Webb Finds a Planet After Its Star Died

🪐 Webb explains how a planet survived the death of its star

🛰️ Rocket Lab to acquire Iridium in historic $8B deal

🔭 LSST begins full operations with Japanese contributions

🌌 Webb traces violent mergers behind “quenched” galaxies

🔮 TESS finds its first planet through gravitational microlensing

WD 1856 b is a Jupiter-sized gas giant orbiting the Earth-sized white dwarf WD 1856+534 every 34 hours, just 3 million kilometers away, a distance that should have destroyed it during the star’s earlier red giant phase.

Webb measured the planet’s mass at four to eleven times Jupiter’s and found it significantly warmer than expected, then detected methane and small cloud particles, the first atmosphere seen on a planet transiting a dead star.

Researchers concluded the planet likely survived on a wider, safer orbit and migrated inward roughly three to five and a half billion years after the star became a white dwarf, driven by gravitational interactions in the system.

Rocket Lab has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Iridium Communications for $54 per share in a cash-and-stock deal, valuing Iridium at an enterprise value of approximately $8.0 billion.

The merger combines Rocket Lab’s launch and satellite manufacturing capabilities with Iridium’s global communications network, spectrum holdings, and 500-plus partner ecosystem to form a vertically integrated space company.

The combined company will design, build, launch, and operate its own satellite constellations, giving Rocket Lab an immediate foothold in satellite IoT, direct-to-device, and positioning, navigation, and timing services.

The NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory has completed commissioning and entered full scientific operations for the ten-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time, aiming to map the changing universe in unprecedented detail.

Researchers and engineers from Japan’s National Astronomical Observatory, the University of Tokyo, Chiba University, and Nagoya University are supporting LSST’s software, systems, and operations using expertise built through the Subaru Telescope.

More than 80 Japanese researchers already have data access, and pairing Rubin’s wide survey with Subaru’s detailed follow-up observations is expected to help resolve mysteries like dark matter and dark energy.

An international team led by the University of Nottingham used Webb to study massive galaxies that abruptly stopped forming stars around nine billion years ago, during the universe’s peak era of galaxy formation.

The galaxies appear unusually compact and show faint but clear signs of disturbance, evidence researchers say points to recent mergers with other gas-rich galaxies as the trigger for their sudden quenching.

Simulations show collisions between gas-rich galaxies typically produce compact remnants, and the newly observed disturbance signatures strengthen the case that violent mergers, not gradual processes, shut down star formation.

NASA’s TESS mission detected its first exoplanet through gravitational microlensing rather than its usual transit method, identifying a super-Jupiter called Gaia23bra b orbiting an orange dwarf star at a Jupiter-like distance.

Astronomers first flagged the event in 2023 using ESA’s now-retired Gaia telescope, then found matching brightness deviations by searching archived TESS data from around the same time, confirming the same system.

The discovery hints that more microlensing planets may be hidden in eight years of archived TESS observations, opening a new way to study planetary systems that more closely resemble our own solar system.