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Organic Chemistry Beyond the Milky Way, Lava World Atmosphere & AI Exoplanet Find
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
JWST detects benzene and methane in a galaxy outside our own — reshaping where complex chemistry can begin in the universe. Plus a lava world with an impossible atmosphere, super-Eddington black holes, and an amateur astronomer who used AI to find a hidden exoplanet.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Benzene. Methane.
That finding connects to a second result, also from JWST. Observations of early galaxies show carbon, oxygen, and silicon spreading into surrounding space just five hundred million years after the Big Bang.
Here's another piece of that early universe puzzle. New simulations address a problem that's frustrated astrophysicists for years: how did black holes reach billions of solar masses so quickly after the Big Bang?
Now to a planet that shouldn't behave the way it does. TOI-561 b is a lava world.
On a different scale entirely, an amateur astronomer named Pavel Rabtsevich used machine learning to mine NASA's TESS dataset and flagged a repeating transit signal that automated systems had missed. The candidate is TIC 4206066, a possible rocky super-Earth with a three-day orbit.
SpaceX rounded out the day with a routine Falcon nine launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base, deploying twenty-seven Starlink V2 Mini satellites to a two hundred sixty-six kilometer orbit. The booster completed its twentieth flight.
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