New Ice Form Found on Neptune

🧊 Strange new ice found inside planets

🔭 JWST rules out tiny exomoons

📡 Starlink threatens radio astronomy

🌀 Narrowing the black hole impostor hunt

⭐ Missing companions near Milky Way's core

CEA France researchers led by Alexis Forestier recreated extreme planetary conditions to study superionic ice, where oxygen atoms form solid lattices while hydrogen nuclei flow freely like liquid through the structure.

Diamond anvil cells compressed ice samples to 230 gigapascals at 1,800 Kelvin, with X-ray diffraction at the European Synchrotron revealing oxygen atoms locked into hexagonal close-packed crystalline arrangements above these thresholds.

The hexagonal phase discovery could reshape planetary interior models, as the team notes this structure may influence the unusual magnetic field generation observed within Uranus and Neptune's deep layers.

Columbia University astronomer David Kipping analyzed JWST (James Webb Space Telescope) observations of exoplanet LP 890-9 c, demonstrating how multi-transit averaging can overcome instrumental red noise that plagued previous exomoon searches.

Analysis of 12 separate transits at 105 light-years distance achieved sufficient sensitivity to rule out moons larger than 0.1 Earth radii with 95% confidence, representing the most sensitive exomoon hunt ever conducted.

The proof-of-concept study establishes JWST lacks a fundamental noise floor for moon detection, though Kipping notes the telescope's limited observation time remains the primary barrier to discovering the first confirmed exomoon.

Curtin University researchers analyzed approximately 76 million radio images over 29 days using the Engineering Development Array 2, a prototype SKA-Low (Square Kilometre Array Low) station located in Western Australia.

The team catalogued 112,534 emissions from 1,806 Starlink satellites across 73–235 MHz, with leakage reaching 10⁶ Jy/beam—roughly 10,000 times stronger than the early-universe hydrogen signals SKA-Low requires detecting.

Current ITU (International Telecommunication Union) regulations address only intentional transmissions, leaving unintended hardware leakage in protected astronomy bands legally unregulated even as the Starlink constellation exceeds 6,000 satellites.

University of Birmingham and Perimeter Institute researchers analyzed GW241011, a gravitational-wave signal from merging compact objects detected by LIGO Hanford and Virgo detectors in October 2024, testing whether the primary object was truly a black hole.

The merger involved objects of 19.6 and 5.9 solar masses with the primary exhibiting dimensionless spin of 0.78, enabling unprecedented precision in measuring spin-induced quadrupole moment at signal-to-noise ratio of approximately 36.

The analysis rules out rotating boson stars with quartic self-interactions as the primary object, though co-author Krishnendu notes sufficiently compact exotic objects with compactness exceeding 0.24 remain viable alternatives to Kerr black holes.

University of Coimbra researcher Rodrigo P. Silva led simulations investigating why young B-type stars in the S cluster near Sagittarius A* have fewer binary companions than typical massive star populations throughout the galaxy.

Simulations tracked 100,000 binary systems for one million years, finding 62% survived while 20% were tidally disrupted, producing a predicted binary fraction of 38% ± 10% matching the observed 43% ± 9% among S stars.

The results support in situ gas-shell fragmentation formation triggered by a Sagittarius A* outburst approximately 6 million years ago, rather than stars migrating inward from more distant galactic regions over time.