Corey S. Powell

The comet’s trajectory projected in Galactic coordinates and the all-sky X-ray map obtained with MAXI. The inset shows optical (DSS) and X-ray (eROSITA) images with the XRISM field of view overlaid. (Credit: JAXA/DSS/eROSITA/MAXI)

Also a challenging targeting process to keep 3I/ATLAS in the field of view! Impressive work from the XRISM team.

www.xrism.jaxa.jp/en/topics/ne...

X-ray image of the comet captured by the soft X-ray imaging telescope Xtend. The image is created from quick-look processed data. The Xtend field of view covers a region of about 3 million km2, revealing a faint emission structure extending about 400,000 km around the comet. (Credit: JAXA)

The XRISM satellite has detected the x-ray glow of Comet 3I/ATLAS. This is the first time anyone has managed to obseve x-ray emission from an interstellar comet!

(FYI: X-rays result from the comet interacting with the solar wind. No spaceships required.) 🔭🧪

www.xrism.jaxa.jp/en/topics/ne...

Maybe the Netflix execs think The Usual Suspects was a spinoff

It may take a little longer than we'd hoped, however

One Hundred Hundred Years of Solitude

Once a star like the Sun runs out of hydrogen, it cools down and expands to become red giant. In the Sun’s case this will happen in about five billion years and scientists think this expansion will cause the destruction of Mercury, Venus and perhaps Earth, but lack evidence on how or whether this will definitely happen.

We knew it was going to be bad, but now we know how bad:

A study of half a million stars shows that their planets rapidly vanish as the stars grow old and bloated. The planets may get shredded, evaporated, or (most likely) dragged by tides into a fiery death. 🧪🔭

warwick.ac.uk/news/pressre...

Vanity Fair parted ways with Olivia Nuzzi. Parted in a way that was full of parting, that embodied the partest part of parting. If parting were a color, it would be this color: part. I wonder, she thought, if this is how our Creator sees us when we part from this world.

Image of the newly discovered spiral galaxy Alaknanda (inset) as observed in the shorter wavelength JWST bands. Several bright galaxies from the foreground Abell 2744 cluster are also seen. Credit: NASA/ESA/CSA, I. Labbe/R. Bezanson/Alyssa Pagan (STScI), Rashi Jain/Yogesh Wadadekar (NCRA-TIFR)

Spiral galaxies like our own are rare in the early universe, because they require quiet, stable conditions.

But the discovery of "Alaknanda," a tidy spiral from 12.3 billion years ago, shows that there were pockets of calm even in the era of cosmic chaos. 🧪🔭

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/202...

Did you know the US Department of Defense posted an $850 billion loss in 2025?

Top left: the on-sky distribution of H i galaxies (squares), SDSS and DESI optical galaxies (circles and lines, depending on the availability of optical PA measurements), and the cosmic filament. The MIGHTEE COSMOS footprint is shown in a block. Other panels show the DESI multiband cutout image and the H i moment-1 map of each H i-selected galaxy. The size of the images and moment maps is fixed to 80 arcsec across each panel. The dashed ellipse in each DESI image panel shows the ellipticity and the size (tripled for visual purposes) of the optical counterpart of each H i galaxy.

The universe is full of giant structures that we cannot see directly. In this case, researchers traced the filament by measuring the location & motion of hydrogen-rich galaxies.

It took a lot of sleuthing to find the hidden scaffolding of the universe. 🧪🔭

academic.oup.com/mnras/articl...

A figure illustrating the rotation of neutral hydrogen (right) in galaxies residing in an extended filament (middle), where the galaxies exhibit a coherent bulk rotational motion tracing the large-scale cosmic web (left). Credit: Lyla Jung

Astronomers have discovered one of the largest spinning structures in the known universe.

This "cosmic filament" is 50 million light years long & contains 100s of galaxies that seem to be rotating in alignment. It's part of an even greater web linking the cosmos. 🧪🔭

www.ox.ac.uk/news/2025-12...

I'm pretty sure those illustrations are just pulled from textbook graphics. I haven't heard anyone claim that it's all D-ribose.

When you're dealing with a precious sample of an asteroid, you want to make use of every bit. Here you can see scientists harvesting a miniature chunk of Bennu for analysis. The piece they are moving is just 30 microns (1/1000th of an inch) wide! 🧪🔭

www.nasa.gov/missions/osi...

A team of Japanese and US scientists have discovered the bio-essential sugars ribose and glucose in samples of asteroid Bennu that were collected by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission. This finding builds on the earlier discovery of nucleobases (the genetic components of DNA and RNA), phosphate, and amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) in the Bennu samples, showing that the molecular ingredients of life could have been delivered to early Earth by meteorites.

Samples of Bennu, a primitive asteroid orbiting near Earth, contain some surprising ingredients: natural sugars, gummy polymers, and specks of stardust that are even older than our solar system.

There's a lot of complex chemistry brewing in space! 🧪🔭

www.nasa.gov/missions/osi...

Planetary hazes, such as the one that surrounds Saturn’s moon Titan and the one that was likely present in Early Earth’s atmosphere, are common in our solar system and likely in exoplanetary atmospheres. Planetary haze can affect the radiative balance of the atmosphere and may act as a source of prebiotic molecules. However, the mechanisms driving organic haze formation in diverse atmospheric compositions are unknown. We use our CIMS to investigate the gas-phase chemistry leading to organic aerosol formation in Early Earth analog atmospheres. We are also using the CIMS and an Aerosol Mass Spectrometer (AMS) to study sulfur photochemistry relevant to Early Earth, Venus, and exoplanetary hazes.

The good news: Experiments indicate that earthlike planets naturally form a whole chemistry set of organic molecules, including ones once regarded as unique to living cells.

More evidence that the chemical starting point for life is common in the universe. 🧪

sites.google.com/view/brownel...

Alien planet’s atmosphere bears chemical hints of life, astronomers claim A study suggests a distant world has gases linked on Earth to algae, but others urge caution before invoking alien slime

The bad news: Earlier this year, eager news stories hyped the discovery of "chemical hints of life" on another planet. But that chemical (DMS) forms naturally, without life, in the new experiments. 🧪🔭

www.science.org/content/arti...

An artist’s interpretation of young Earth, with haze built up in the atmosphere. (Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Francis Reddy)

Early Earth may have rained down naturally produced sulfur-containing biomolecules, such as the amino acid cysteine.

It's an obscure-sounding result with big implications for the origin of life on Earth (and maybe many other planets). 🧪🔭

www.colorado.edu/today/2025/1...

It's a fine line between November Rain and December snow.

Artist’s concept of the red planet Mars with rings. Image via Kevin Gill

In the distant past, Mars might have looked like this.

(Illustration by Kevin Gill.) 🧪🔭

earthsky.org/space/did-an...

This graphic traces Curiosity’s path to the Jura outcrop on Vera Rubin Ridge. Color-enhanced images from the rover show the layered rocks interpreted as evidence of tidal rhythmites, with similar layers in an Earth setting shown for comparison. Credit: Ranjan Sarkar, Priyabrata Das, Suniti Karunatillake

NASA's Curiosity Rover found evidence of tides in the sediments of an ancient lake. Today's Martian moons aren't big enough to to do that.

Mars may once have had a much larger moon, which then shattered (perhaps repeatedly), creating the smaller moons of today. 🧪🔭

agu.confex.com/agu/agu25/me...

Deimos is seen by the Hope probe with Mars in the background. Credit: Emirates Mars Mission

More evidence that Mars has a colorful history. In the past, the Red Planet probably had rings at certain times, and a larger moon (or moons) at others.

In the future, Mars will probably have rings again. 🧪🔭

eos.org/articles/sed...

The neutrinos don't hurt a bit

Beautifully said

Construction workers created two colossal caverns, each more than 500 feet long and about seven stories tall, for the gigantic particle detector modules of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, hosted by Fermilab. A third cavern will house utilities for the operation of the detector. Photo: Matthew Kapust, Sanford Underground Research Facility

The upcoming LBNF-DUNE experiment will go even further, studying neutrinos to search for the answer to one of the most fundamental questions in science: Where did all the matter in our universe come from? (In other words: Why is there something rather than nothing?) 🧪🔭

aeon.co/essays/going...

JUNO's central detector (at the top of the picture) is filled with scintillation fluid and surrounded by photomultiplier tubes

The JUNO detector seen from outside (Image/©: Yuexiang Liu/JUNO Collaboration)

China's huge JUNO neutrino detector turned on three months ago, and has already achieved new levels of sensitivity in studying these mysterious particles.

The detector weighs 20,000 tons & contains 45,000 sensors watching for rare neutrino interactions. 🧪🔭

www.prisma.uni-mainz.de/outreach/pre...

I'd vaguely assumed it was a loose reference to quadraphonic sound. But even after going down the rabbit hole, I still don't know the real answer.

too soon

New set of outer planet portraits! Images by JWST, processing by Andrea Luck. 🧪🔭

Artist's illustration of the OSIRIS-APEX spacecraft at asteroid Apophis. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

OSIRIS-APEX was marked for termination by the current administration, despite being a low-cost add-on to an existing mission. Congress has saved it for now, though with its staff in limbo. 🧪🔭

arstechnica.com/space/2025/1...

On the left, this image shows SamCam, provided by the U of A to track the spacecraft’s sample head during its primary mission. The Y-shaped sample return capsule release mechanism is visible in the center in its deployed position. The OSIRIS-REx Laser Altimeter, provided by the Canadian Space Agency to create detailed 3D topographical maps of Bennu, is behind the release mechanism. To the right, one of the spacecraft's two navigation cameras, or NavCams, is visible.

NASA's OSIRIS-APEX just flew past Earth, making a course adjustment to asteroid Apophis in 2029. Apophis will come very close to us that year & could hit in the future.

OSIRIS-APEX will tell us a lot about Apophis...assuming the mission survives budget cuts. 🔭🧪

news.arizona.edu/news/osiris-...