NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is set to achieve its most dangerous feat yet tomorrow, December 24, 2024. After a six-year journey of spiraling closer to the star at the heart of our solar system, the spacecraft is expected to come within 3.8 million miles of the Sun’s surface.

This tiny distance in cosmic terms lets scientists capture a new type of information, revealing secrets about solar winds, extreme heat, and magnetic fields.

Engineers have spent years carefully adjusting Parker’s flight path using multiple Venus gravity assists. These flybys reshape the spacecraft’s orbit and tighten its looping path around the Sun.

Recent discoveries reveal that bursts of slow pulsing radio waves originate from a binary star system consisting of a red dwarf and a white dwarf.

These findings challenge current pulsar theories and indicate a wider variety of stellar systems may emit similar signals.

Radio Wave Mysteries

A Neptune-sized planet, TOI-3261 b, makes a scorchingly close orbit around its host star. Only the fourth object of its kind ever found, the planet could reveal clues as to how planets such as these form.

An international team of scientists used the NASA space telescope, TESS (the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), to discover the exoplanet, then made further observations with ground-based telescopes in Australia, Chile, and South Africa. The measurements placed the new planet squarely in the “hot Neptune desert”—a category of planets with so few members that their scarcity evokes a deserted landscape.

The team, led by astronomer Emma Nabbie of the University of Southern Queensland, published their paper on the discovery, “Surviving in the Hot Neptune Desert: The Discovery of the Ultrahot Neptune TOI-3261 b,” in The Astronomical Journal in August 2024.

New observations show that planets forming in protoplanetary disks like that around PDS 70 can trigger the formation of subsequent planets.

This finding, based on high-resolution images from ALMA, supports the domino effect in the sequential formation of planetary systems.

Discoveries in Multi-Planet Systems.

Thirty-five years ago, our Cosmic Background Explorer, or COBE, was launched! The satellite was a crucial stepping stone in understanding the cosmic microwave background — the afterglow of the earliest moments of our universe.

Launched from what’s now Vandenberg Space Force Base on Nov. 18, 1989, COBE carried three instruments to space to measure microwave and infrared light across the whole sky. COBE’s observations helped us learn how our universe started and evolved.

COBE discovered that the oldest light in the universe contained tiny temperature variations (red indicates hotter regions, blue colder). These were the seeds for the gravitational formation of structures of galaxies seen in the universe today.

S James Webb Space Telescope: + There are still many questions we want to answer about the early universe, and our missions continue to study it and refine our understanding.

With billions of stars in the Milky Way, some nomenclature standardization is necessary.

By Phil Plait edited by Lee Billings.