NASA exoplanet probe tracks interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS to gauge its spin https://www.space.com/astronomy/comets/nasa-exoplanet-probe-…e-its-spin.
NASA’s TESS Reobserves Comet 3I/ATLAS https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/3iatlas/2026/01/27/nasas-tess…-3i-atlas/
On January 22, 2026, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope observed the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS nearly perfectly aligned with the Sun-Earth axis, revealing unprecedented jet structures and an extended anti-tail.
A team of researchers at Monash University has uncovered a powerful new way to engineer exotic quantum states, revealing a robust and tunable three-dimensional flat electronic band in an ultrathin kagome metal, an achievement long thought to be nearly impossible. The study, “3D Flat Band in Ultra-Thin Kagome Metal Mn₃Sn Film,” by M. Zhao, J. Blyth, T. Yu and collaborators appears in Advanced Materials.
The discovery centers on Mn₃Sn films just three nanometers thick. Despite their extreme thinness, these films host a 3D flat band that spans the entire momentum space, offering an unprecedented platform for exploring strongly correlated quantum phases and designing future low-energy electronic technologies.
“Until now, 3D flat bands had only been observed in a few bulk materials with special lattice geometries,” said Ph.D. candidate and co-lead author James Blyth, from the Monash University School of Physics and Astronomy.
A team of astronomers have used a new AI-assisted method to search for rare astronomical objects in the Hubble Legacy Archive. The team sifted through nearly 100 million image cutouts in just two and a half days, uncovering nearly 1400 anomalous objects, more than 800 of which had never been documented before.
Scientists have found the interstellar organic matter could produce an abundant supply of water by heating, suggesting that organic matter could be the source of terrestrial water.
There remains a number of mysteries on our planet including the elusive origin of water on the earth. Active studies suggested that terrestrial water had been delivered by icy comets or meteorites containing hydrous silicates that came from outside the “snow line” – the boundary beyond which ice can condense due the low temperatures. More recent studies, however, have provided observations opposing to cometary origin theory, yet still failing to suggest plausible substitutions for the source of terrestrial water. “Until now, much less attention has been paid to organic matter, comparing to ices and silicates, even though there is an abundance inside the snow line” says planetary scientist Akira Kouchi at Hokkaido University.
In the recent study published in Scientific Reports, a group of scientists led by Akira Kouchi demonstrates that heating of the interstellar organic matter at high temperature could yield abundant water and oil. This suggests that water could be produced inside the snow line, without any contribution of comets or meteorites delivered from outside the snow line.
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It’s been an idea that has been around since 1895 but only since the 1960s that it was taken seriously. But the biggest issue is how to make a cable over 36,000km that is light enough and strong enough. We now have the ability to make the materials but can we make them long enough to make it a reality, find out in today’s video.
Written, researched and presented by Paul Shillito.
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The platypus is one of evolution’s lovable, oddball animals. The creature seems to defy well-understood rules of biology by combining physical traits in a bizarre way. They’re egg-laying mammals with duck bills and beaver-like tails, and the males have venomous spurs on their hind feet. In that regard, it’s only fitting that astronomers describe some newly discovered oddball objects as “Astronomy’s Platypus.”
The discovery consists of nine galaxies that also have unusual properties and seem to defy categorization. The findings were recently presented at the 247th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Phoenix. The results are also in new research titled “A New Population of Point-like, Narrow-line Objects Revealed by the James Webb Space Telescope,” posted to the arXiv preprint server. The lead author is Haojing Yan from the University of Missouri-Columbia.
“We report a new population of objects discovered using the data from the James Webb Space Telescope, which are characterized by their point-like morphology and narrow permitted emission lines,” the authors write in their research. “Due to the limitation of the current data, the exact nature of this new population is still uncertain.”
Data from NASA’s Juno mission has provided new insights into the thickness and subsurface structure of the icy shell encasing Jupiter’s moon Europa. Using the spacecraft’s Microwave Radiometer (MWR), mission scientists determined that the shell averages about 18 miles (29 kilometers) thick in the region observed during Juno’s 2022 flyby of Europa. The Juno measurement is the first to discriminate between thin and thick shell models that have suggested the ice shell is anywhere from less than half a mile to tens of miles thick.
Slightly smaller than Earth’s moon, Europa is one of the solar system’s highest-priority science targets for investigating habitability. Evidence suggests that the ingredients for life may exist in the saltwater ocean that lies beneath its ice shell. Uncovering a variety of characteristics of the ice shell, including its thickness, provides crucial pieces of the puzzle for understanding the moon’s internal workings and the potential for the existence of a habitable environment.
The new estimate on the ice thickness in the near-surface icy crust was published on Dec. 17 in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Quantum computing represents a potential breakthrough technology that could far surpass the technical limitations of modern-day computing systems for some tasks. However, putting together practical, large-scale quantum computers remains challenging, particularly because of the complex and delicate techniques involved.
In some quantum computing systems, single ions (charged atoms such as strontium) are trapped and exposed to electromagnetic fields including laser light to produce certain effects, used to perform calculations. Such circuits require many different wavelengths of light to be introduced into different positions of the device, meaning that numerous laser beams have to be properly arranged and delivered to the designated area. In these cases, the practical limitations of delivering many different beams of light around within a limited space become a difficulty.
To address this, researchers from The University of Osaka investigated unique ways to deliver light in a limited space. Their work revealed a power-efficient nanophotonic circuit with optical fibers attached to waveguides to deliver six different laser beams to their destinations. The findings have been published in APL Quantum.