John Bird

A Dragonfly for Titan - Eos A new eight-rotor robotic probe will head to the solar system’s most Earth-like moon. Here’s what its team is doing to prepare.

A Dragonfly for Titan eos.org/features/a-d...

LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA detect most massive black hole merger to date Scientists have detected the merger of the most massive black holes ever observed with gravitational waves, using the US National Science Foundation-funded (NSF) LIGO Hanford and Livingston Observator...

LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA detect most massive black hole merger to date | EurekAlert! www.eurekalert.org/news-release...

NASA Says Mars Rover Discovered Potential Biosignature Last Year - NASA A sample collected by NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover from an ancient dry riverbed in Jezero Crater could preserve evidence of ancient microbial life. Taken

BREAKING NEWS: NASA has found a potential sign of past life on Mars. www.nasa.gov/news-release...

New approach uses observed local supervoid to give expansion of the universe an extra push and solve the Hubble tension phys.org/news/2024-11... via
@physorg_com

Perseid meteor shower 2025: When, where and how to see it The Perseid meteor shower is one of the best shooting star displays of the year.

Perseid meteor shower 2025: When, where and how to see it www.space.com/32868-persei...

New Zealand Air Force Mounts Dangerous Rescue in Antarctica

New Zealand Air Force Mounts Dangerous Rescue in Antarctica www.nytimes.com/2025/08/06/w...

Scientists may have solved a chemistry mystery about Jupiter's ocean moon Europa. www.space.com/astronomy/ju...

On July 9, 2025, Earth spun faster than usual, enough to make the day 1.6 milliseconds shorter than the standard 24 hours. Add a leap day every 4 years, except: Years divisible by 100, unless they’re also divisible by 400, giving 365.2425 days/year, which is very close to the real 365.2422.

Evidence for a sub-Jovian planet in the young TWA 7 disk  - Nature Using the James Webb Space Telescope's Mid-Infrared Instrument, a study reports evidence for a direct detection of a cold, sub-Jupiter-mass planet in the disk of the star TWA 7. 

For the first time ever, MIRI on JWST discovered an exoplanet by directl imaging. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A dedicated search for upward-going air showers at energies >0.1 EeV has been performed using the Fluorescence Detector of the Pierre Auger Observatory. arxiv.org/abs/2502.04513

Solar Orbiter’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager at 17.4 nanometres, viewing the Sun from a latitude 11.4° below the equator at a distance of 77 million km.

Model suggests impact of global warming on AMOC has led to increased flooding along US Northeast Coast phys.org/news/2025-05...

Two separate axion-hunting groups have turned their gaze to a new potential source: starburst galaxies physics.aps.org/articles/v18...

Scientists discover a new colour by laser stimulation of only M cones and not L or S, which in principle would send a colour signal to the brain that never occurs in natural vision. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The NSF Solar Telescope in Hawaii, the largest solar telescope globally, with the Visible Tunable Filtergraph (VTF), has taken its first images.The new VTF has an unparalleled combination of imaging, spectral, and polarimetric capabilities.

Thwaites Glacier, Antarctica covers an area about the size of Florida. It has the largest ocean front of any glacier in the world.

JWST’s Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) analyzed 263 galaxies from the early universe and revealed a significant asymmetry: roughly 66% spin clockwise, while only about 33% rotate counterclockwise. Does this mean the universe is in a spinning black hole? academic.oup.com/mnras/articl...

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) recognized 128 new moons in orbit around Saturn, discovered by astronomers from Taiwan, Canada, the United States and France. Saturn’s new grand total of 274 moons is almost twice as many as all the rest of the moons in our solar system combined

While NGC 1514 is an elliptical, but complex, planetary nebula at optical wavelengths, it was discovered to have a pair of infrared-bright, axisymmetric rings studied by JWST/MIRI. arxiv.org/abs/2502.21281

The Veil Nebula is the remnant of a star roughly 20 times as massive as the Sun that exploded 10,000 years ago, situated about 2400 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. This view combines three filters of Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3.

JWST MIRI imaging filter curves. MIRI uses 3 arsenic-doped silicon (Si:As) IBC arrays.

Wall of ice the size of Rhode Island heading toward penguin-packed island off Antarctica A wall of ice the size of Rhode Island is lumbering toward a remote island off Antarctica that’s home to millions of penguins and seals.

A trillion-ton megaberg heads toward South Georgia Island. Calving icebergs are happening more frequently as the climate warms and more fresh water flows into the ocean. apnews.com/article/gian...

The expansion rate of the universe remains elusive. Using Type Ia supernovae, the rate was measured to be H0 = 73.24±1.74 (km/s)/Mpc arxiv.org/pdf/1910.02978

JWST spectrum of K2-18b’s atmosphere. The detections of methane and carbon dioxide suggest the presence of an ocean underneath a hydrogen-rich atmosphere. There’s also a hint of DMS, which on Earth is tied to biological activity.

2024 was the first year in recorded history that Earth’s average temperature was higher than 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. climate.copernicus.eu/global-clima....

Great images! what wavelength are these? what telescope?🤔

Great images!
what wavelengths are these? what telescope?🤔

Great images! what wavelengths are these and what telescope?🤔

Chile's President Gabriel Boric has become the first leader in the Americas to visit the South Pole. www.bbc.com/news/article...

Sea surface temperatures. Note 2023 and 2024.