🚀 Webb Finds Air on a Lava World

🔭 Lava world's thick atmosphere

🛰️ NASA loses Mars contact

🌌 Magellanic Clouds survey starts

🚀 SpaceX plans to go public

🌀 Star's wobble proves Einstein

Researchers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) studied the super-Earth 55 Cancri e, finding compelling evidence for a secondary atmosphere created by intense volcanic outgassing on the tidally locked planet.

The telescope’s NIRSpec and MIRI instruments measured thermal emissions from the planet’s dayside, revealing spectral features consistent with a carbon-rich atmosphere, likely containing carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide gas.

This discovery suggests that even intensely irradiated lava worlds can sustain significant gaseous envelopes, challenging previous assumptions and expanding the range of planets that could potentially support atmospheres for further study.

NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) mission controllers are addressing a fleet crisis after losing contact with the MAVEN orbiter, a vital communications relay and atmospheric probe orbiting Mars since 2014.

The loss of MAVEN jeopardizes communications for rovers like Perseverance, which relied on the orbiter’s unique 4,500-kilometer elliptical orbit for longer, higher-volume data relay periods than other spacecraft.

This failure highlights the urgent need for a next-generation Mars telecommunications orbiter, as analysts warn the potential loss of high-throughput data relay could severely hamper future robotic and human exploration plans.

The Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) is launching a five-year survey to investigate the formation, evolution, and chemical composition of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, our galaxy’s neighbors.

The survey will utilize the 4MOST multi-object spectrograph on the VISTA telescope, aiming to collect spectra from over three million stars across both clouds to map their kinematics and metallicity gradients.

According to AIP scientists, this detailed mapping will provide unprecedented insight into dwarf galaxy interactions and star formation, testing cosmological models of how large galaxies like the Milky Way grow over time.

SpaceX, led by founder Elon Musk, is reportedly planning an initial public offering (IPO) next year, reversing its long-held private status to raise massive capital for ambitious new technology ventures.

The company is targeting a $1.5 trillion valuation to raise over $30 billion, with a key goal of developing modified Starlink satellites as space-based data centers for the artificial intelligence sector.

Analysts believe this capital will accelerate Musk's Mars settlement goals and fund a new AI division, potentially creating a distributed network of data centers in orbit to reshape global computing infrastructure.

Scientists led by the Chinese Academy of Sciences studied a tidal disruption event, AT2020afhd, where a star was torn apart, providing the first direct evidence of a predicted relativistic effect.

Using X-ray data from the Swift Observatory and radio data from the VLA, they detected a disk and jet wobbling in unison with a repeating 20-day period around the black hole.

According to co-author Dr. Cosimo Inserra, this confirms Lense-Thirring precession, or frame-dragging, validating a century-old prediction of Einstein’s general relativity and opening new ways to probe black hole physics.