Project
NASA space telescope launched in 2018 that surveys bright nearby stars for transiting exoplanets by monitoring dips in stellar brightness.
Amateur astronomer Pavel Rabtsevich searched TESS data for more than 126,000 stars with AI agents and flagged TIC 4206066 as a super-Earth candidate. Three other searches had also picked up the signal, and thruster firings may explain some of the dips, so the planet is unconfirmed.
Reality
Astronomers re-reading 1999 Hubble spectra of white dwarf HS 0209+0832 found unusually high niobium that may trace matter the star shed as it died. The team proposes that some of that debris built a gas giant hinted at in TESS data, though the planet remains a candidate.
Reality
Warwick-led astronomers tie niobium at over 1,000 times solar levels in a white dwarf to a candidate planet made from what the star shed as it died. If it holds up, it shows planets can still form after a star has died.
Perspective Coverage
6 publishersReality
Southampton's Black Hole Hunters project wants volunteers to vet AI-screened telescope data for black holes beyond the roughly 70 whose locations are known. A volunteer's flag picks a target for telescope follow-up, and the team counts a discovery only once it detects gravitational self-lensing.
Reality
Planets inherit their direction of travel from the disk that formed them. A planet running backward around a small cool star is therefore a formation problem, and one team's answer is a second disk, tilted from the first.
Reality
A University of Tokyo group found the planet in brightness data already in hand, where the secondary eclipse arrived earlier than a circular orbit allows. Its star's surface is 8,400 C and the orbit takes two days.
Reality
A Wisconsin group reports a planet that is mostly rock where theory expects a gas envelope. Its own authors say astronomers cannot finish the composition argument alone.
Reality