Where it is: 1,280 light-years away in the constellation Orion
When it was shared: June 5, 2026.
Explosive beams of energy crisscross through rainbow-colored space in a scene that evokes a cinematic sci-fi battle. In reality, it’s a scene of birth; in this single image, astronomers have captured every stage of star formation playing out at once.
This new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) image reveals OMC-2, a beautiful and dense star-forming region within the Orion Molecular Cloud. It places viewers inside a turbulent cosmic nursery, where gas, dust and newborn stars are all in motion.
Just south of the famous Orion Nebula, one of the best-known stellar nurseries in the night sky (located within the three-star asterism known as the Sword of Orion), OMC-2 is a cloud of cold gas and dust where protostars — very young stars still gathering mass — are forming.
The scene is filled with layered clouds of gas and dust glowing in blue, green and yellow. Thick clumps of cold dust appear dark brown to black, blocking light completely and creating dark pockets across the field. Inside some of these clumps, stars may still be forming, hidden from view inside thick cosmic cocoons.
Scattered throughout the clouds are fully-formed stars of different colors and sizes, from small orange points to larger white and blue stars shining through the haze.
But perhaps the most striking feature of the image is the network of pale, glowing streams and wave-like structures cutting through the cloud. These are created by protostar jets as they collide with the surrounding material, carving out bright ridges and shock fronts. The result is an image that looks sculpted, with curved streams of whitish gas marking how young stars shape their environment.
Each jet, ridge and shadow provides clues about the movement of material through the region and helps astronomers trace how stars form and how their energy changes the surrounding cloud. Its colors and textures reveal a complex environment where gravity pulls material together, young stars ignite and energetic outflows reshape the cloud that gave rise to them.
It’s a vivid portrait of cosmic creation made possible by JWST’s infrared vision, which allows it to peer through thick layers of gas and dust that block visible light. By detecting that infrared light, astronomers can see structures and embryonic stars that would otherwise remain secret.
OMC-2 is one of four parts of the Orion Molecular Cloud, a massive filament behind the Orion Nebula. OMC-1 sits immediately behind the nebula, OMC-2 and OMC-3 are to its north and OMC-4 lies to its south.
Astronomers have used a technique called echo mapping to detect hints that supermassive black holes, such as the cosmic titan at the heart of the Milky Way, known as Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), are surrounded by dense clouds and clusters of dark matter. The research could teach us more about this mysterious substance and the environments around supermassive black holes.
Dark matter is the universe's most mysterious stuff, outweighing ordinary matter in the cosmos by a ratio of five to one — but remaining effectively invisible because it doesn't interact with electromagnetic radiation, including the light we use to see. The only way scientists can even infer the presence of dark matter is via its interaction with gravity, and the impact that this interaction has on objects made of traditional matter like stars. For instance, the gravitational effect of dark matter allows stars at the edges of galaxies to whip around at much greater speeds while not flying loose than the visible matter of those galaxies would allow.
This team decided to test the gravitational influence of dark matter at the hearts of galaxies, environments dominated by supermassive black holes which can have masses millions or even billions of times that of the sun. Ordinary matter around these supermassive black holes is often very visible, especially when spiraling into the maw of one of these cosmic titans from a flattened cloud called an accretion disk. This is because the gravitational influence of those black holes generates immense amounts of friction, causing them to grow brightly. That wouldn't work for dark matter; it can't feel friction because it doesn't interact with itself or with ordinary matter, and it can't glow because it doesn't absorb or emit light.
Clearly, dark matter can't be spotted around supermassive black holes even using the most advanced telescopes such as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), which has captured glowing rings of material around Sgr A* and around a more distant supermassive black hole that rules the heart of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87).
While discussing the problem of detecting dark matter around supermassive black holes, Mayank Sharma, a physics graduate student at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), hit on an interesting solution.
"We could actually test this prediction using a technique in astronomy, which allows you to measure the distance to the surrounding gas by looking for echoes of light," Sharma said in a statement. The technique Sharma refers to is "reverberation mapping," and it has become a trusted method of determining the mass of black holes.
Echoes of dark matter
Reverberation mapping is based upon the fact that as matter falls into a black hole, it releases a burst of energy that causes the accretion disk it comes from to pulse. This pulse of light travels from the accretion disk to gas in the wider environment of the black hole. This gas absorbs that light and also pulses, with this secondary pulse serving as an echo of the first.
Because we know the speed of light, when astronomers see the first pulse of light and then its echo, they can use the time between pulses to estimate the distance between the black hole and the gas on the outskirts of its environment. The size of a black hole and the distance between it and outer gas clouds can be used to determine its mass, and could also be used to determine the mass of dark matter clustered around it.
The team applied their method to 14 different galaxies, finding in five cases that mass increases moving away from the central black hole in a way that couldn't be accounted for by visible matter alone. Despite the early success of this research, it far from proves that supermassive black holes are indeed gathering places for dark matter. The team's findings do point an interesting way forward for the investigation into the universe's most mysterious substance and its most mysterious regions.
"These galaxies are definitely showing a hint that there is extra material that cannot be explained by just the supermassive black hole," Sharma said. "The prospects are exciting."
James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observations have revealed the colorful secret of the Pink Planet, the coldest object of its type ever directly observed.
A team of astronomers led by Northwestern University has revealed their findings in a recent paper published in The Astronomical Journal, finally describing the rose-colored haze covering the planetary-mass companion GJ504b, thanks to JWST data.
For over a decade, researchers have speculated that atmospheric salt clouds may create the pink planet’s strange hue, but this is the first concrete evidence for the hypothesis.
The Pink Planet
Since its discovery in 2013, GJ504b, commonly known as “The Pink Planet,” has been a bit of an astronomical mystery. Even the object’s description is imprecise: a “planetary-mass companion,” a nebulous category teetering between the size of a large planet and a brown dwarf, at roughly 25 times Jupiter’s mass. Residing 57 light-years from Earth, the object’s host star is similar to our Sun.
Faint due to extremely cold temperatures, astronomers cannot obtain clear enough observations with ground-based telescopes to perform spectroscopic analysis. However, from its vantage point beyond our atmosphere, the JWST’s advanced instruments have finally provided the necessary data to make sense of the object’s strange pink atmosphere.
The exoplanets most clearly observed are much hotter than our world, with temperatures between 1,000 and 2,000°F, creating a brilliance which can be seen across the gulf of space and through Earth’s atmosphere.
This giant planet is a mere 550°F, still hot by Earth standards, but far cooler than is normal for its type. According to the new study, GJ504b is an ancient world, some 2.5 to 4billion years old, with a slow cooling over time accounting for its decreased temperature.
Challenging JWST Observation
In addition to providing the first evidence for The Pink Planet’s elusive salt clouds, the team’s research has broader implications for studying cold objects, laying the groundwork for future JWST observations of such faint glows, too dim for ground-based telescopes.
“The Pink Planet is the coldest companion ever discovered using ground-based instruments,” according to Aneesh Baburaj, the study’s lead author. “Many teams all around the world performed follow-up observations to study its light, but it was too faint for ground-based instruments. That made it a perfect target for JWST. When we finally obtained its spectrum, it immediately looked interesting. But once we started digging deeper into the data, we realized it was not like anything we have analyzed before.”
To accurately analyze the light, Baburaj’s team used an advanced data-processing technique to remove considerable glare from the Pink Planet’s host star, improving the quality of the JWST data. Breaking light into separate colors through spectroscopic analysis allows scientists to determine the elemental composition of exoplanet atmospheres using JWST data.
“In the past, other astronomers observed the companion for an entire night with some of the biggest telescopes in the world to obtain a spectrum,” Baburaj said. “And they could not see the object. With JWST, our entire observation took around two hours, and we were successful.”
Analyzing the JWST Data
The team discovered water vapor, methane, carbon dioxide, ammonia, and other molecules in the object’s atmosphere, but these results conflicted with existing atmospheric models, which only made sense if the object had an extremely unlikely combination of physical features. However, once the team added clouds to the model, the effect of their salty formations on the light made the JWST data much easier to explain.
“We ran simulations with clouds, and the results aligned with what we know about cold planets,” Baburaj said. “We tried three different types of clouds, and salt clouds fit best. When we accounted for salt clouds, it subdued the signature of molecules hidden deeper in the companion’s atmosphere. Then, the results became physically possible.”
In addition to the salty clues, the researchers discovered an abundance of heavy metals. These may have something to do with The Pink Planet’s origins, as it may have originally formed as a star instead of a planet, but astronomers remain uncertain. In any case, the work process developed here will be essential to future JWST investigation of cold objects.
“This is the first time we’ve found that salt clouds are critical to explaining the spectrum of an object,” Baburaj concluded. “It’s a good reminder to account for clouds in our models.”
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.
On June 20, 1943, Pingualuit Crater (formerly known as Chubb Crater and as the New Quebec Crater) was first photographed by a U.S. Army Air Force crew during a meterological flight over northern Quebec. Formed approximately 1.4 million years ago by a meteorite impact, the 2.1-mile-wide (3.4 kilometers) crater has an unusually circular shape resultingContinue reading "June 20, 1955: Pingualuit Crater is discovered"
An asteroid now bears the name of beloved musician Elliott Smith, thanks to one ambitious filmmaker.
Elliott Smith passed away at the age of 34 in 2003, but his impact and his music continue to connect with people around the world. And his influence has now extended to space, thanks to independent filmmaker Orlando Campopiano, who worked to get an asteroid named "Elliottsmith."
"I hope this introduces at least one new person to Elliott's brilliant discography, and I'm happy to see a permanent legacy in the stars! To have this tribute to him blessed by the estate and discoverers is also a great honor," Campopiano told Stereogum.
While listening to the song "Shooting Star," from Smith's album "From a Basement on the Hill," which was released in 2004 following his death, Campopiano had the idea to try and get an asteroid named after Smith, he told Stereogum.
He took this inspiration and ran with it, connecting with Smith's estate and working together to submit a proposal to the International Astronomical Union (IAU), which gives official names to cosmic objects, including asteroids. Maybe there are some Elliott Smith fans at the IAU, because the organization actually said yes.
With this positive response, Asteroid (861969) 2014 OS439 is now officially "Elliottsmith."
The asteroid Elliotsmith (861969) visualized in our solar system. (Image credit: NASA)
The asteroid was discovered back in 2014 by the Pan-STARRS 1 (Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System) project in Hawai'i.
The IAU's announcement of the renaming reads: "Steven Paul 'Elliott' Smith (1969–2003) was an influential, Oscar-nominated American songwriter. His intricate music left a lasting impact on many musicians. Asteroid 861969 honors his birth date, August 6, 1969. Smith often used celestial motifs in his work, notably in the song 'Shooting Star,' which, in hindsight, symbolizes his brief but brilliant light."
As this classification states, this asteroid is more than just a random rock in the sky. Its previous, numerical name 861969 happens to perfectly mirror Smith's birthday. This cosmic alignment makes it feel like this naming was truly meant to be.
New research reveals how an unusual celestial object resembling a cosmic “bullseye” could offer clues to one of the most perplexing phenomena in our universe.
The research, undertaken by physicists Pierre Sikivie and Yuxin Zhao at the University of Florida, focuses on an astronomical feature quite unlike any other—the galaxy LEDA 1313424, whose concentric rings have garnered it the apt nickname of the “Bullseye galaxy.”
Based on Sikivie and Zhao’s recent research, detailed in a new paper that appeared in The Astrophysical Journal, quantum behavior related to long-mysterious dark matter may hold the key to the galaxy’s unusual appearance.
Unraveling a Bullseye Galaxy’s Circular Secrets
In the past, astronomers have attempted to explain LEDA 1313424’s unusual concentric appearance as the likely result of an ancient collision between two galaxies.
Not so, according to Sikivie and Zhao, who now take a vastly different approach by arguing that a better explanation may involve a Bose-Einstein condensate of axions, a variety of extremely light hypothetical particles.
A stunning Hubble Telescope view of the Bullseye galaxy (Image Credit: NASA, ESA, I. Pasha (Yale), P. van Dokkum (Yale)).
This concept has much deeper roots that go back close to a century ago, when the first galaxy featuring an unusual concentric ring was discovered. This example, dubbed the Cartwheel galaxy, was only the first in a succession of similar astronomical discoveries involving galaxies with “ringed” appearances that incorporate as many as three annular features.
Unraveling an Annular Enigma
Explaining why these galaxies look this way has remained elusive. One theory proposed by astronomers, as noted earlier, involves impacts between two galaxies, which could create waves of density whose ripples become evident in ring-like structures surrounding the resulting galaxies.
However, a discovery in 2025 by Imad Pasha, a Yale University astronomer, and his colleagues presented an even stranger development in this ongoing concentric saga: the discovery of a galaxy that possesses not three rings, but nine of them. With its discovery, this remarkable celestial object’s unusual appearance garnered the nickname now familiar to us: “The Bullseye galaxy.”
Artist’s concept detailing the annular features encircling LEDA 1313424 (Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Ralf Crawford (STScI))
One theory that astronomers believed may account for the galaxy’s nine concentric structures had been a hypothetical impact—and a very energetic one—that occurred about 56 million years ago. However, while investigating this possibility, Sikivie and Zhao say a problem emerged: this would mean that the outermost ring in the galaxy would have had to travel at a speed of 758 miles per second as it blasted outward from the galaxy’s center.
This speed, they say, is impossible to reconcile with what astronomers can already discern about the nature of the supposed collusion, as well as the well-characterized behavior of galactic material observed in other regions of the cosmos.
An Alternative Approach
In an effort to get to the bottom of the mystery behind this unique galaxy, Sikivie and Zhao have put forward an alternative idea: that the rings in the Bullseye galaxy might instead be a byproduct of dark matter’s mysterious properties.
According to astronomers, dark matter is believed to be a nonluminous material that populates our universe, contributing around 85% of its total mass. Despite its ubiquity, direct detections that could confirm its existence have remained elusive.
However, there are some intriguing cosmic phenomena that astronomers are aware of that are very good candidates for being indirect evidence of this mysterious material. These observations include gravitational motion that occurs in galaxies, whereby the accumulation of dark matter is believed to manifest in the appearance of spherical halos encircling them.
In the past, Sikivie has explored this possibility, and whether current prevailing theories about dark matter, such as the idea that hypothetical particles known as axions, may offer the best interpretation of the physical reality behind dark matter.
If dark matter is indeed related to axions, it would also be required to obey what astrophysicists call conservation of angular momentum. According to Sikivie, when axions and galaxies interact, a phenomenon should emerge where portions of dark matter halos closest to the center would become oriented in structural forms known as “caustic rings.”
“We had earlier proposed that disk galaxies have caustic rings of dark matter with a pattern of ring radii, very similar to the pattern of ring radii observed in LEDA 1313424,” Sikivie recently said.
With this idea in mind, Sikivie and Lhao then turned their attention to the mysterious bullseye of LEDA 1313424 and “fitted the observed ring radii to the pattern of ring radii in the caustic ring interpretation,” from which they discerned that “LEDA’s rings are the imprint of caustic rings of dark matter on the baryonic matter in LEDA’s disk.”
Strange Quantum Behaviors
A further aspect of the researchers’ theory involves the quantum behavior that axions are expected to engage in.
Under extremely cold conditions, these hypothetical dark matter particles could collectively occupy the same quantum state, forming what is known as a Bose-Einstein condensate—a strange state of matter in which quantum effects become visible on macroscopic scales.
According to the team, such a condensate could interact with ordinary matter in ways that match astronomical observations. If the duo is correct, this could imply that ring-shaped galaxies such as LEDA may not result from galactic collisions at all—instead, these unique cosmic structures might be evidence of dark matter axions that have undergone Bose-Einstein condensation.
Presently, much like dark matter, axions have remained hypothetical and frustratingly difficult to detect. Of course, given their elusiveness, this also makes them a very good candidate in terms of helping scientists close in on the dark matter mystery, and new models are helping to provide potentially compelling new resolutions for such problems.
For now, mysterious ringed galaxies remain mysterious. However, as the work of researchers like Sikivie and Lhao progresses, one of astronomy’s more unusual recent discoveries is gradually coming into focus, while providing fresh insight into the intriguing quantum nature of dark matter.
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached atmicah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.
On June 19, 2004, at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Tucson, Arizona, astronomers Roy Tucker, David Tholen, and Fabrizio Bernardi discovered Asteroid Apophis. This Near-Earth Object (NEO), approximately 1,099 to 1,230 feet (335 to 375 meters) wide, reached the highest ever rating of level 4 out of 10 on the Torino Impact Hazard Scale,Continue reading "June 19, 2004: Astroid Apophis is discovered"
Last year, NASA's Lucy spacecraft encountered a bi-lobed asteroid that is a chunk of an even larger rocky body that was smashed apart in an almighty collision 155 million years ago. This little pitstop happened on Lucy's way to a rendezvous with the Trojan asteroids that shadow Jupiter around the sun.
The asteroid 52246 Donaldjohanson, better known as "DJ" to Lucy's mission scientists and named after the paleoanthropologist who discovered the Lucy hominin fossil in Ethiopia in 1974, orbits the sun in the inner part of the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
The true Lucy fossil dates back in time 3.2 million years and is an important link in the evolutionary chain that led to homo sapiens. Likewise, primitive asteroidal bodies are somewhat like fossilized remnants of the building blocks of the solar system's planets, including Earth. Understanding the make-up of these asteroids and where they formed versus where they are now can provide crucial insights into how Earth was assembled and where its organic materials and water may have come from.
Lucy flew past DJ in April of 2025. It is a pretty primitive asteroid, meaning that it has, or once upon a time had, certain volatile materials such as water-ice, as well as plenty of carbon — all things that can be removed thermally over time. Most objects that contain volatiles originate in the outer solar system, where it is cold enough that the volatiles do not sublimate away.
Within DJ's composition, Lucy detected iron-bearing phyllosilicates, which are a mineral formed in the presence of liquid water.
"Phyllosilicates are an indication that water was present and there was some degree of aqueous alteration," Simone Marchi, a planetary scientist from the South-west Research Institute and lead of the study into DJ, told Space.com.
However, for DJ to have had water, it must have formed further out from the sun, possibly in the outer asteroid belt.
"But DJ belongs to the inner asteroid belt so that's already intriguing," said Marchi.
The spectral evidence also indicates DJ was only partially altered by water, which Marchi says tells us something about its history.
"The aqueous alteration terminated early, and though we don't know why, we can speculate. In order to have aqueous alteration there needs to be some internal heating [usually via radioactive elements] and if something forms later than everything else then there will be less heat [since many of the radioactive elements will have already decayed]. Or perhaps there was just less water to start with where it formed."
The main belt carbonaceous asteroid (52246) Donaldjohanson as observed by the NASA Lucy Spacecraft on April 20, 2025. Here the grey-scale optical image, acquired with the L'LORRI instrument, is overlain by a false-color map indicating the gravitational slopes on the asteroid’s surface. (Image credit: NASA/GSFC/SwRI/JHU-APL/DLR)
What we do know is that DJ was once part of a much larger asteroid that suffered a giant impact 155 million years ago, causing the parent body to break apart into a number of chunks, the largest being the 45-mile-wide (73-kilometer-wide) asteroid 163 Erigone. Consequently, the remains of this parent asteroid, including DJ, are collectively referred to as the Erigone family.
DJ's violent origin may also explain its shape, which features two lobes joined together by a narrower and relatively smooth neck.
"We have now seen many small bodies in the solar system that appear to have this bi-lobed shape, and that's across a wide range of sizes," said Marchi.
For example the near-Earth asteroids 25142 Itokawa, which was visited by the first Japanese Hayabusa mission in 2005, and 4149 Toutatis that was encountered by China's Chang'e 2 in 2012, are both bi-lobed. So too is the tiny asteroid Selam, which is a satellite of the asteroid 152830 Dinkinesh visited by Lucy in 2023. Then there are cometary bodies including 67P Churyumov–Gerasimenko visited by the Rosetta mission and comet 19P/Borrelly, imaged by NASA's Deep Space 1 spacecraft in 1999.
These objects are all different sizes, different types and in different locations, but they all share the same structure. However, Marchi cautions that they might not all form the same way. For example, the neck between the lobes of comets such as 67P might form through erosion via sublimation and outgassing as the comet gets closer to the Sun, whereas for asteroids it might indicate a history of being involved in a giant impact, the resulting fragments coming together to be bound by gravity – a so-called contact binary.
Lucy now continues onwards, scheduled to encounter its first trojan asteroid, known as 3548 Eurybates, in August 2027. Trojans are asteroids that have been captured by Jupiter's gravity at the L3 and L4 Lagrange points, 60 degrees in front and 60 degrees behind Jupiter itself.
"We think that the Trojans, based on our understanding of the solar system, formed further out and then were captured where they are today following the early shuffling of the planets," said Marchi. "This shuffling could also have been the origin of DJ, so there could be a connection there between DJ and the Trojans."
The asteroid Donaldjohanson is seen in detail in this Lucy image. (Image credit: The asteroid Donaldjohanson as seen by the Lucy Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (L’LORRI). This is one of the most detailed images returned by NASA’s Lucy spacecraft during its flyby. )
Compositionally, the majority of trojans are expected to be even more primitive than DJ, containing more carbon, water and other volatile materials that would sublimate if they got too close to the sun.
That is all except one: Eurybates.
"It is the only one of our targets that from spectroscopy appears to be relatively similar to DJ. It's not identical, but it is closer in composition to DJ than the other Trojans, so it will be intriguing to compare them," said Marchi.
Indeed, any similarities will help tell us how asteroids were herded around during the first few hundred million years of solar system history following the formation of the planets. Jupiter and Saturn, especially, began migrating inwards and then out again. In doing so, their gravity pushed and pulled minor bodies all over the place, as did the gravity of Uranus and particularly Neptune as they edged outwards. These migrations led to the formation of the asteroid belt and the Kuiper belt, and ejected trillions of bodies into the wide orbits of the Oort Cloud.
"The key question is, if DJ has been relocated in the inner asteroid belt, then how many other asteroids came along with it and ended up being closer to the Earth, where they could have delivered some water, some organics and other things to our planet?" asked Marchi.
Lucy will visit six of Jupiter's trojans, which in total number over 15,300 discovered so far. Far from lumps of rock, the trojans, along with DJ and Dinkinesh (which is the Ethiopian name for the Lucy fossil), are windows into the past, and the storytellers of the Earth's most ancient history.
Lucy's findings from Donaldjohanson were published on Thursday (June 18) in the journal Science.
A new cosmic bounce model suggests that remnants from a pre-Big Bang Universe may still exist today. What if some of the Universe’s oldest objects are actually older than the Big Bang itself? A new study from the University of Portsmouth suggests that ancient black holes may have survived from a time before the Universe [...]
WALLOPS ISLAND, Virginia—Just 10 months ago, NASA asked three companies if they could do something nobody had done before. Could they build and launch a satellite to save a $500 million astronomy mission at risk of crashing back to Earth? What's more, could they do it in less than a year on a tight budget?
Katalyst Space Technologies, a startup founded in 2020, presented the most compelling solution. "They came back with a response that was technically and programmatically plausible, and then we were like, 'Yeah, let’s do it,'" said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA's astrophysics division.
That was in August of last year. In September, NASA awarded Katalyst a $30 million contract to build, test, and launch a small satellite to chase down Swift and latch onto it with three robotic arms. Then, Katalyst's Link servicing spacecraft will boost Swift's orbit back to a safe operating altitude, allowing it to resume scientific observations. Easier said than done.
WALLOPS ISLAND, Va.—Just 10 months ago, NASA asked three companies if they could do something nobody had done before. Could they build and launch a satellite to save a $500 million astronomy mission at risk of crashing back to Earth? What's more, could they do it in less than a year on a tight budget?
Katalyst Space Technologies, a startup founded in 2020, presented the most compelling solution. "They came back with a response that was technically and programmatically plausible, and then we were like, 'Yeah, let’s do it,'" said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA's astrophysics division.
That was in August of last year. In September, NASA awarded Katalyst a $30 million contract to build, test, and launch a small satellite to chase down Swift and latch onto it with three robotic arms. Then, Katalyst's Link servicing spacecraft will boost Swift's orbit back to a safe operating altitude, allowing it to resume scientific observations. Easier said than done.
WALLOPS ISLAND, Va.—Just 10 months ago, NASA asked three companies if they could do something nobody had done before. Could they build and launch a satellite to save a $500 million astronomy mission at risk of crashing back to Earth? What's more, could they do it in less than a year on a tight budget?
Katalyst Space Technologies, a startup founded in 2020, presented the most compelling solution. "They came back with a response that was technically and programmatically plausible, and then we were like, 'Yeah, let’s do it,'" said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA's astrophysics division.
That was in August of last year. In September, NASA awarded Katalyst a $30 million contract to build, test, and launch a small satellite to chase down Swift and latch onto it with three robotic arms. Then, Katalyst's Link servicing spacecraft will boost Swift's orbit back to a safe operating altitude, allowing it to resume scientific observations. Easier said than done.
Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered that the well-known "Pink Planet" harbors a salty surprise and an exotic atmospheric chemistry. The discovery marks an advancement in the study of cold objects beyond the solar system.
Initially discovered in 2013, GJ504b orbits a sun-like star located around 57 light-years from Earth. With a mass around 25 times that of Jupiter, this Pink Planet may not be a planet at all despite its moniker. It may instead be a brown dwarf, a failed star that formed like a star but was unable to gather enough mass to achieve the nuclear fusion of hydrogen to helium in its core. Thus, astronomers refer to it as a "planetary-mass companion," which means a planet-size object orbiting a parent star.
GJ504b remains one of the coldest planetary-mass companions discovered using ground-based telescopes, with a temperature of around 550 degrees Fahrenheit (290 degrees Celsius). Although, that still makes it hot enough to bake bread. Now, James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) data reveals it has a key ingredient for bread making too: salt located in its atmospheric clouds, unlike anything astronomers have seen before.
"The Pink Planet is the coldest companion ever discovered using ground-based instruments," team leader Aneesh Baburaj of Northwestern University said in a statement. "Many teams all around the world performed follow-up observations to study its light, but it was too faint for ground-based instruments. That made it a perfect target for JWST.
"When we finally obtained its spectrum, it immediately looked interesting. But once we started digging deeper into the data, we realized it was not like anything we have analyzed before."
The Pink Planet is cold and old
The team studied this planetary companion by measuring its faint electromagnetic radiation emissions and filtering out the bright glare of its parent star.
They found the relative coolness of the Pink Planet is a result of the planet's age. Both gas giant planets and brown dwarfs are born blisteringly hot but cool off as they get older. This new research estimated that GJ504b is between 2.5 billion and 4 billion years old.
Breaking down light from the Pink Planet into individual wavelengths, the team was also able to determine its chemical composition. This is possible because elements absorb and emit light at characteristic wavelengths, meaning they leave "fingerprints" on light passing through their atmospheres.
"In the past, other astronomers observed the companion for an entire night with some of the biggest telescopes in the world to obtain a spectrum," Baburaj said. "And they could not see the object. With JWST, our entire observation took around two hours, and we were successful."
The JWST data revealed a rich cocktail of chemicals in the atmosphere of the Pink Planet that included water, carbon dioxide, methane, and ammonia. However, these observations didn't match modeling of the planetary companion's atmosphere until the team factored in something completely unexpected: clouds of salt deep in the atmosphere.
An illustration of the JWST which has become a vital tool in the investigation of exoplanets and brown dwarfs. (Image credit: ESA)
"We ran simulations with clouds, and the results aligned with what we know about cold planets," Baburaj said. "We tried three different types of clouds, and salt clouds fit best. When we accounted for salt clouds, it subdued the signature of molecules hidden deeper in the companion’s atmosphere. Then, the results became physically possible.
"This is the first time we've found that salt clouds are critical to explaining the spectrum of an object. It's a good reminder to account for clouds in our models."
Though this mystery may be solved, there are still questions surrounding GJ504b that will only be solved with further investigation. The Pink Planet seems to be unusually rich in elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, which astronomers call metals. This means the team still can't pin down the origin of the Pink Planet; did it form like a planet, or like a star?
That means they aren't quite ready to determine if GJ504b is a gas giant planet or a brown dwarf... or should that be Pink Dwarf?
It’s not the kind of thing astronomers expect to see while observing the powerful effects of a distant supermassive black hole: an unprecedented UFO sighting.
However, that’s precisely what one group of scientists now reports in a preprint paper, who detail the successful detection of one of the strongest UFOs—a black hole phenomenon otherwise known as “ultra-fast outflows”—that astronomers may have ever seen.
The landmark detection was made possible with the XMM-Newton space observatory and NuSTAR X-ray telescope, which allowed the researchers behind the discovery to observe a luminous quasar with origins that date back to “cosmic noon,” revealing a pair of outflow wind components being blasted from the black hole in question.
These winds become known as ultra-fast outflows (UFOs) when their strength propels them to greater than ten percent of light speed, and astronomers currently believe they are an important part of what helps black holes regulate their growth, which may also hold for their host galaxies.
One way this occurs is that UFOs help to heat galactic gases that give rise to star formation, a quenching process that most astronomers believe occurred during a period called “cosmic noon,” which occurred between 1.6 and 3.5 billion years after the birth of the universe.
Cosmic Fingerprints of Powerful UFOs
Astronomers can detect ultra-fast outflows based on the “dips” they create in their powerful gusts, which are caused by ionized iron present in their outflow gases. These gases also absorb X-rays along their path away from their black hole originators, which leave “fingerprints” in the form of absorption features that are detectable using X-ray telescopes.
Significantly, these “dips” manifest as a blueshift since they are shifted to higher energies as they move at such high speeds (again, roughly 10% of the speed of light). From the blueshifted energy signatures they comprise, astronomers can determine not only the presence of UFOs, but also the wind speed of their gusty outflows.
In the past, most detections of these high-powered cosmic phenomena have relied on gravitationally lensed quasars. These celestial objects occur when a galaxy or similar feature closer to Earth appears in front of them, magnifying the quasar’s light and significantly brightening its luminosity from our Earthly perspective.
However, lensing of this variety can also present problems, and so astronomers led by Giorgio Lanzuisi of INAF Bologna designed a special system to target more than a dozen hyper-luminous quasars at cosmic noon, as a means of getting a better feel for the dynamics of non-lensed quasars.
“WISSHFUL” Thinking
WISSHFUL is an XMM-Newton multi-year heritage program that Lanzuisi and his colleagues designed for this purpose, whose initial target became a quasar designated WISSH13, whose redshift at 3.294 marks the object’s existence as it appeared approximately 2 billion years after the Big Bang.
WISH13’s black hole also weighs in at close to 2 billion times that of our Sun, which causes it to shine far brighter than normally expected for an object of its estimated mass.
Their work began in the autumn of 2024 by combining observations from XMM-Newton and NuSTAR initially obtained in 2017. From these X-ray images of WISSH12, a pair of distinctive absorption features became evident, which the team determined to have been generated by two separate sources from within the same ultra-fast outflow.
These components were found to travel at different speeds: one moving at close to 30% of the speed of light, while the other at only about 10% of light speed. The slower of these two appears to have been an enduring component of the UFO, while the faster one showed signatures that indicated a more recent appearance. This could mean that it emanates from events that are shorter in duration.
By matching theoretical predictions of a layered wind structure surrounding the black hole, the researchers say their observations align with models that indicate a fast-moving inner “spine” launched from the accretion disk’s innermost regions. Meanwhile, a slower outer “sheath” is also believed to emanate farther from the black hole. The combined outflow components produce an estimated 21 to 24 solar masses of material annually.
The Most Massive UFO Ever Observed?
Such figures, the team says, represent what is believed to be among the most massive and energetic ultrafast outflows ever observed, a discovery which also marks the highest-redshift ultrafast outflow yet detected in a non-lensed quasar.
Despite their remarkable energetic output, the team says these outflow winds seem to conform to the same essential relationships observed in active galaxies much closer to Earth, suggesting that the processes driving these outflows have remained remarkably consistent across cosmic time.
Going forward, the team says they hope to make additional observations of these powerful cosmic phenomena with help from the new Athena X-ray mission, which they say could help uncover similar winds in even more distant quasars.
The team’s discoveries were detailed in a recent paper, “The WISSHFUL program: the highest redshift UFO discovered in a non-lensed QSO,” which appeared at the preprint arXiv.org server.
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached atmicah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.
Astronomers have a cosmic mystery on their hands, investigating a celestial crime scene to determine if a distant star has eaten a super-Earth exoplanet. The star may have had an accomplice — a failed star or "brown dwarf" companion — which may have steered the unfortunate planet toward its fiery doom.
The team charged with investigating this mystery first discovered hints of the crime when they found the star, TOI-5882, located around 1,300 light-years away, is surprisingly rich in the element lithium.
"You are what you eat, right?" team leader Brooke Kotten of the University of Michigan said in a statement. "We know that there's much more lithium in planetary material than there is in stars. So if a star eats a planet, it's going to take on a bunch of lithium."
So-called engulfment events such as this one occur very rapidly, on a timescale of a few days to a couple of weeks, which means catching stellar beings in the act of enjoying a planetary meal is extremely rare. Thus, astronomers have to act as cosmic crime scene investigators to reconstruct these events with the evidence at hand.
"That's what makes this field so exciting. You really are solving a mystery," Kotten said. "We can't just watch the crime happen, so we have to work with all the clues we're given to figure out whodunit."
One of the aims of these investigations is to discover the ways in which a star can devour a planet. One of the most common engulfment scenarios happens when a star runs out of hydrogen at its core at the end of its main sequence lifetime. This results in it swelling out to up to 100 times its original diameter, engulfing its attendant planets during its so-called red giant phase. This will occur in the solar system in around 5 billion years when the sunwill puff out to around the orbit of Mars, swallowing the inner rocky planets, including our own.
However, Kotten and colleagues know this isn't what has happened in the TOI-5882 system, as this star hasn't yet become a red giant. Instead, the researchers think the sun-like star had assistance from its brown dwarf companion.
Companion brown dwarf of partner in crime?
Brown dwarfs get their slightly unfortunate nickname of "failed stars" because, despite forming from collapsing clouds of gas and dust, just like stars, they fail to grow to the masses needed to trigger the nuclear fusion of hydrogen to helium in their cores, the process that defines what a main-sequence star is. They're quite mysterious by existing in this sort of limbo between planet and star.
This particular brown dwarf has around 20 times themass of Jupiter, or around 2% of the mass of the sun. That's not massive enough to trigger nuclear fusion, but is massive enough for it to have enough of a gravitational influence over planets orbiting TOI-5882. That means the team suspects this brown dwarf could have perturbed the orbit of this unfortunate planet enough to send it plummeting into its star.
This is something the scientists will need to investigate further. They may not have enough information yet to determine this planet's cause of death, but they do have some evidence that helps them identify the kind of world it would have been before it was obliterated. This comes from observations of the chemical composition and lithium content of 62 stars with similar ages and masses to TOI-5882.
"Lithium atoms delivered by planetary engulfment to a star are like sports fans arriving at a stadium," team member Seth Jacobson of Michigan State University said. "There may already be a few early arriving fans present, representing the initial amount of lithium in the stellar atmosphere, but they are quickly outnumbered."
An illustration of the lithium-enriched star TOI-5882 with its brown dwarf. (Image credit: Robert Lea (created with Canva))
From the lithium abundance they measured, the team has determined that this planet was a so-called super-Earth with a mass somewhere between two times that of our planet and the mass of the solar-system ice giant Neptune, which is around 18 times as massive as Earth.
"The fact that we can look at a star 1,300 light-years away and say with confidence, 'This star has more lithium than you would expect,' is a testament to both the precision of modern instrumentation and the hard interpretive work that goes into making sense of that signal," said Melinda Soares-Furtado, a senior author of the study and assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin. "And it's not like you have to cherry-pick the data to make it stand out. It's robust. No matter how you slice it, TOI-5882 is so enriched in lithium it shows up as being at least in the 97th percentile."
Soares-Furtado added that TOI-5882 is one of the few stars she has seen demonstrating evidence of planetary engulfment, although a few of the other stars in the control sample were enriched in lithium, albeit not to the extent of TOI-5882. That leaves another mystery for the team to solve, something that Soares-Furtado may well be quite content with.
"When I was growing up, I dreamed about becoming a private investigator," she said. "I think that explains a lot about where I ended up. I do feel like a detective."
Sally Ride made history aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger on June 18, 1983, becoming the first American woman in space 20 years nearly to the day after Soviet Valentina Tereshkova’s flight. In 1977, as she was finishing her Ph.D. in physics, Ride saw a newspaper ad placed by NASA to recruit astronauts. For the firstContinue reading "June 18, 1983: Sally Ride is the first American woman in space"
A new study reveals why black holes let out massive radio "burps" years after eating stars, giving astronomers a chemical blueprint to predict them early.
NASA’s Fermi Mission Uncovers Possible Sibling Supernova Remnants
A new study of two supernova remnants, the debris left behind after stars explode, suggests the explosions came from stellar siblings that once orbited each other. The first star’s detonation sent its binary companion hurtling through space, and then, after traveling for thousands of years, the surviving star blew up too.
This multiwavelength scene shows the Jellyfish Nebula supernova remnant (right), the interstellar cloud it’s interacting with, and a distinctive curving filament to its upper left. The filament, which is shown here both in optical and ultraviolet (UV) light, is the visible part of an overlapping supernova remnant, G189.6+3.3, that is more prominent in radio and X-rays. Visible light is shown in yellow, UV from NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory is shown in violet, and infrared light from NASA’s retired WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) mission appears in cyan, red, and orange. Both remnants are located about 6,000 light-years away in the constellation Gemini. The brilliant star at far right is Propus, also known as Eta Geminorum.
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and M. Michailidis et al. 2026; optical: DSS; infrared: NASA/WISE/JPL-Caltech/UCLA; ultraviolet: NASA/Swift
“Using 16 years of data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, our analysis uncovered gamma rays associated with a supernova remnant that was hidden in the glare of its neighbor, the Jellyfish Nebula, one of the brightest gamma-ray-emitting supernova remnants known,” said Miltiadis Michailidis, a postdoctoral fellow in the physics department at Stanford University in California. “There are so many striking connections between the two remnants that we conclude they’re likely related, giving us the first known example of a binary system where both stars have undergone supernova explosions.”
Michailidis presented the findings Wednesday at the 248th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Pasadena, California. A paper describing the results will appear in a future edition of Nature Communications.
The study focused on a faint supernova remnant called G189.6+3.3, which is mainly visible in X-rays. It is upstaged by its brighter and better-known neighbor, the Jellyfish Nebula (IC 443). The two star wrecks, both located in the constellation Gemini, appear to partially overlap as seen in X-rays. Recent X-ray evidence suggests that hot plasma likely associated with G189.6+3.3 may extend across the entire region, a hint that the overlap may be nearly total.
A massive star explodes when its energy-producing core runs out of fuel and collapses under its own weight, triggering an explosion that blows the star apart. The explosion’s shock wave encloses a hot cloud of debris that rapidly expands into space. So far, astronomers have cataloged about 300 supernova remnants in our galaxy.
The Fermi mission is part of NASA’s fleet of observatories monitoring the changing cosmos to help humanity better understand how the universe works. More than a decade ago, observations from Fermi’s LAT (Large Area Telescope) showed that the shock waves of supernova remnants accelerated particles to within a fraction of the speed of light, a process first proposed by physicist Enrico Fermi — the mission’s namesake — in 1949.
These high-speed particles, called cosmic rays, interact with interstellar gas to produce gamma rays, the highest-energy form of light. Protons make up 99% of cosmic ray particles. To prove that accelerated protons are responsible for the glow, astronomers search for a specific gamma-ray feature. When cosmic-ray protons smash into interstellar gas, they produce a short-lived particle called a neutral pion, which almost immediately decays into a pair of gamma rays. This emission occurs within a specific band of energies associated with the neutral pion’s mass and lies within the range detected by Fermi’s LAT instrument.
In 2013, Fermi observations proved that the Jellyfish Nebula, which is interacting with part of a glowing cloud of hydrogen gas known as Sharpless 249, produced gamma rays through this mechanism. Its neighbor, G189.6+3.3, was discovered in 1994 as part of an X-ray survey by the German-led ROSAT (Roentgen Satellite) mission.
A bright filament of gas lies between the overlapping remnants. New observations of this feature reveal that the shock wave from G189.6+3.3 slammed into dense interstellar gas there and dramatically slowed, key evidence that both remnants are interacting with the same cloud system.
The well-known supernova remnant IC 443 (right) has an older, fainter neighbor (shown here in blue-green and magenta) called G189.6+3.3. A filament of gas between them, glowing in visible and ultraviolet light (violet arc at center), traces the neighbor’s shock wave and shows that both remnants are interacting with the same molecular cloud, shown in red, orange, brown for infrared and radio data and yellow for visible light. Blue-green shows X-rays from the fainter remnant, while magenta shows gamma rays with energies greater than 10 billion electron volts; for comparison, visible light has energies between about 2 and 3 electron volts. In this view, high-energy light from the much brighter IC 443 has been removed for clarity. Gamma-ray emission near the filament stems from protons accelerated in the supernova’s shock wave as it expands into the cloud.
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and M. Michailidis et al. 2026; radio, MWISP and ESA/Planck; infrared: NASA/WISE/JPL-Caltech/UCLA; optical: DSS; ultraviolet: NASA/Swift; X-ray: SRG/eROSITA; gamma ray: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration
Astronomers think the Jellyfish Nebula is also a candidate PeVatron, a cosmic particle accelerator capable of boosting protons to energies so high they could nearly escape our galaxy. Such particles can produce gamma rays with trillions of times more energy than visible light. Finding a second particle accelerator near the Jellyfish Nebula could offer scientists new clues for how supernova remnants develop into PeVatrons.
“The overlapping remnants, a connecting gas filament, and the availability of data from Fermi and other facilities motivated us to delve into this complex but little-studied region,” said co-author Marianne Lemoine-Goumard, an astrophysicist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) based at the University of Bordeaux. “With Fermi’s LAT instrument, we found gamma-ray emission associated with accelerated protons in the northern part of the fainter remnant. If both remnants are interacting with the same structure, then they must share a common distance from us.”
The team concludes the remnants lie about 6,000 light-years away, their explosion centers are separated by roughly 40 light-years projected onto the plane of the sky, and the original stars may have been 20 or more times the Sun’s mass.
Estimates of the remnants’ ages vary widely, but the team concludes that the age of the Jellyfish Nebula is 8,000 to 9,000 years, while G189.6+3.3 is between 20,000 to 110,000 years old. This means the delay between the explosions could have extended for up to 100,000 years.
In addition, the team conducted computer simulations of a million massive binary systems. They show that systems where the stars orbit close enough to exchange matter and interact during their lives can readily produce dual supernova explosions with similar separations and time delays as those found for the remnants. The team also estimated that the chance of randomly encountering this combination of observed spatial alignment and compatible distances to be less than 1%, strongly supporting a physical association.
“The evidence we’ve compiled — including observations across the spectrum, the chemical and physical properties of the remnants, simulations, and more — paints a compelling picture of a dual supernova event,” said Michailidis.
This study identifies a unique possible example of a binary system where both stars exploded as supernovae and left behind separate, detectable supernova remnants. Astronomers think that most massive stars form in binary or multiple-star systems. The Jellyfish Nebula/G189.6+3.3 complex offers astronomers a rare opportunity to study how massive binary stars evolve, exchange matter, explode, and experience velocity changes — called kicks — induced by the supernova blast. It also provides a powerful new laboratory for understanding how coupled supernova remnants behave, including how they accelerate particles, generate gamma rays, and shape their surrounding environments.
“Fermi’s gamma-ray observations of supernova remnants continue to reveal the dynamic lives of stars,” said Elizabeth Hays, the Fermi project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “We can now connect the glowing remains of two massive stars to a powerful pair that evolved together over thousands of years.”
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'Human minds should not go through this'
