Astro Blog

By Caryl-Sue Micalizio , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: The  awe-inducing Vera C. Rubin Observatory  does not blink. From its sky-high altitude in the Chilean Andes, Rubin will image every point in the skies over the Southern Hemisphere 800 times over a 10-year period. The observatory is already issuing astronomers 800,000 alerts a night and eventually might send 10  million  a night. “The whole field of astronomy is about to be completely revolutionized by this dataset,” says astronomer Sarah Greenstreet in Kimberly Cartier’s beautiful, breathless introduction to the observatory, “ Small, Faint, or Fast, Rubin Will Find It .” So what is Rubin going to find? Asteroids . ...astronomers think Rubin might find 4 million more. Comets . Rubin’s unblinking eye will help astronomers trace comets and other trans-Neptunian objects in the icy reaches of the outer solar system. Planet 9 . “This is the survey that will determine whether Planet 9 is real or not,” says astronomer Meghan ...

By Robert Sanders , UC Berkeley News.  Excerpt: Jupiter, the most massive planet in our solar system, has correspondingly humongous storms.... Some of these storms also generate terrific bolts of lightning, according to a new study by University of California, Berkeley scientists. Some flashes are 100 times more powerful than lightning on Earth — and possibly much stronger. The results come from analysis of data from NASA’s Juno spacecraft, which has been orbiting the planet since 2016 and scanning the atmosphere with its microwave radiometer, which can detect radio emissions from lightning similar to the radio interference created by lightning on Earth. ...lead author Michael Wong, a planetary scientist at UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory...  study  was published March 20 in the journal  AGU Advances ....  Full article at https://news.berkeley.edu/2026/03/23/lightning-bolts-on-jupiter-pack-more-than-100-times-the-power-of-earths-flashes/ .  See also...

By Science Insider.  Excerpt: Out past Neptune, connected spheres of rock orbit through the solar system like faceless galactic snowmen. Called contact binaries, these objects represent roughly 10% of all planetary building blocks. But how these cosmic curiosities form has remained unclear. Typically, simulations of two colliding space objects model the masses as fluid blobs that squish into a single sphere on impact. But using high-performance computers, ...new models were  able to predict the snowman-shaped contact binaries for the first time , scientists reported this week. As for the origins of the binaries, scientists think they began as single objects formed when gravity pulled together dust, gas, and pebbles in the disc of the early Milky Way. As the disc rotated, it ripped apart such objects into two separate chunks that orbited each other. Over time, gravity gently tugged these chunks back together until they fused into their characteristic two-lobed shape....  F...

By Robert Sanders , UC Berkeley News.  Excerpt: Of the more than 4,500 stars known to have planets, one puzzling statistic stands out. Even though nearly all stars are expected to have planets and most stars form in pairs, planets that orbit both stars in a pair are rare. Of the more than 6,000 extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, confirmed to date — most of them found by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) — only 14 are observed to orbit binary stars. There should be hundreds. Where are all the planets with two suns, like Tatooine in  Star Wars ? Astrophysicists at the University of California, Berkeley, and the American University of Beirut have now proposed a reason for this dearth of circumbinary exoplanets — and Einstein’s general theory of relativity is to blame. ...If a planet is orbiting the pair of stars, the gravitational tugs from the stars make the planet’s orbit precess, ...similar to the way the axis of a spinning top...

By Elise Cutts , Science.  Excerpt: Astronomers are planning ambitious telescopes to search for signs of life on distant planets. A newly discovered world, announced here last week at the Rocky Worlds conference and  published yesterday  in  The Astrophysical Journal Letters , might just be the perfect target. The planet, called HD 137010 b, is almost exactly Earth-size. At 355 days, its orbit is almost exactly Earth-like, too. And its star is bright and just 146 light-years away–close enough to be observed in detail with future telescopes....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/earth-size-planet-spotted-yearlong-orbit . 

By Jackie Flynn Mogensen , Scientific American.  Excerpt: The galaxy MoM-z14 could offer clues to what the universe looked like in its early infancy. ...On Wednesday astronomers on  announced that a bright galaxy  called MoM-z14 that was found using NASA’s  James Webb Space Telescope  (JWST) is the farthest yet detected, existing just 280 million years after the big bang. ...The galaxy, the light of which has taken more than 13 billion years to reach our telescopes, is  brighter, denser and more chemically rich than astronomers had expected , according to NASA....  Full article at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/jwst-spots-most-distant-galaxy-ever-pushing-the-limits-of-the-observable/ .