Day 4 of the 2025 Space Telescope Advent Calendar: Star Birth in the Lobster Nebula. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope recently imaged a region where the radiation and winds from a group of superhot infant stars are blasting and sculpting dense clouds of surrounding dust.
For the first time, scientists have directly detected molecules in a Frisbee of gas and dust swirling around an alien gas-giant planet. I didn't think this was possible, says astronomer Sierra Grant of Carnegie Science in Washington, D.C. Typically such a faint signal would be invisible in the glare of a star. Grant and her co-author Gabriele Cugno of the University of Zurich, who published the results recently in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, think the carbon-rich disk is a lunar nursery.
Asteroid 2024 YR4, a 220-foot (67m) 'city-killer', currently has a four per cent chance of hitting the moon on 22 December 2032. However, fresh observations could mean the odds of a collision rise to as high as 30 per cent. If the massive asteroid does hit the moon, it could carve out a 0.6-mile-wide crater and shower Earth with lunar shrapnel.
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.
