Astronomy and Planetary Science Thread

[Michel Van]

It is a bit late for an April Fools joke is it not Michel Van?

Could be...
but from time to time the question pop up

And Now to Mercury

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UROSUvQCQ48&pp=ygUMYW50b24gcGV0cm92

 

[Justo Miranda]

The collision of two supermassive blackholes will just simply create a new much bigger supermassive blackhole.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92cwKCU8Z5c

 

[Flyaway]

Why We Should Be Wary Of The Putative K2-18b Extrasolar Biosignature

Why We Should Be Wary Of The Putative K2-18b Extrasolar Biosignature

The claimed detection of a biosignature on a far-flung exoplanet raises doubts about the remote search for extraterrestrial life.

www.forbes.com

 

[NMaude]

Some more interesting news from Fraser Cain:

Lucy’s close up images of another asteroid, why Mars has a lopsided magnetic field, Chinese engineers rescue a pair of satellites with gravitational slingshots, and new hints about where Mars’s carbon dioxide atmosphere went. In our longer Space Bites+ on Patreon, a proposed human mission to both Mars and the asteroid Ceres.

00:00 Intro
00:24 LUCY flyby of asteroid Donaldjohanson
https://www.universetoday.com/article...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...up-of-a-weirdly-shaped-asteroid&v=jQNFiTQORvM
02:01 Mars' magnetic field
https://www.universetoday.com/article...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...ts-of-a-lopsided-magnetic-field&v=jQNFiTQORvM
03:55 Where did Mars' atmosphere go?
https://www.universetoday.com/article...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...riosity-found-where-it-all-went&v=jQNFiTQORvM
05:29 China's satellite rescue
https://www.universetoday.com/article...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...o-rescue-a-pair-of-satellites-1&v=jQNFiTQORvM
07:01 Vote results / @frasercain https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCogrSQkBJn1KF0N9I4oM7eQ/community/community
07:42 Bacteria mimicking multicellular life
https://www.universetoday.com/article...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...t-can-mimic-multi-cellular-life&v=jQNFiTQORvM
09:29 Planet orbiting perpendicular to its stars
https://www.universetoday.com/article...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...ndicular-orbit-around-two-stars&v=jQNFiTQORvM
11:10 Moon ejecta hitting Earth
https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.15502https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...ttps://arxiv.org/abs/2504.15502&v=jQNFiTQORvM
12:42 Cool images
https://www.universetoday.com/article...
https://www.universetoday.com/article...
https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Im...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...widest_high-res_view_of_the_Sun&v=jQNFiTQORvM
15:10 Guide to space
15:56 Space Bites+
16:19 Telescope updates

Host: Fraser Cain
Producer: Anton Pozdnyakov
Editing: Artem Pozdnyakov

 

[Flyaway]

NASA’s Deep Space Network Starts New Dish, Marks 60 Years in Australia

NASA’s Deep Space Network Starts New Dish, Marks 60 Years in Australia

Canberra joined the global network in 1965 and operates four radio antennas. Now, preparations have begun on its fifth as NASA works to increase the network’s capacity.

www.jpl.nasa.gov

 

[UpForce]

In this episode, Dr. Nikku Madhusudhan of the University of Cambridge discusses a major breakthrough in the search for life beyond Earth. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, his team has detected the chemical fingerprints of dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and dimethyl disulfide (DMDS) in the atmosphere of K2-18 b. These compounds, which on Earth are associated mostly with biological activity, suggest that this distant potential Hycean world may be one of the most promising candidates for life outside our solar system. The findings open a new chapter in the study of habitable exoplanets and the search for extraterrestrial biology.

A very inspiring development, one would expect this being headline news all over. Godier, fortunately, proved to be an able interviewer and had good rapport with Madhusudhan. Too bad our political and business leaders (not to mention authoritarians) in their navel gazing (if not indeed a deeper exploration of their own lower intestines) have gotten us all in such a state that a discovery of a very likely biosphere in another star system is but a ripple in our new stream.

It was good to hear about Madhusudhan's meticulous and multi-pronged blind heuristic in getting to a result, especially as the statistical 3σ finding is strongly supported by both preceding and remaining future avenues of research. Beyond this, his qualitative analysis was very convincing. I've not listened to nearly everything Godier has put out but I know he has had a tentative notion of microbial life being quite common in the universe and thus his excitement for a promising candidate so close by was no surprise. Truly interesting.

 

[NMaude]

Some major new discoveries concerning the origins of multi-cellular life on Earth, from Anton Petrov:

Hello and welcome! My name is Anton and in this video, we will talk about the origins of multicellular life on Earth
Links:
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002638&v=ujbjQnb3spI
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/do...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev....org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2023.2767&v=ujbjQnb3spI
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-ph...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...-started-complex-life-20240724/&v=ujbjQnb3spI
Previous videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_MkchWsfao
• Mind-blowing Experiment Evolved Multi...

• Why Do Loners Exist? Slime Mold Provi...

• 8% of Human DNA Is Ancient Viruses An...

• Simple Bacteria Can Form Complex Supe... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwMrO9xGdX8
#biology #originoflife #earth

0:00 Origins of multicellular life
0:45 Eukaryotes vs prokaryotes
2:10 History of multicellular morphology
2:50 Why is there no multicellular bacteria?
3:45 Study that provides first hints - snowball Earth
7:00 Why some structures become permanent - viruses
8:20 Bacteria that's ALWAYS multicellular
10:35 Intriguing experiments and discoveries
12:00 Conclusions and what this means

 

[publiusr]

Space models

Exploring the Universe Through Sight, Touch, and Sound - NASA Science

For the first time in history, we can explore the universe through a rich blend of senses—seeing, touching, and hearing astronomical data—in ways that deepen

science.nasa.gov

Tactile:: Mini Star Kits

I was hoping it would be more like…this

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805353029991.html?gatewayAdapt=isr2usa4itemAdapt&_randl_shipto=US

Sim

We took a guided tour of the solar system in Elite Dangerous, and now you can too (interview)

Learn about the solar system from a pair of real space museum curators in sci-fi game Elite Dangerous, as Abbie MacKinnon and Laura Joy Pieters of the London Science Museum give a guided tour of our home system.

www.space.com

 

[NMaude]

From the "Space Race" channel:

NASA has spent decades trying to unlock the secrets of asteroids

 

[NMaude]

From GEO GIRL:

Check out the part 1 Death Valley video about the geologic history of the region: • Geology of Death Valley- Hottest, Dry... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OoG9IiKCoQ
Check out the video about Clay Minerals on Mars That May Indicate Past Water & Life: • Clay Minerals on Mars Indicate Past W... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vBhk92CApc

References & Resources:
Geology Underfoot - Death Valley book: https://store.geosociety.org/products...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...dv2?_pos=1&_sid=e672074e8&_ss=r&v=1yDHkInoxxA
Roadside Geology – Southern California book: https://store.geosociety.org/products...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...sca?_pos=1&_sid=8b5100f62&_ss=r&v=1yDHkInoxxA
Geology Underfoot – Southern California book: https://store.geosociety.org/products...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...ca2?_pos=1&_sid=e586b4197&_ss=r&v=1yDHkInoxxA
Merino et al., 2019 (extremophiles article): https://doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2019.00780https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...oi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2019.00780&v=1yDHkInoxxA
Douglas et al., 2008: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2007...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...rg/10.1016/j.icarus.2007.08.019&v=1yDHkInoxxA
Douglas & Yang, 2002: https://doi.org/10.1130/0091-7613(200...
https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...02)030%3C1075:MBIEPO%3E2.0.CO;2&v=1yDHkInoxxA

0:00 Recap
0:11 Life in Death Valley?
0:45 Implications for Aliens!
1:36 Extreme conditions in Death Valley!
2:07 Using minerals as indicators for water!
3:13 Using minerals as indicators for life!
4:28 Other important minerals
4:44 Tip for Exploring Death Valley!
5:10 Outtakes

 

[Flyaway]

Our galactic neighbor Andromeda has a bunch of satellite galaxies — and they're weirdly pointing at us

Our neighboring Andromeda Galaxy (Messier 31, or M31) appears to sport a lopsided arrangement of satellite galaxies that defy scientific models, stumping astronomers who are also trying to figure out why so many of this galaxy's family members point in our direction. All but one of M31's brightest 37 satellites are on the side of the Andromeda spiral that faces our Milky Way galaxy – the odd one out being Messier 110, which is easily visible in amateur images of the Andromeda Galaxy.

…

New simulations by Kanehisa, along with his Potsdam colleagues Marcel Pawlowski and Noam Libeskind, show that, according to cosmology's standard model, the odds of having such a lopsided arrangement are less than 0.3%. And yet, the closest galaxy to us is beating those odds. So when is a coincidence just a coincidence, and when does it open a window into a deeper mystery?

…

Accurate data regarding the motion of the dwarf galaxies is known for only four of M31's satellites (five if IC 10 is counted, which is a contested member of the M31 system), which means that simulations can be a little rough. However, astronomers are aiming to determine the motions for at least a dozen of M31's dwarfs to high precision within another year or two with the release of the next dataset from the Gaia astrometric mission.

"Once we have a more substantial sample of M31 dwarfs with proper motions, we should be better positioned to study the time evolution of the observed asymmetry," said Kanehisa. In other words, we would be able to better understand for how long this lopsided alignment can stay in place.

Our galactic neighbor Andromeda has a bunch of satellite galaxies — and they're weirdly pointing at us

Cosmological simulations say that such an alignment should not happen, with a probability of less than 0.3%.

www.space.com

Related paper:

Andromeda’s asymmetric satellite system as a challenge to cold dark matter cosmology - Nature Astronomy

The Andromeda galaxy is surrounded by a highly lopsided system of dwarf galaxies. Simulations show that the observed distribution is highly unexpected in the current cosmological model, raising questions about the viability of the cosmological paradigm.

www.nature.com

 

[NMaude]

Anton Petrov has a video about a nearby white-dwarf that will undergo a Type-Ia supernova:

Hello and welcome! My name is Anton and in this video, we will talk about a confirmed future supernova when two white dwarfs collide
Links:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s4155...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...com/articles/s41550-025-02528-4&v=Dn7C9NYrJ8s
https://www.news.pitt.edu/supernovae#supernova
#whitedwarf #milkyway

0:00 White dwarf progenitor near us
0:45 What are these Type 1A explosions?
2:55 Distance candle in cosmology and some issues
4:00 Actual explosion and how it happens
4:50 Why does this happen?
5:30 New study and a binary that will explode
7:00 Why this is a bit of an issue
8:20 When will it explode?
9:10 Conclusions

 

[NMaude]

The Lucy mission has revealed a major surprise concerning the Solar System's asteroids, from Anton Petrov:

Hello and welcome! My name is Anton and in this video, we will talk about NASA's Lucy mission and a discovery about contact binary asteroids
Links:
https://science.nasa.gov/image-articl...
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev....org/article/10.3847/PSJ/ac8b72&v=90aRIukIsjo
https://www.nature.com/articles/s4158...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...com/articles/s41586-024-07378-0&v=90aRIukIsjo
Other videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odQyT90zfnQ
• NASA's Lucy Mission Just Made a Bizar...

• Unexpected Discoveries From the Outsk... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAgt5xuX1uk

#contactbinary #asteroid #lucy

0:00 NASA's Lucy mission
1:40 Asteroid it just visited - Donald Johanson
2:55 Autonomous mission
4:00 Surprising discoveries that nobody expected
5:40 Contact binaries and what they are
7:00 How sun affects these objects - YORP
9:10 This is a cycle
9:40 Additional surprises
11:20 What's next?

 

[Flyaway]

One of the largest structures in the sky, as seen from our perspective, has only just been discovered. It’s an enormous cloud of molecular hydrogen gas that may one day condense down into stars. However, because its light is only detectable in a rarely studied part of the spectrum, all this gas has not been seen until now.

…

What Eos lacks in density, it more than makes up for in size. It’s up to 80 light-years across, and contains between 2,000 and 8,500 solar masses, depending on the methods used to estimate it, of which just 44 solar masses is dust. At 300 light-years away, at the edge of the local bubble, it’s far closer than any star-forming region and, by galactic standards, this is our neighborhood. For example, that makes it closer than such famous stars as Betelgeuse or Antares. Its crescent shape takes up 25 degrees of the sky, exceeded only by the Milky Way in angular dimensions among structures we have detected.

One Of The Largest Single Structures In The Sky Discovered Surprisingly Close To Us

At just 300 light-years away, it’s one of the closest large gas clouds ever detected near Earth, and takes up as much sky as a typical constellation.

www.iflscience.com

Related paper:

A nearby dark molecular cloud in the Local Bubble revealed via H2 fluorescence - Nature Astronomy

Eos is a newly discovered molecular cloud sitting just 94 pc from the Sun. It was detected through the far-UV emission of its molecular hydrogen, having been missed in conventional molecular gas surveys due to a low abundance of common gas tracers.

www.nature.com

 

[FighterJock]

An interesting discovery Flyaway.

 

[Flyaway]

I’m not sure turning this debate into a political issue as this opinion piece appears to do really helps anyone. It certainly muddies the waters by conflating two issues that really should be separate into one. I’ve seen plenty of articles criticising this announcement and its subsequent reporting, heck I’ve posted a few on here, and none of them have felt the need to drag a completely separate issue, that of the NASA budget into it.

The pursuit of truths: A letter on the boy who cried aliens (op-ed)

When people believe that we have found life on other planets when we have not, we've lost more than public trust — we've lost our own direction.

www.space.com

 

[UpForce]

A short, quirky and dare I say feel-good video about aurorae. People (think they) hear sounds when observing them, at least occasionally. This, generally, wasn't believed to be possible but now there's a hypothesis at least. The description of the supposed effect is somewhat fuzzy in the video. I'm vaguely aware of research about energetic particles associated with northern lights changing the strength of the polar vortex, measurable down to (at least seasonal average) surface temperatures but this is obviously thought to be something more immediate and direct.

View: https://youtu.be/tnATQJJIsK4?si=31VUKHS81Cn2DLsd

 

[NMaude]

Here's an update on NASA's future Titan lander mission:

Last Video: Why NASA is Obsessed With Asteroids
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Kw2lT2K-NI&t=1s
• Why NASA is Obsessed With Asteroids

The Space Race is dedicated to the exploration of outer space and humans' mission to explore the universe. We’ll provide news and updates from everything in space, including the SpaceX and NASA mission to colonize Mars and the Moon. We’ll focus on news and updates from SpaceX, NASA, Starlink, Blue Origin, The James Webb Space Telescope and more. If you’re interested in space exploration, Mars colonization, and everything to do with space travel and the space race... you’ve come to the right channel! We love space and hope to inspire others to learn more!

Anton Petrov has put out a video concerning the possible of the massive power outage affecting power-grids throughout the Iberian peninsula:

Hello and welcome! My name is Anton and in this video, we will talk about the Spain/Portugal blackout of 2025 and whether it was the so-called "induced atmospheric vibration"
Links:
https://theconversation.com/did-induc...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...-explains-the-phenomenon-255497&v=3nVanTk3YBw
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Eu...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...wiki/2025_European_power_outage&v=3nVanTk3YBw
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contine...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...inental_Europe_Synchronous_Area&v=3nVanTk3YBw
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev..._of_major_power_outages#Largest&v=3nVanTk3YBw
https://www.ren.pt/pt-pt/media/notici...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...e-porto-e-na-regiao-de-santarem&v=3nVanTk3YBw
https://www.drax.com/opinion/britains...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...on/britains-blackout/#chapter-1&v=3nVanTk3YBw
https://murciatoday.com/spain_is_heat...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...t_april_24_28_1000205994-a.html&v=3nVanTk3YBw
#blackout #spain #inducedatmosphericvibrationhttps://www.youtube.com/hashtag/inducedatmosphericvibration

0:00 Power outage in Spain/Portugal
1:30 Misinformation and what we know
2:40 Did renewables cause this?
3:25 Weather is responsible for most blackouts
4:05 European grid is too complex
5:10 Cyberattack?
5:35 Fire?
5:50 Atmospheric phenomenon and natural vibrations
8:00 So could this be the cause?
8:45 Solutions and conclusions

 

[NMaude]

From PBS Space Time (In 2018) concerning the solar-system's habitable zone:

The Sun is slowly burning through its fuel. Hydrogen is fused into helium in the Sun’s core, producing energy that keeps it shining, and keeping the Earth warm and hospitable to life. But that fuel WILL run out, after which the Sun will swell into a red giant and flash-fry the Earth. But in fact that frying – well, slow-roasting – will begin much earlier. See, the Sun is getting brighter even now. This has complex, and for the most part terrible implications for life. The end of the world will come sooner than you think.

 

[Flyaway]

Gaia spots odd family of stars desperate to leave home

The European Space Agency’s Gaia mission has spotted an unusual family of stars all strangely eager to leave home – a family we couldn’t have discovered without the star-surveying spacecraft, and one unlike all others we have spotted to date.

Gaia spots odd family of stars desperate to leave home

www.esa.int

Related paper:

Radware Bot Manager Captcha

 

[Flyaway]

It seems a team are claiming to have found a planet nine, but not Mike Brown’s planet nine but another planet nine by studying historical data. Interestingly if this planet nine exists it would mean the other planet nine didn’t exist as their orbits would be non-compatible to both existing in the solar system. By the sounds of it they must have used a custom built algorithm to search through all this data initially. That’s of course if it isn’t just a fault in the data.

Now, in a paper posted last week on the arXiv preprint server, a team of astronomers from Taiwan, Japan, and Australia claims it has found hints of the so-called Planet Nine in archival images of the night sky. Some experts are skeptical that the signal, just a single pair of faint dots, will survive scrutiny and follow-up observations. But if it does, the object lies on an orbit far outside the original Planet Nine prediction—rendering it an entirely different planet.

This mismatch “doesn’t mean it’s not there, but it means it’s not Planet Nine,” says Mike Brown, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology who, along with his colleague Konstantin Batygin, came up with the Planet Nine proposal nearly a decade ago. “I don’t think this planet would have any of the effects on the Solar System that we think we’re seeing.”

…

Phan and Goto used sky surveys from two infrared space telescopes launched 23 years apart: the Infrared Astronomy Satellite (IRAS), a NASA-Netherlands-U.K. satellite launched in 1983; and AKARI, a Japanese satellite launched in 2006. Because of Planet Nine’s long orbit, the researchers hypothesized that the time gap between the two data sets would be enough to see the potential planet move incrementally across the night sky.

From an initial catalog of about 2 million objects within the IRAS and AKARI data sets, the researchers whittled down to pairs of dots of light whose spacing could be explained by a moving planet with a Planet Nine–like mass and distance. Then, they removed known sources such as stars, sources that didn’t move over time, and sources with too much noise, such as those near the bright galactic center. When 13 pairs remained, they checked each by eye. Only one candidate pair survived the scrutiny. The two dots had matching colors and brightnesses—a sign they were the same object.

…

However, when Brown, who was not involved in the work, calculated the candidate signal’s orbit himself, he found that the planet would have an orbit tilted roughly 120° from the plane of the Solar System: a tilt so extreme that the planet would orbit the Sun in the opposite direction than the other planets. Brown’s models predict that to explain the clustering of distant Kuiper belt objects, Planet Nine needs an orbit tilted only about 15° to 20° from the plane of the Solar System.

If Phan and Goto’s signal really is a far-off planet, its existence would ironically disprove the original Planet Nine, as the two planets could not coexist without making each other’s orbits unstable, Brown adds. “It’s kind of fun that a paper that purports to find a candidate for Planet Nine is really finding something that would basically say that we were wrong the entire time.”

But that’s only if the faint infrared clue holds up after future observations. For one, Bernstein says, it’s difficult to confirm that only two tiny pinpricks of light at such far distances from Earth are anything other than noise—or unrelated impostor objects such as asteroids, stars, or galaxies.

…

Later this year, though, more data will flood in as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory comes online. From its perch in Chile’s Atacama Desert, Rubin will scan the southern sky for 10 years in unprecedented detail—and Brown and Batygin think if Planet Nine is real, Rubin has a good chance of finding it. But whether the telescope spots Goto and Phan’s source or another planet instead, Batygin says he would still cheer on the discovery: “I would be the first person to say, ‘That is not Planet Nine—that is Planet 8.5.’”

https://www.science.org/content/article/astronomers-searching-planet-nine-find-possible-hints-different-planet

 

[NMaude]

Dr. Becky has a new video out concerning K2-18b and the possible detection of life there using DMS signatures:

The planet K2-18b has been hitting the headlines again this month with the claim of a tentative detection of something known as dimethyl sulphide (DMS) in its atmosphere from this paper by Madhusudhan et al. (2025). DMS is a molecule that is only produced by microbial life here on Earth, but NO we have not detected alien life in this planet’s atmosphere. The detection itself of DMS is tentative, and the molecule itself, doesn’t necessarily mean life. This whole story is quite literally the definition of “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. Now if you’re thinking, wait haven’t I heard this before? Technically, yes, the same research group put out this paper in 2023 claiming an even more tentative detection of DMS, but the data they had from the James Webb Space Telescope, JWST, using NIRSpec wasn’t good enough to make a strong claim. So now they’ve got different data from MIRI on JWST, and now they’re claiming they have stronger evidence for DMS. But if you’ve been following me for a while you know that all of this hype around K2-18b has come with a lot of scientific debate with other research papers claiming there’s no evidence for DMS at all. And this past week or so since this research dropped has been no different, with this paper from Taylor (2025) also fitting to the new JWST MIRI data and claiming there’s no evidence for DMS at all. This is science in action and it is incredibly exciting to get to live through all of this debate! So let’s have a deep dive into this…

My previous video on the first claim of DMS in K2-18b's atmosphere with JWST (the NIRSpec data from Madhusdudhan et al. (2023) - • Did JWST find a MARKER OF LIFE in an ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F360SGAlI8Y
My previous video on the counter-arguments against the DMS claim in the JWST NIRSpec data - • K2-18b: did JWST really find evidence... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0lGz73rluo
My previous video interviewing Jake Taylor about the discovery of photochemistry in a planet's atmosphere with JWST - • JWST discovered PHOTOCHEMISTRY in an ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eW38rqLZMPg

Madhusudhan et al. (2025; K2-18b MIRI data claiming DMS) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.12267
Taylor et al. (2025; reanalysis of same K2-18b MIRI data) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.15916
Schimdt et al. (2025; reanalysis of K2-18b NIRSpec data) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.18477
Madhusudhan et al. (2023; K2-18b NIRSpec data claiming DMS) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.05566.pdf
Shorttle et al. (2024; K2-18b hydrogen atmosphere with magma ocean) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.05864
Wogan et al. (2024; K2-18b is mini-Neptune) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.11082
Hu et al. (2021; prediction of the molecules present in a hycean world atmosphere) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2108.04745.pdf
Benneke et al. (2019; water vapour in K2-18b's atmosphere) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.04642.pdf
Cloutier et al. (2019; K2-18b properties) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.04731
Foreman-Mackey et al. (2015; K2-18b discovered in K2 data) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.04715
Seager et al. (2013; biosignatures in hydrogen atmospheres) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1309.6016.pdf
JWST proposal 2722 - https://www.stsci.edu/jwst/phase2-pub...
JWST proposal 2372 - https://www.stsci.edu/jwst/phase2-pub...

00:00 Introduction
04:29 The planet K2-18b: what we already know about it
13:16 Madhusudhan et al. (2025)’s claims of evidence of DMS
15:40 How strong their evidence is for their claimed detection of DMS
18:51 The counter-arguments against the detection
28:26 Bloopers

 

[NMaude]

A PBS Space Time video from a year ago concerning the possibility of singularities NOT existing:

It's not too often that a giant of physics threatens to overturn an idea held to be self-evident by generations of physicists. Well, that may be the fate of the famous Penrose Singularity Theorem if we're to believe a recent paper by Roy Kerr. Long story short, the terrible singularity at the heart of the black hole may be no more.

Roy Kerr Paper: Do Black Holes have Singularities?
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.00841.pdf

 

[FighterJock]

I always had thought that Singularities were the end product of supergiant stars colapsing into black holes and being crushed out of existence into the afore mentioned Singularity, now it appears that we have been proven wrong by Roy Kerr (his most famous discovery was that Black Holes spin).

 

[Flyaway]

Where Does Gold Come From? NASA Data Has Clues

Where Does Gold Come From? NASA Data Has Clues - NASA Science

Since the big bang, the early universe had hydrogen, helium, and a scant amount of lithium. Later, some heavier elements, including iron, were forged in

science.nasa.gov

Related paper:

Radware Bot Manager Captcha

 

[NMaude]

It would appear that large spiral galaxies have formed earlier in the universe than predicted, from Anton Petrov:

Hello and welcome! My name is Anton and in this video, we will talk about the discovery of a massive spiral galaxy called Big Wheel
Links:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s4155...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...com/articles/s41550-025-02500-2&v=MraVhQI2o_s
https://theconversation.com/youve-hea...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...eres-why-its-significant-252170&v=MraVhQI2o_s
https://academic.oup.com/mnras/articl...https://www.youtube.com/redirect?ev...nras/article/527/3/8941/7445010&v=MraVhQI2o_s
#jwst #galaxy #cosmology

0:00 JWST discovers another giant galaxy that's hard to explain
1:45 Super spiral galaxies
2:40 Why this is a problem
3:30 Other similar discoveries from before
5:35 Why galaxies appear spirals and how spirals form
7:30 Conclusions and what this means