Astro Blog

By Daniel Clery , Science.  Excerpt: Researchers have found promising hints that the atmosphere of a distant planet contains gases linked to life,  BBC reports today . A team led by University of Cambridge astronomer Nikku Madhusudhan reports in  The Astrophysical Journal Letters  that it  used NASA’s JWST telescope to detect the signatures of the gases  dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and dimethyl disulfide (DMDS) in starlight that had passed through the atmosphere of K2-18b, a massive planet 120 light-years from Earth. On Earth, those gases are produced by marine phytoplankton and give sea air its distinctive scent. ...It’s also possible that DMS and DMDS are produced on the planet  by some nonbiological process . Last year, a different team of researchers reported signs of DMS  within the dust and gas of the definitively lifeless comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko , calling into question the gas’ usefulness as a biosignature....  See also New York Tim...

By Jenna Ahart , Science.  Excerpt: Like the fictional planet Tatooine in  Star Wars , some exoplanets ...orbit binary pairs of stars, which cast their worlds in double sunrises and sunsets as they themselves orbit each other. Now, researchers report today in  Science Advances  that they have found  an especially unusual example of such a planet : one that orbits over and under the poles of two failed stars that loom in its skies. ...only 16 exoplanets had ever been confirmed to orbit around a binary pair—and all of those planets orbit within the plane of the stars’ orbits around each other, not over the poles. ...this peculiar planet, known rather prosaically as 2M1510 (AB) b, ...orbits... brown dwarfs, failed stars that aren’t massive enough to spark on. ...In binary systems like this one, the elliptical orbit of each object in the binary will gradually shift its orientation over time, like the axis of a spinning top tracing out a circle as the top wobble...

By Molly Herring , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Researchers have found salts in samples from asteroid Ryugu. Combined with similar salty discoveries from asteroid Bennu, the finding suggests that aqueous incubators of life’s first ingredients may have been relatively common in the early solar system. ...The results from  Ryugu  were reported in  Nature Astronomy  in November 2024, and those from  Bennu  were reported in January 2025. The parallel discoveries paint a compelling picture of the early solar system. ...“We can now say, for the first time, that 4.5 billion years ago—long before most of us thought it could happen—we had both the ingredients and the environment in which the early stages of organic evolution towards life could begin,” said  Tim McCoy , a curator of meteorites at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History who studied the Bennu samples. Such evolution “didn’t happen on a large, icy moon or a large, warm planet like Earth. It...