Webb Discovers Giant Exoplanet Hiding

🔭 Hidden planet found at Beta Pictoris

🌑 Nearby exoplanets are strange and hostile

☄️ Ancient asteroid shower hit Earth and Mars

⭐ Oldest stars reveal universe's true age

🚀 Starship launch aborted at final moment

Aidan Gibbs and researchers at the University of California, San Diego discovered a third giant planet orbiting Beta Pictoris, a young star system just 63 light-years from Earth, using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope.

Webb's NIRSpec Integral Field Unit detected carbon monoxide absorption lines in the planet's atmosphere, revealing Beta Pictoris d orbits at approximately 30 astronomical units with at least twice Jupiter's mass.

The spectroscopic detection method marks the first directly imaged exoplanet discovered primarily through moderate-resolution spectroscopy, potentially transforming searches for worlds hidden within bright debris disks, according to the research team.

Xander Byrne and colleagues at the University of Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy characterized four sub-Earth exoplanets orbiting Barnard's Star, the Sun's closest stellar neighbor after Alpha Centauri, located just under six light-years away.

Analysis reveals the planets are rich in periclase mineral from extreme magnesium abundance, tidally locked with permanent day-night hemispheres, and orbit in a stabilizing 9:12:16 resonance ratio resembling musical perfect fourths.

The European Space Agency's upcoming Plato mission may discover many more sub-Earth planets, with this compositional analysis technique helping assess habitability potential of rocky worlds, according to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society study.

William Bottke at Southwest Research Institute and collaborators linked an ancient lunar impact surge approximately 800 million years ago to the catastrophic disruption of the Eulalia asteroid family's parent body near Jupiter's 3:1 resonance.

Simulations show approximately three-quarters of fragments entered the resonance over 150 million years, with the shower producing the 93-kilometer Copernicus crater and potentially triggering widespread bombardment across terrestrial planets.

The Planetary Science Journal study suggests this impact shower coincided with major biosphere transitions on Earth, including ocean chemistry changes and possible eukaryotic diversification, demonstrating how asteroid collisions shaped planetary evolution.

Indranil Banik and researchers at the University of Portsmouth analyzed 155,600 Milky Way subgiant stars using LAMOST DR7 spectroscopy and Gaia eDR3 parallaxes to estimate the universe's age through stellar archaeology methods.

Their MCMC reconstruction of latent age distributions yields oldest stars at 13.73 billion years, with Yonsei-Yale isochrone fitting requiring metal-poor, alpha-enriched chemistry and cross-validation against Gaia FLAME age estimates.

The Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society study finds consistency with CMB-calibrated Lambda-CDM cosmology predicting 13.8 billion years, casting doubt on early-universe solutions to the Hubble tension that predict only 12.9 billion years.

SpaceX engineers aborted Starship Flight 13 at the last second when four of the Super Heavy booster's 33 Raptor engines failed to ignite during the countdown sequence at Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas.

Onscreen telemetry showed only 29 of 33 Raptor engines firing, triggering automatic shutdown three seconds before planned liftoff of the 407-foot rocket carrying 20 next-generation Starlink satellites for orbital deployment testing.

CEO Elon Musk announced two engine replacements are required before the next attempt early next week, with NASA depending on Starship as the Artemis program's lunar lander for crewed moon missions planned by 2028.