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JWST Challenges Structure Formation, 45 Habitable Worlds & Interstellar Comet Chemistry
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
JWST has delivered its clearest evidence yet that a massive galaxy cluster existed 10.4 billion years ago — far too early for our models of dark matter and structure formation. Plus: 45 prioritised habitable exoplanets, interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS chemistry, AI validates 118 new worlds, and quantum physics on the ISS.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
A galaxy cluster that shouldn't exist yet does. JWST has produced its clearest evidence yet that a massive, well-formed cluster called XLSSC 122 was already in place ten point four billion years ago.
Alongside that, the search for potentially habitable worlds just got more disciplined. A Cornell-led team has cut through a catalog of over six thousand exoplanets and identified forty-five rocky worlds sitting inside their star's habitable zone.
Moving to something that arrived from outside our solar system entirely. Comet 3I/ATLAS has now been chemically mapped in detail, and the results are striking.
A separate JWST result adds another layer to how strange exoplanet atmospheres can get. The planet GJ504b, sometimes called the Pink Planet, has now been confirmed to have salt clouds in its atmosphere.
On the detection side, an AI pipeline called RAVEN built at the University of Warwick has validated a hundred and eighteen new exoplanets from TESS data, including thirty-one newly identified worlds. Some are ultra-short-period planets.
Aboard the International Space Station, NASA's Cold Atom Lab has completed an upgrade and is now producing Bose-Einstein condensates, a fifth state of matter, in microgravity. The conditions needed to form these quantum states are essentially impossible to sustain on Earth for extended periods.
Pulling back, the clearest thread across all of this is that our observational tools are now sharp enough to challenge long-standing assumptions. XLSSC 122 is the most direct test case.
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