Astro Blog

By Daniel Clery , Science.  Excerpt: It’s as if the baby universe had caught a case of measles. Since NASA’s JWST observatory began peering into the distant universe in 2022, it has discovered a rash of “little red dots”—hundreds of them, shining within the first billion years of the 13.8-billion-year-old universe, so small and red that they defied conventional explanation. Only in the past few months has a picture begun to emerge. The little red dots, astronomers say, may be an entirely new type of object: a colossal ball of bright, hot gas, larger than the Solar System, powered not by nuclear fusion, but by a black hole. ...JWST couldn’t resolve the dots into a recognizable shape, which meant they must have been tiny—less than 2% of the diameter of the Milky Way....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/early-universe-s-little-red-dots-may-be-black-hole-stars . 

By Heather Cox Richardson.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xh9-t8xqviM .

By McKenzie Prillaman , Science.  Excerpt: About 1,400 light-years from Earth sits a  young sunlike star surrounded by cooling gas and teensy silicate minerals . These mineral solids — some of the building blocks of rocky planets — are among the first to condense from the gas, suggesting that they’re kick-starting the creation of planets in a system much like the one earthlings call home, researchers report in the July 17  Nature . “It really is the first time we’ve seen this stage of planet formation in the process,” says planetary scientist Laura Schaefer of Stanford University, who was not involved in the new study. Observing the timeline of these early hot minerals will help researchers better understand how events unfolded billions of years ago in the solar system....  Full article at https://www.sciencenews.org/article/star-earliest-birth-planet-solar-system .