Space News & Blog Articles

Fomalhaut is one of the brightest stars in the night sky and is about 25 light-years away, making it a galaxy amenable to detailed observations. It's also a young star, only about 440 million years old. At that age, stars like Fomalhaut are surrounded by active debris disks made of rock and dust from collisions between planetesimals. Exoplanets form in these disks, and one of the hot topics in exoplanet science concerns how planets form in these circumstellar disks.

Circumstellar discs are believed to be key components in planetary formation. However, we have very little actual evidence of planets growing in the “rings” that surround young stars. So planet formation theorists were ecstatic to learn that two new papers in Astrophysical Journal Letters describe a planet that is actively forming in the gap it most likely created in the ring system of a young, Sun-like star.

The greatest challenge facing astrobiologists is that there is only one planet known to us that has life. Of all the bodies of the Solar System, only Earth has a dense atmosphere, liquid water on its surface, and the organic chemistry that supports life. However, these conditions did not exist billions of years ago when Earth was still young. While the nebula from which the planets formed was rich in volatile elements, the high temperatures in the inner Solar System largely prevented them from condensing, leaving them mostly in a gaseous state.

The detection of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS in July produced quite the stir in the scientific community. This comet is the third interstellar object (ISO) to pass through the Solar System, the previous two being 1I/'Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov, which arrived in 2017 and 2019, respectively. Like its predecessors, the arrival of 3I/ATLAS highlighted just how common these objects are and inspired mission concepts for studying them up close. The latest comes from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), where a team has developed a mission study for a spacecraft that could perform a flyby with 3I/ATLAS.