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      A newly discovered interstellar object might predate the solar system

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      The solar system’s newest visitor, 3I/ATLAS, may be 3 billion years older than the sun and its planets.

      First discovered on July 1, 3I/ATLAS is a rare interstellar object — only the third ever spotted. Since then, astronomers have been racing to uncover its origins. A new calculation predicts that 3I/ATLAS originated from a part of the Milky Way called the thick disk. If so, there’s a two-thirds chance that it’s a comet over 7 billion years old. That would make it the oldest comet known, researchers reported July 11 at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting 2025 in Durham, England. More

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      A third visitor from another star is hurtling through the solar system

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      For only the third time in history, astronomers have detected a new interstellar visitor — an object from another star — blitzing into our solar system.

      First named A11pl3Z and now designated as 3I/ATLAS , the comet was spotted by a survey telescope in Chile on July 1 and confirmed by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center the same day. To piece together its trajectory, astronomers dug through older sky surveys and found its position as early as mid-June. More

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      A barrage of radiation couldn’t kill this hardy life-form

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      An unassuming lichen harbors a hidden superpower: It’s remarkably resistant to ultraviolet radiation. New experiments on the hardy organism call into question the long-held belief that alien planets bathed in ultraviolet light must be sterile worlds, researchers report June 12 in Astrobiology. The discovery may open up more options in the search for life elsewhere in the universe.

      Thousands of exoplanets have been discovered to date, but many of them orbit a type of small, highly active star apt to send off blasts of energetic particles and radiation. And unlike our planet, those worlds likely don’t have ozone in their atmospheres. Ozone is formed from compounds produced by photosynthesis, and researchers haven’t found any evidence of such a process occurring on an exoplanet. More

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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