For the first time, NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) mission has identified a planet orbiting a distant star thanks to its warping of space-time. Unlike the star-hugging transiting planets TESS regularly reveals, the newfound microlensing world is a super-Jupiter orbiting far from its host star.

“When TESS launched, no one expected it to ever be capable of finding this kind of planet,” said University of New Mexico professor Diana Dragomir. “The discovery implies that there are probably other microlensing planets hiding in TESS’s data that we hadn’t previously thought to look for.”

Astronomers first became aware of the alerting microlensing event, called Gaia23bra b, in 2023 using ESA’s (European Space Agency) now-retired Gaia space telescope. Gaia23bra b is fundamentally different from the transiting planets normally found by TESS. Instead of causing a dimming, the star-planet system magnified the light of a more distant background star (the “source”).

Scientists have detected evidence of landslides on Pluto for the first time. A paper published in the journal Icarus reports that images taken by the New Horizons spacecraft during a flyby revealed six large landslides in three impact craters.

These mass movements of ice, rock and debris are common on Earth and have been detected elsewhere in our solar system, including Mars and Ceres, a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. But evidence from icy Pluto has been nonexistent until now, even though it has steep crater walls and rugged icy terrain where landslides could occur.

A newly observed molecular drift may reveal how magnetic fields weaken before a star is born.

Researchers at the University of Warwick and the University of Colorado Boulder have directly observed, for the first time, four white dwarfs in binary star systems in our nearby region of space. These stellar binaries are all within 65 light-years of Earth, and one contains the ninth-closest white dwarf to the sun.

The four systems each include a red dwarf companion—a larger, brighter star—making the systems appear to be single-star systems. The new results, published in MNRAS, show that each of these nearby red dwarfs hosts a hidden white dwarf companion.

First author Dr. Mairi O’Brien, a research fellow at the University of Warwick, said, “Nearby isolated white dwarfs are usually easy to find, but we couldn’t see these four stars directly in visible wavelengths because their red dwarf companions were drowning out their light. It’s a reminder that even in our own cosmic neighborhood, we can still find surprises if we look in the right way, at the right wavelengths.”

North America’s celestial highlights for the week ahead, which also apply to mid-northern latitudes in the northern hemisphere. This week, the Perseids begin.

Researchers have long suspected early life may have been helped by sugars brought to Earth by asteroids – now a sugar found in raspberries has been spotted in a cosmic cloud nearly 27 light years away

The Extremely Large Telescope just passed a serious milestone while coming together. But it’s not done yet; the immense telescope is about to get even larger.

The European Organization for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere (ESO)’s Extremely Large Telescope is under construction on a mountaintop in Chile.

Using the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at McDonald Observatory, astronomers have taken a closer look at a nearby exoplanet and discovered it may be more Earth-like than previously thought. The planet, known as GJ 3378b, orbits a small, cool star called a red dwarf. Just 25 light-years from Earth in the direction of the northern constellation Camelopardalis, it lies in its star’s “habitable zone”—the region where temperatures could allow liquid water to exist—making it a candidate to host life.

“Our mantra is ‘follow the water,’” explained Paul Robertson, an astronomer at the University of California, Irvine, and lead author on the new study of GJ 3378b published in The Astrophysical Journal. “It’s the one thing every known living thing on Earth needs, so that’s the first thing we look for when trying to find environments that could sustain life.”

Reddwarfs are the coolest group of stars in existence. They are much smaller and dimmer than our sun and often appear reddish, hence their name. They are the most common stars in our galaxy, making them an important target in the search for life outside our solar system.