Webb Finds Supernova Ghost

🌌 Webb finds supernova remnant

🚀 NASA Starliner report details

🛰️ Young sun's strange bubbles

🪐 Ganymede auroras mirror Earth

🔭 Warm super-Jupiter discovered

Northwestern University scientists, led by Charlie Kilpatrick, used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to identify the specific red supergiant star that exploded as supernova 2025pht in galaxy NGC 1637.

Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) and NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) instruments revealed the star was surprisingly red, indicating it was surrounded by an unexpectedly large amount of carbon-rich dust before exploding.

This finding explains the "missing red supergiants" problem, suggesting massive stars are often hidden by dust, a conclusion supported by lead author Kilpatrick who had previously argued for this interpretation.

NASA’s Program Investigation Team released its final report on Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner mission, formally declaring the troubled crewed flight test a Type A mishap due to significant technical failures.

The flight was extended from a planned 14 days to 93 days after propulsion system anomalies occurred, forcing the spacecraft to return uncrewed from the International Space Station (ISS) in September 2024.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman admitted programmatic goals influenced engineering decisions, and the agency is now implementing corrective actions to address the identified hardware failures, qualification gaps, and cultural breakdowns.

Johns Hopkins University astronomers, led by Carey Lisse, utilized NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to capture the first-ever image of an astrosphere surrounding the young, Sun-like star HD 61005.

The bubble has a diameter 200 times the Earth-Sun distance, inflated by a stellar wind that is 3 times faster and 25 times denser than the solar wind from our own Sun.

This provides a direct analogue for our Sun’s youth, showing how its more powerful early wind shaped the heliosphere, which co-author Scott Wolk notes is crucial for understanding space weather evolution.

University of Liège scientists analyzed data from NASA’s Juno spacecraft, revealing that the physical processes driving the aurorae on Jupiter’s moon Ganymede are remarkably similar to those observed on Earth.

Juno's Jovian Auroral Distributions Experiment (JADE) instrument measured precipitating electrons in the 1-100 keV energy range, showing they are accelerated along Ganymede's magnetic field lines, mirroring Earth's auroral mechanisms.

This discovery confirms that auroral generation mechanisms are universal, providing a key analogue for understanding magnetosphere-body interactions, which researchers believe will help model habitable conditions on exoplanets with their own magnetic fields.

An international team from the TESS-Keck Survey confirmed the discovery of a new "warm super-Jupiter" exoplanet, designated TOI-7778 b, orbiting a distant Sun-like star every 180 days.

Follow-up radial velocity measurements using the Keck I telescope's HIRES instrument constrained the planet's mass to 3.2 Jupiter masses, with a radius of 1.25 Jupiter radii, confirming its gas giant nature.

This planet occupies a rare orbital space between hot Jupiters and cold gas giants, providing a crucial benchmark for testing planetary migration theories, according to models of protoplanetary disk evolution.