Astronomers say NASA's James Webb Space Telescope may have spotted the universe's first "dark stars," primordial bodies of hydrogen and helium that bear almost no resemblance to the nuclear fusion-powered stars we've come to know.
Astronomers were astonished to find an abundance of phosphine, a molecule produced by microbes on Earth, in the atmosphere of a brown dwarf, an unusual type of object that lives in the grey zone between a giant planet and a tiny star. As detailed in a new paper published in the journal Science, astronomers said they had found "undepleted phosphine," a molecule made up of three hydrogen atoms and one phosphorus atom, in the atmosphere of Wolf 1130C, a brown dwarf 54 light-years from Earth.
To back up his far-fetched theory, Loeb has pointed out that 3I/ATLAS' highly unusual trajectory brings it suspiciously close to Jupiter, Mars, and Venus. In a new blog post, the astronomer pointed out that the object will come within just 1.67 million miles of Mars' path around the Sun, in what he characterized as a "remarkable fine-tuning" of the object's path.
