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      Mysterious ‘little red dot’ galaxies have a possible origin story

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      The early universe is speckled with little red dots, and now we may have an idea of how these peculiar galaxies originated: They were born with almost no spin.

      Little red dots were totally unknown until their discovery by the James Webb Space Telescope, which revealed a tiny galactic species that proliferated when the universe was only 640 million to 1.5 billion years old. These galaxies are compact because they were barely rotating when first taking shape, Harvard astronomers Fabio Pacucci and Avi Loeb report in a paper submitted June 3 to arXiv.org and accepted to the Astrophysical Journal Letters. More

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      In a first, the Webb telescope found a planet by actually ‘seeing’ it

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      For the first time ever, the James Webb Space Telescope has discovered an exoplanet by directly imaging it. The newfound world has a mass roughly similar to Saturn and orbits inside the debris disk surrounding a young star named TWA 7, researchers report June 25 in Nature.

      JWST has previously discovered more than 100 planets, mostly through the transit method, in which the telescope watches an exoplanet pass in front of its parent star, causing a brief dimming in the star’s light. Direct imaging — capturing a photo of a star-orbiting exoplanet — is a far more challenging task. More

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      A dwarf galaxy just might upend the Milky Way’s predicated demise

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      It may come down to a coin toss as to whether the Milky Way collides with the Andromeda Galaxy within 10 billion years.

      While scientists have previously reported that a convergence was certain, an analysis of the latest data suggests the odds are only about 50 percent, researchers report June 2 in Nature Astronomy. The Milky Way’s largest satellite system — the Large Magellanic Cloud — may be our galaxy’s saving grace, the study shows. More

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      Venus’ tectonics may be actively reshaping its surface

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      Things may be moving on Venus’ surface.

      In 1983, researchers discovered that the planet’s surface was speckled with strange, circular landforms. These rounded mountain belts, known as coronae, have no known Earthly counterparts, and they’ve remained enigmatic for decades. But hot plumes of rock upwelling from Venus’ mantle are shaping the mysterious landforms, a new analysis suggests. If true, that mean that Venus’ surface is tectonically active, and not merely a stagnant layer, researchers report May 14 in Science Advances. More

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      A passing star could fling Earth out of orbit

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      Bad news, earthlings. Computer simulations of the solar system’s future reveal a new risk facing us all: The gravitational tug of a passing star could either cause another planet to smack into Earth or else fling our planet into the sun or far away from it, where any inhabitants would freeze.

      Blame Mercury. Astronomers have long known that the innermost planet’s orbit, which is fairly oval-shaped, can become even more elliptical due to gravitational jiggles from Jupiter. Passing stars exacerbate this danger, Nathan Kaib, an astronomer at the Planetary Science Institute who is based in Iowa, and Sean Raymond, an astronomer at the University of Bordeaux in France, report in work submitted to arXiv.org May 7. More