After five years in development, Free Stars: Children of Infinity—the official sequel to The Ur-Quan Masters by the old game's original creators—has released a free public demo. It's a "combat demo" in the style of UQM’s melee mode, where players can assemble a fleet from the game's roster of nearly 40 ships, then match those ships up in head-to-head arcade SpaceWar-style action. The demo can be found on Steam and GOG, and it's available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. (Console versions are coming, but they're not yet out.)

Pew pew! Credit: Pistol Shrimp Games

I have to present this news with a big disclaimer, though, because I've been part of the Children of Infinity writing team since 2021, working as a volunteer with the Pistol Shrimp Games crew and contributing NPC dialogue and some story bits. As a huge fan of the original games, it's been a dream opportunity. (Because I've been volunteering my time, I'm not financially involved and receive no compensation if you download the demo or, when it's eventually released, buy the full game.)

What's in the demo

Children of Infinity is a space adventure RPG, just like The Ur-Quan Masters (and its direct spiritual predecessors, Starflight and Starflight 2). What's been released today is just one part of the game—the arcade-style "melee" portion, which lets players jump into one-versus-one combat against another player or against a computer-controlled opponent. Each of the ships you can pick has its own maneuvering characteristics, weapons, and special abilities.

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Beyond the solar system, the line between planet and star can get blurry. Astronomers call objects that fall between the size ranges of planets and stars substellar objects. One type of substellar object, called a brown dwarf, forms from collapsing gas clouds like a star, but is not quite massive enough to fuse hydrogen in its core. Some can briefly fuse a heavier form of hydrogen, known as deuterium, in their cores, though never enough to produce starlight. Others are small and cold enough to develop complex atmospheres.

Recently, astronomers discovered a new type of substellar object in a star-forming region of the Milky Way Galaxy called IC 348. Using observational data from the JWST’s Near InfraRed Spectrograph (JWST NIRSpec), they found objects 0.2% to 1.2% the mass of the Sun that float freely like stars but have carbon-containing molecules called hydrocarbons in their atmospheres. Because these objects are smaller than known brown dwarfs and have evidence of hydrocarbons, scientists refer to them as H-type objects.

To investigate what H-type objects are and where they fit within the spectrum of substellar objects, researchers Richard J. Parker and Catarina Alves de Oliveira analyzed survey data on stars and substellar objects in IC 348, then conducted follow-up simulations to uncover how H-type objects formed. The main question they asked was whether H-type objects form from collapsing gas clouds, like brown dwarfs and stars, or develop around host stars before being ejected and drifting freely through space, like planets.

First, they reviewed the observational records of IC 348 obtained with the JWST NIRSpec and the near-IR spectrograph SpeX at the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility. IC 348 has 495 stars and brown dwarfs combined, as well as 9 H-type objects. Estimates for the age of this star-forming region range from either 1 to 3 million years or 5 to 6 million years, depending on how different teams calculated it. From there, Parker and Alves de Oliveira compared where the stars, brown dwarfs, and H-type objects were located within the cluster. They found no unique spatial distribution among the 3 types of objects.

Then, the team simulated the evolution of IC 348 over 10 million years to determine which initial conditions would result in a spatial distribution closest to the survey data. They simulated an initial giant gas cloud and used a mathematical function to distribute its mass among the 495 constituent objects. The researchers then placed a Jupiter-sized planet around each simulated star that was approximately the Sun’s mass to determine whether they could grow and escape their home star and become H-type objects. They also repeated the simulations by placing the Jupiter-sized planets at distances from the Sun similar to those of Earth, Jupiter, and Neptune, and varied the sizes and star densities of the simulated IC 348 regions.

They found that if Jupiter-sized planets orbited their stars at roughly Jupiter’s distance from the Sun, then 5 to 15 of them could escape their stars in a region like IC 348, which would roughly match the number of known H-type objects. However, the escaped planets were distinctly more spread-out than the observed H-type objects, which share a similar spatial distribution with the cluster’s stars and brown dwarfs. Since the simulations did not match the observed distribution, the researchers suggested that these H-type objects are likely a new sub-category of very small brown dwarfs rather than escaped planets.

Although this study favors a brown dwarf origin for H-type objects, the exact details of how they formed remain up for debate. Astronomers still have multiple competing theories about how ordinary brown dwarfs form. Perhaps they are ejected from their gas cloud before fully forming, have their outer layers stripped by radiation from a nearby massive star, or simply form like stars on a slightly smaller scale. Regardless, future researchers will continue to explore this murky area of substellar astronomy.

The post Objects at the border between planets and stars appeared first on Sciworthy.

A neutron star is what remains after the core of a massive star collapses. It is not a small ordinary star. It is the crushed core of a dead one, compressed until protons and electrons are forced together and most of the material becomes neutrons. The result is one of the strangest objects in the […]

The post What Is a Neutron Star? The City-Sized Remnant of a Stellar Explosion appeared first on Curiosmos.

While previous investigations of planet formation across the universe’s history suggest that planets trickled into the picture, a recent study has found that primordial planetesimals could have formed much earlier from the insides of the first stars in the universe.

First Stars, First Planets?

When the first stars flickered on, the universe was filled with pristine gas, containing only hydrogen, helium, and a little lithium. This gas, though great at making massive stars known as Population III (Pop III) stars, was not yet enriched with the heavy elements necessary for planet formation and, of course, life. Past studies have suggested that planet formation in the universe was gradual, taking several billion years to peak after billions of stars created and spilled the needed metals into the universe. However, local pockets of enriched gas from Pop III stars could have created the right conditions for planet formation earlier in the universe’s history.

Pop III stars burned bright and fast, exploding violently in pair-instability supernovae that completely shredded the progenitor, ejecting over 100 solar masses of metals into their previously pristine surroundings. Cosmological simulations suggest that oxygen from these supernovae could have produced significant water fractions within the dense cores of the supernova remnant. This may have set the stage for planet formation in water-rich disks around subsequent generations of stars as early as 150–200 million years after the Big Bang — does numerical modeling support this planet formation hypothesis?

Primordial Planetesimals in Simulated Water-Rich Disks

To test if these water-rich dense cores within Pop III supernova remnants could form planetesimals, the building blocks of terrestrial planets, Eduard I. Vorobyov (University of Innsbruck; Southern Federal University) and collaborators performed numerical simulations tracing the collapse of one such gas core into a protoplanetary disk around a protostar. The simulations begin from the gravitational collapse of a 1-solar-mass gas cloud core, with a protostar emerging 24 thousand years after the initial cloud collapse. As the protostar’s gravity pulled in material from its surroundings, a rotating disk formed around the growing star.

Tracking the gas and dust evolution in the disk, the authors found that several Earth masses of planetesimals formed within 0.5–1.0 au of the 0.4-solar-mass protostar. While the simulations did not trace the disk all the way to planet formation (this requires complex multi-body modeling and lots of computing power), enough planetesimals formed to create a Mars- or Earth-mass planet in the future. Luckily, unlike their live-fast and die-young predecessors, low-mass stars born from Pop III supernova remnants would still be burning hydrogen in their cores today, and ancient metal-poor stars in the Milky Way’s halo may be home to the universe’s first planets that could be detected in future exoplanet surveys. This study showed, for the first time, that water-rich protoplanetary disks with planetesimals could pop up billions of years earlier than previously thought, changing our understanding of planet formation in the universe.

Citation

“Planet Formation at Cosmic Dawn: Planetesimals in H₂O-rich Disks around Low-mass Stars,” Eduard I. Vorobyov et al 2026 ApJL 1007 L51. doi:10.3847/2041-8213/ae907c

The post Primordial Planetesimals from the Guts of Population III Stars appeared first on AAS Nova.

Now that NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is on its way toward its Lagrange Point 2 (L2) destination, more of its mission goals are coming into focus, including the possibility that it could detect an Earth-like planet orbiting a star like our own Sun using gravitational microlensing.

The Roman team said such a detection could identify targets for the proposed Habitable Worlds Observatory project, including scanning their atmospheres for signs of extraterrestrial life.

Searching for Another Earth with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

In NASA’s mission fact sheet, Roman’s planners pose several questions. These include: 

• How common are solar systems like our own?
• What kinds of planets exist in the cold, outer regions of planetary systems?
• What determines the habitability of Earth-like worlds?

Although scientists have used several methods to detect exoplanets, including Earth-like planets, Roman will employ three. These include the transit method, microlensing, and direct imaging. NASA said the combination of approaches will allow mission scientists to conduct a “sweeping search expected to uncover around 100,000 new exoplanets — a staggering leap compared to the nearly 6,200 currently known.”

“It is hoped that Roman will discover thousands of new exoplanets and significantly expand our knowledge of the diversity of planetary systems in our Galaxy,” explained Associate Professor Edita Stonkutė, an astrophysicist at Vilnius University unconnected to the Roman team, in a statement emailed to The Debrief.

Microlensing Can Reveal Earthlike Planets Orbiting Sunlike Stars

Most exoplanets have been detected by the dimming of their host star when they transit between it and Earth, giving the transit method its name. Roman plans to use that same method for most of its larger planetary detections. However, among the expected tens of thousands of transit-method detections, mission planners expect a small but sizeable percentage to come from microlensing.

NASA said the “light-bending” microlensing phenomenon occurs when two distant stars “align closely from our vantage point.” Due to the strength of the nearer star’s gravity, the light from the more distant one is “warped” around the nearer one, essentially focusing it very briefly for a distant observer.

“If the alignment is especially close, the nearer star acts like a cosmic lens, focusing and magnifying light from the background star.” Professor Stonkutė explained. “By analysing these changes, astronomers can determine that the planet exists and estimate its mass and orbital characteristics.”

Critically, Professor Stonkutė also noted that microlensing can occur with objects other than stars, including exoplanets.

“This is Precisely Where Roman Has the Edge”

Using its Wide-Field Array, Roman will monitor hundreds of millions of stars. NASA said the observatory will monitor these target stars for “tiny surges in starlight” that typically signal a microlensing event.

Although the transit method is employed to detect larger exoplanets, NASA noted that microlensing “specializes in finding planets like those in our solar system.” The space agency added that this includes “worlds as lightweight as Mars in their star’s habitable zone or farther out.”

A star’s habitable zone is typically defined as the orbital plane where an exoplanet could sustain liquid water on its surface, a key ingredient for life as we know it.

Professor Stonkutė described microlensing as “particularly valuable” since it can detect planets that are difficult to spot with other planet-hunting methods. The professor said this includes “small Earth-like planets located far from their star.” The Roman team hopes to find “more than 1,000 microlensing planets.”

The professor warned that “most microlensing events cannot be predicted in advance.” As a result, telescopes need to actively scan large areas of the sky to increase the chances of a microlensing detection

“This is precisely where Roman has the edge over other telescopes that have searched for exoplanets using different methods,” the professor added.

A “Stepping Stone” Toward NASA’s Habitable Worlds Observatory Concept

While Roman is tasked with directly imaging exoplanets, finding another Earth around a Sun-like star will still require an indirect detection, most likely from a microlensing event. However, the Roman team notes that their observatory “will provide a crucial stepping stone for NASA’s Habitable Worlds Observatory concept.”

According to the space agency, that “flagship” telescope, still awaiting final approval, “would be designed to photograph Earth-like planets for the first time ever.”

Roman may also be able to scan the atmospheres of planets detected with the transit method. The space agency said Roman “would also look for signs of life called biosignatures by measuring atmospheric gases like oxygen and ozone that could signal the presence of living things.” 

Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and has spent the last six years as Associate News Editor and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him at christopher@thedebrief.org.

Empty space is not completely empty in the equations of quantum physics. Under an ordinary magnetic field, that distinction is impossible to notice. Near a magnetar—a neutron star with a magnetic field trillions of times stronger than Earth’s—space itself can alter the way light travels. NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) has measured unusually strong […]

The post A Magnetar May Have Bent Empty Space—NASA’s IXPE Tests a 90-Year-Old Prediction appeared first on Curiosmos.

Which naked-eye star is richest in metals and what is the estimated mass of the metal contained therein? ThomasMineral, Virginia In astronomer-speak, metals refer to elements heavier than helium. The first stars that lit up the universe were very metal-poor, since hydrogen and helium were just about the only materials around after the Big Bang. TheseContinue reading "Which naked-eye star is richest in metals?"

The post Which naked-eye star is richest in metals? appeared first on Astronomy Magazine.

Stars do not actually switch their lights on and off when they twinkle. The flicker happens between the star and your eyes, as its light passes through Earth’s moving atmosphere. Planets are affected by the same air, but they usually look steadier because their light arrives from a small disk rather than a single point. […]

The post Why Do Stars Twinkle While Planets Usually Look Steady? appeared first on Curiosmos.

A pioneer mission in astrometry – the measurement of the position, distance, motion, brightness, and color of stars – the European Space Agency’s (ESA) High Precision Parallax Collecting Satellite, or Hipparcos, launched on Aug. 8, 1989. There were immediately problems when a rocket-engine failure kept Hipparcos from reaching its planned orbit. However, the satellite wasContinue reading "Aug. 8, 1989: The Hipparcos satellite launches"

The post Aug. 8, 1989: The Hipparcos satellite launches appeared first on Astronomy Magazine.

Star formation in the nearby Andromeda Galaxy (M31) has been slowing down over the last 500 million years, according to a new study using Hubble Space Telescope data.  The study was published July 27, 2026, in The Astrophysical Journal. Lead author Tobin Wainer, an astronomer at the University of Washington, and his team used dataContinue reading "Andromeda’s star formation is slowing down"

The post Andromeda’s star formation is slowing down appeared first on Astronomy Magazine.

An unusual clump of gas 450 million years after the Big Bang may contain stars hailing from the universe’s elusive first generation of stars. New research examines an alternative explanation involving an accreting black hole.

Meet Hebe

Initially spotted in 2024, an early-universe gas clump nicknamed Hebe has now been identified as a possible hiding place of Population III (Pop III) stars — the universe’s first generation of stars. Pop III stars are thought to be massive and chemically pristine, containing only hydrogen, helium, and a whisper of lithium. This exciting hypothesis was prompted by the detection of recombination lines from helium, which could be ionized by the high-energy radiation of the first stars.

Before the community settles on this exciting explanation, however, the hypothesis must withstand all the tests astronomers can throw at it. In a recent research article, Junehyoung Jeon, Tae Bong Jeong, and Saiyang Zhang (The University of Texas at Austin) along with Volker Bromm (The University of Texas at Austin) attempted to explain Hebe’s properties in another way.

Considering Alternatives

Hebe glows with distinctive helium emission that requires a source of high-energy radiation. This radiation could be provided by a cluster of Pop III stars, but it could also, in theory, arise from an accreting supermassive black hole embedded within the gas clump.

The authors used models to explore both possibilities. For the first scenario, in which the telltale helium emission is driven by a cluster of Pop III stars, the team calculated the maximum possible mass of the cluster, which sets how much high-energy radiation is produced. The cluster mass is moderated by high-energy radiation from another source: GN-z11, a starburst galaxy situated about 10,000 light-years from Hebe. For the second scenario, the team modeled the spectral energy distribution arising from a supermassive black hole — either a direct-collapse black hole or a primordial black hole — accreting pristine gas from the surrounding cloud.

Still a Leading Explanation

While the black hole scenario could, with reasonable black hole masses, gas densities, and accretion rates, reproduce individual flux measurements drawn from JWST observations, this hypothesis struggled to simultaneously match multiple measurements. The Pop III star cluster scenario, with a cluster mass of a few hundred thousand solar masses, provided the best fit to the JWST data.

As a final test, the team introduced a third possibility involving a population of second-generation stars, which are more chemically enriched than Pop III stars. While this model fit well, the number of stars necessary to match the data — roughly 10 million — would produce a stellar continuum detectable (but so far not seen) by JWST.

While a cluster of Pop III stars is still the leading explanation for Hebe’s properties, the team noted that the Pop III star and black hole hypotheses aren’t mutually exclusive; Hebe could very well harbor a primordial black hole and a smattering of Pop III stars. Regardless of what powers its characteristic helium emission, Hebe offers an enticing glimpse into the early universe, and more work is needed to understand this intriguing object.

Citation

“What Is Powering the Enigmatic He II Emitter Hebe: The First Stars or Black Holes?” Junehyoung Jeon et al 2026 ApJ 1006 27. doi:10.3847/1538-4357/ae7bea

The post First-Generation Stars Provide Better Fit than a Black Hole for Early-Universe Gas Clump appeared first on AAS Nova.

NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory captured an “orphan” black hole lighting up as it devoured a star on the outskirts of a faraway galaxy. These phenomena are rare to begin with, and none had ever before been seen so far outside of a galaxy’s core.

“We were looking for these star-shredding events as a way to find otherwise invisible supermassive black holes wandering away from the galactic cores where they usually reside,” said Robert Stein, a research fellow at The University of Maryland, College Park and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “With this discovery, which is one of just a couple that have been confirmed so far, we’ve validated a new technique and can use it to hunt for more.”

A paper describing the results, led by Stein, was published Monday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Researchers saw an ultrabright flare unleashed by a star being torn apart by extreme gravitational forces after drifting too close to a monster black hole — a phenomenon called a tidal disruption event. The black hole behind the blast weighs in at about a million times the Sun’s mass. Its existence was first flagged in November 2025 as an unusual brightening in a galaxy about 750 million light-years away by ZTF (Zwicky Transient Facility), a survey conducted by the Palomar Observatory in Southern California.

“Out of the half million flashes ZTF detects each night, our new artificial intelligence algorithm automatically recognized a flare that looked a lot like a tidal disruption event, despite its unusual location in the outskirts of a galaxy,” Stein said. For a few months, the tidal disruption event outshone its entire host galaxy in ultraviolet wavelengths, temporarily radiating with the light of about 10 billion suns.

Other telescopes, including the SOAR (Southern Astrophysical Research) telescope in Chile, followed up on the ZTF source to look at the event’s spectrum, which revealed features supporting that it was likely a tidal disruption event. Astronomers then used NASA’s Swift to look at wavelengths they can’t detect with ground-based telescopes to uncover new information. For example, Swift’s UVOT (Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope) took the blip’s temperature and found that it had quite a fever at about 54,000 degrees Fahrenheit (30,000 degrees Celsius).

“The combination of all this data helped us rule out other explanations and confidently say it’s a tidal disruption event, despite its strange location,” said Jonathan Carney, a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who took the first spectra that supported the flare’s interpretation as a tidal disruption event.

Hidden heavyweights

Nearly every galaxy in the universe is anchored by a supermassive black hole sitting right in the center. About once every 100,000 years, a star will drift too close to this invisible heavyweight and trigger a tidal disruption event.

While they’re rather rare in any given galaxy, scientists scour millions of galaxies for them. Each year, astronomical surveys typically spot about 30 tidal disruption events occurring somewhere in the universe.

Prior to 2024, they’d only been seen in galaxy cores. That’s partly because astronomers mainly looked for them there; after all, it’s where all the known supermassive black holes were, and you can’t get a tidal disruption event without one (the gravitational pull of lighter black holes isn’t strong enough).

Then scientists saw the telltale signs of a star being shredded 2,600 light-years from the center of its host galaxy. That inspired more astronomers to look beyond galaxy cores for similar events, and now a team has identified one more than 30,000 light-years away from a galaxy’s center.

Oddball origin story

So how did the newfound black hole become so off-kilter?

“It must have originated in a galaxy’s center, but not the one it’s in the outskirts of now,” Stein said. “We think the host galaxy’s supermassive black hole is still at its core, but the one eating the star could have started off in a small galaxy that merged with the big one we see today.”

The researchers have outlined two possibilities. Three or more galaxies may have merged together, and the gravitational tug-of-war between their central supermassive black holes may have flung the lightest black hole out to the galaxy’s edge.

Or a dwarf galaxy could be midway through a merger. As the dwarf’s stars fell into the larger galaxy, one may have passed too close to the dwarf’s supermassive black hole.

“Further discoveries could reveal the origin of this apparent ‘orphan’ black hole,” Stein said. “The key science question we want to answer is: How common are wandering black holes?”

The answer may soon be within reach. “Pointed science observations with Swift’s UVOT and XRT (X-Ray Telescope) instruments are temporarily suspended as the mission awaits an orbit boost, which is planned for this summer,” said co-author S. Bradley Cenko, Swift’s principal investigator at NASA Goddard. The spacecraft, whose primary mission ran from 2004 to 2006, is slowly sinking toward Earth due to atmospheric drag after more than 20 years of observations of the changing universe. Nudging it to a higher orbit could extend its lifetime even longer. “Once it resumes normal operations, Swift could continue searching for more examples of out-of-place black holes.”

In the coming years, scientists will use the new technique to search for disintegrating stars in observations from the newly operational Vera C. Rubin Observatory, jointly funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and National Science Foundation, in Chile and NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

“Rubin’s wide, deep surveys will reveal a much larger sample of tidal disruption events than current observatories are capable of collecting, including ones that are off-center,” Carney said. “And Roman’s space-based surveys will extend the current search zone by seeing ones that are farther away, looking back through 9 billion years of cosmic history.” Adding their observations to Swift’s and those from ground-based observatories will bring astronomers closer than ever before to completing a census of the universe’s behemoth black holes.

To learn more about the Swift mission, visit:

https://nasa.gov/swift

By Ashley Balzer
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

Media contact:

Claire Andreoli
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
301-286-1940

Galaxies, stars, and living cells are all examples of local order emerging in the universe. At first glance, that seems to contradict one of physics’ oldest principles.

However, a recent study in Physical Review D offers a mathematical explanation for how these structures form while still obeying the second law of thermodynamics.

The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy, or disorder, in an isolated system always increases over time. Einstein famously said that “the second law of thermodynamics occupies a unique position among the laws of Nature,” reflecting how fundamental he believed the principle to be.

In its early days, the universe was smooth and uniform, with low entropy. As it expanded, gravity pulled gas into stars, stars into galaxies, and eventually made life possible. Each step seems to create order in one place, even though the universe as a whole became more disordered. Cosmologists have usually explained this by pointing to the universe’s growing volume.

Gravity as a Ledger, Not a Force

Mathematician Ginestra Bianconi at Queen Mary University of London addressed this problem with a framework called Gravity from Entropy. Rather than treating gravity as a fundamental force, the Gravity from Entropy framework proposes that it emerges from an information-based difference between two descriptions of spacetime geometry. One metric describes the actual shape of spacetime, while the other describes the geometry that matter and curvature would create. When these two match, gravity disappears. When they differ, gravity arises from the difference.

In the low-energy, weak-curvature limit, the framework reduces to general relativity. In the new study, Bianconi adds a thermodynamic perspective. She applies Gravity from Entropy to the standard model of an expanding universe and shows that the local geometric degrees of freedom follow the first law of thermodynamics, with their own temperature and pressure emerging from the equations.

Falling Density, Rising Total

One of the study’s central findings is the distinction between total entropy and entropy per unit volume. As the universe grows, the total entropy increases, just as the second law demands. However, the study found that entropy per unit volume decreases over time even as the universe’s total entropy continues to increase. Within the Gravity from Entropy framework, Bianconi proposes that this declining local entropy density may help explain how galaxies and other cosmic structures emerge.

The study also shows that these geometric temperatures change depending on what dominates the universe. In a universe dominated by matter or radiation, the temperature decreases over time. In a universe dominated by dark energy, like our own, they remain nearly constant. The framework even assigns a temperature and pressure to empty spacetime.

A Theory Still Waiting to Be Tested

“This work reveals how the Gravity from Entropy theory can tackle the challenging question of reconciling the second law of thermodynamics with the emergence of complexity in our universe,” stated Bianconi. “These results may open new avenues for investigating the long-standing problem of reconciling the foundations of cosmological irreversibility, the emergence of complex structures, and ultimately life with fundamental gravitational dynamics.”

So far, Gravity from Entropy has not been confirmed by observations. The theory makes predictions that future observations of large-scale cosmic structures and other gravitational phenomena could test. While it remains unproven, Bianconi believes it could offer a new way to link gravity, thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, and the rise of complexity in the universe.

Austin Burgess is a writer and researcher with a background in sales, marketing, and data analytics. He holds an MBA, a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, and a data analytics certification. His work focuses on breaking scientific developments, with an emphasis on emerging biology, cognitive neuroscience, and archaeological discoveries.

Around 4.6 billion years ago, an immense cloud of gas and dust in space collapsed in on itself. As it collapsed, gravity pulled most of the material toward several small points, one of which would eventually become our Sun. The other points formed other stars in what scientists call an open cluster. 

During this early stage of the Sun’s life, it was surrounded by a swirling disk of leftover material aligned with its equator, known as a protoplanetary disk. Eventually, this disk condensed to form the planets that make up our solar system. This process normally results in a system with a star at its center, and the planets orbiting the plane of the star’s equator. 

However, scientists have found that this scenario doesn’t quite hold for our solar system. The planets in our solar system orbit the Sun in a single plane offset from the Sun’s equator by approximately 6°. The fact that the planets are in the same orbital plane suggests that the protoplanetary disk model of solar system formation is correct, since the odds of the Sun capturing 8 rogue planets in this arrangement are astronomically low. So, what threw the planets in our solar system off-kilter?

To determine what caused the solar system to tilt, Daohai Li at Queen Mary University of London recently used the computer program NBODY6++ to model different versions of the open cluster from which the Sun came. In these simulations, he varied the number of stars in the cluster, from 500 to 2,000 to 8,000. He also varied the radius of the cluster, from 0.25 to 1 to 4 parsecs (8 to 30 to 100 trillion kilometers or 5 to 20 to 70 trillion miles). Finally, he varied the percentage of stars with a binary companion from 10% to 50% to 90%. Li assigned each star a randomly generated initial mass, starting position, and velocity, and simulated their interactions for 400 million years.

First, Li examined the simulations to identify stars with masses approximately equal to the Sun’s. From this group of solar-massed stars, Li found ones that left the cluster after 400 million years as a single star, after either forming alone or having lost a former companion star. He proposed that these stars were the most similar to the Sun and could thus host a simulated solar system.

Li then simulated the planets and their orbits as they would have formed on these potential host stars. To simplify this process, Li only simulated the 4 giant planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, which dominate planetary behavior in our solar system. He modeled these solar systems independently for 200 million years to ensure they would remain intact and used those that did for statistical analysis of the solar system’s past.

Overall, Li discovered 2 scenarios that could explain the solar system’s tilt. In the first, the primordial solar system was jostled by many distant neighboring stars in its cluster. This jostling tilts the planets’ orbits, but it does so randomly. Therefore, this scenario would make it unlikely for the planets to remain in the same orbital plane. It would also cause them to orbit the Sun faster and more chaotically than in our solar system.

In the second scenario, the Sun had a temporary companion star that it either formed with or briefly encountered before separating. When this occurred, the simulated planets’ orbits all tilted together. Stars that formed with a binary companion had a 10% chance of tilting their planets’ orbits by 6° or more, while stars that formed alone had a less than 0.1% chance. 

Li concluded that the solar system could have tilted as a result of interactions between the Sun and a temporary companion star within its parent cluster. However, he acknowledged that the model strongly depends on how closely a star passes by the Sun, since the closer a star passes, the more it disturbs the solar system. Despite this uncertainty, it’s possible that somewhere in space is the Sun’s twin or former neighbor that we haven’t seen in eons, and that’s what made our solar system crooked!

The post The Sun’s twin star may have tilted the planets’ orbits appeared first on Sciworthy.

O Apple TV adquiriu antecipadamente os direitos de produção de “Peculiar Stars”, o vindouro (e bastante disputado) romance de Rebecca Yarros, autora conhecida pela série de livros “Empyrean”.

A aquisição foi confirmada pelo serviço no X. A série será produzida pelo Apple Studios e contará com Yarros como produtora executiva, por meio da sua empresa Full Measures Productions.

A new tale of survival and romance from bestselling author Rebecca Yarros.

Apple Studios will develop Peculiar Stars, and Yarros will serve as executive producer through her banner Full Measures Productions. pic.twitter.com/g2KTQ6ZnSL

— Apple TV (@AppleTV) July 22, 2026

“Peculiar Stars” será publicado em novembro e acompanhará uma jovem que fica presa em uma ilha deserta com um membro da família do seu noivo — o que transformará sua visão sobre o amor.

Quando eles são finalmente resgatados e retornam aos seus mundos repletos de privilégios, expectativas e segredos, esse retorno se mostra muito mais perigoso do que a ilha onde estavam.

De acordo com o Deadline, a Apple ainda está à procura de um roteirista para escrever a adaptação. No livro, a história terá um ritmo lento, se desenrolando por 543 dias na ilha supracitada.

O Apple TV está disponível no aplicativo Apple TV em mais de 100 países e regiões, seja em iPhones, iPads, Apple TVs, Macs, dispositivos Android, smart TVs ou online — além de também estar em aparelhos como Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Chromecast com Google TV, consoles PlayStation e Xbox. O serviço custa R$29,90 por mês, com um período de teste gratuito de 7 dias. Por tempo limitado, quem comprar e ativar um novo iPhone, iPad, Apple TV ou Mac ganha 3 meses do Apple TV. Ele também faz parte do pacote de assinaturas da empresa, o Apple One.

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