The object, dubbed 3I/ATLAS, has caught the attention of Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, who has a long track record of making controversial predictions about previous interstellar objects being relics from an extraterrestrial civilization.

While there’s been a growing consensus among astronomers that the latest object is a comet, Loeb has continued to entertain the idea that it may have been sent to us by an intelligent species from outside of the solar system — and he’s far from backing down.

In a blog post over the weekend, Loeb pointed to observations by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, which showed a “glow of light, likely from a coma, ahead of the motion of 3I/ATLAS towards the Sun.”

We bring you an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at this iconic mission with Dr Linda Spilker, from her first job out of college to serving as the current Voyager Project Scientist.

Before it met the 30,000–50,000 kelvin wall at the edge of our Solar System, Voyager 1 took its final images.

More than 50 years after the last manned moon mission, the Apollo program is still making groundbreaking discoveries.

Lunar rock collected by Apollo 17 is revealing more about the Light Mantle, a distinctive bright streak across the moon’s surface. It’s believed to be the remains of an ancient landslide that happened in the distant past, but the exact cause is unknown.

Asteroid strikes, debris from a nearby mountain and seismic activity are all possibilities, but orbital photographs can only reveal so much. Scientists are now studying a rock core from Apollo 17 that was recently unsealed for the first time in 50 years, allowing new insights into the geology of the area.

Penn State astronomers are using data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, combined with theoretical models, to investigate a distant, radiation-bathed protoplanetary disk. The basic ingredients needed to build planets can survive even in regions flooded with intense ultraviolet radiation, acc

Sometimes, simple methods are more effective than complex bespoke technologies.

The sky at night. It inspires awe. It inspires thoughts of an existential nature: Who are we? Why are we here? And, perhaps most importantly of all, in which direction should I roll this big ball of shit? That is, if you’re a dung beetle.

“African ball-rolling dung beetles exploit the [Sun], the [Moon], and the celestial polarization pattern to move along straight paths, away from the intense competition at the dung pile,” wrote the study authors. “Even on clear moonless nights, many beetles still manage to orientate along straight paths. This led us to hypothesize that dung beetles exploit the starry sky for orientation, a feat that has, to our knowledge, never been demonstrated in an insect.”

By analyzing the data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), astronomers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and elsewhere have probed the properties of a massive and old galaxy designated SMILES-GS-191748. Results of the study, published August 7 on the pre-print server arXiv, shed more light on the nature of this galaxy.

SMILES-GS-191748 is a massive and quiescent galaxy at a redshift of 2.675. The galaxy most likely contains a very old stellar population that first formed when the universe was young.

Given that very little is known about the properties of SMILES-GS-191748, a team of astronomers led by University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Ian McConachie decided to inspect this galaxy using JWST and HST. They nicknamed SMILES-GS-191748 “Eridu,” after the ancient Bronze Age Sumerian city in Mesopotamia due to the galaxy’s suspected early formation time and apparent quiescent nature.