocked out but indicated by the star at the center. A lot of processing was required to bring out this bright blob, including eliminating optical effects that normally act to hide such objects.

Alpha Centauri, located in the far southern sky, is made up of the binary Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B, both Sun-like stars, and the faint red dwarf star Proxima Centauri. Alpha Centauri A is the third brightest star in the night sky. While there are three confirmed planets orbiting Proxima Centauri, the presence of other worlds surrounding Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B has proved challenging to confirm.

Now, Webb’s observations from its Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) are providing the strongest evidence to date of a gas giant orbiting Alpha Centauri A. …Based on the brightness of the planet in the mid-infrared observations and the orbit simulations, researchers say it could be a gas giant approximately the mass of Saturn orbiting Alpha Centauri A in an elliptical path varying between 1 to 2 times the distance between Sun and Earth.

If confirmed the exoplanet would be orbiting the star within the habitable zone, though as a gas giant life as we know it would likely be impossible. The location, only four light years away, makes this exoplanet and the entire system a prime target for further observations.

Hat tip to BtB’s stringer Jay.

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