Interstellar Visitor 3I/Atlas, NASA's SphereX Sky Map, and the Self-Destructive Exoplanet

Anna: Welcome to Astronomy Daily. I'm Anna. And

today we'll start with the exciting news of a

new interstellar visitor. Only the third ever

confirmed to be zooming through our solar

system. Then we'll explore NASA's

SphereX mission which is creating an all sky

map of the universe, making its data

publicly accessible. Next,

prepare for a mind bending story about a self

destructive exoplanet. An astonishing

discovery. We'll also dive into the latest

revelations from the James Webb Space

Telescope, which continues to reshape our

view of cosmic history. And finally, we'll

uncover a surprising twist how Earth's

very own weather satellites are now helping

us study Venus.

Let's get started. Our first

stop today is an exciting new celestial

visitor. Astronomers have just confirmed the

discovery of an interstellar object, space

speeding through our solar system. This marks

only the third time humanity has detected an

object that originated beyond our own stellar

neighbourhood. The Visitor, officially

named 3i Atlas by the International

Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Centre, has

been classified as a comet. Its

fuzziness, as described by astronomer

Jonathan McDowell from the Harvard

Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, suggests

it's primarily made of ice rather than rock.

While its exact size is still being refined,

current estimates place it at roughly 10 to

20 kilometres wide, which would make it the

largest interstellar interloper ever

detected. However, if it's truly made of ice,

it could be smaller since ice reflects more

light, making it appear larger.

Regardless of its precise dimensions, it

poses absolutely no threat to Earth.

Richard Moisel, head of Planetary defence at

the European Space Agency, assures us it will

fly deep through our solar system, passing

just inside the orbit of Mars without any

collision risk. What makes 3i

Atlas so fascinating is its incredible speed.

Zooming along at more than 60 kilometres per

second, or about 37 miles per second,

this phenomenal velocity means it isn't

gravitationally bound by the sun. Unlike

comets and asteroids that originate from

within our solar system, its trajectory

clearly indicates it's from interstellar

space and will continue on its journey back

out into the galaxy once it passes us.

Astronomers theorise that these icy wanderers

form around other star systems. As another

star passes nearby, its gravitational tug can

free these ice balls, sending them rogue into

the galaxy. This newly discovered comet is

simply one that happens to be passing through

our cosmic backyard. The object

was initially spotted by the NASA funded

ATLAS survey in Hawaii. Professional and

amateur astronomers worldwide then joined

forces, digging through past telescope data

to trace its path back to at least mid June.

It's expected to get brighter and closer to

the sun until late October and will remain

observable by telescope into next year.

To put this discovery into perspective, the

first interstellar object, Oumuamua,

was detected in 2017 and was so

peculiar it even led some scientists to

speculate about alien origins, though this

theory has since been largely dismissed. Our

second visitor, 2i Borisov, was

observed in 2019. Mark Norris, an

astronomer at the University of Central

Lancashire in the UK, notes that 3i

Atlas appears to be moving considerably

faster than its two predecessors. While it's

currently roughly the distance of Jupiter

away from Earth and primarily visible in the

southern hemisphere, its presence is

incredibly significant. Scientists

estimate that as many as 10,000 interstellar

objects might be drifting through our solar

system at any given time, though most are

likely much smaller. This new detection

suggests that observatories like the newly

online Vera C Rubin Observatory in Chile

could soon be finding these dim interstellar

visitors on a monthly basis.

Unfortunately, sending a mission to intercept

3i Atlas isn't feasible due to its speed and

trajectory. However, these rare

visitors offer scientists an unparalleled

opportunity to study material from outside

our solar system. Imagine if we could detect

precursors of life like, um, amino acids on

such an object. It would give us immense

confidence that the conditions for life exist

in other star systems across the universe.

Moving from interstellar visitors to an

ambitious new mission let's talk about NASA's

Sphere X telescope. Launched in March

and now comfortably settled into low Earth

orbit, this new Astrophysics space telescope

has embarked on an incredible to create a

comprehensive all sky map of the universe.

What's truly revolutionary is that SphereX,

which stands for Spectro Photometer for the

History of the Universe, Epoch of

Reionization and ICES Explorer has already

begun delivering its sky survey data to a

public archive on a weekly basis. This

means anyone from professional astronomers to

curious enthusiasts can access and use this

data to unravel the universe's secrets.

As Rachel Akcsson, the lead for the SphereX

Science Data Centre, puts it, because we're

looking at everything in the whole sky,

almost every area of astronomy can be

addressed by SphereX data. While other

missions like NASA's retired WISE telescope,

also mapped the entire sky, Sphere X

significantly builds on that legacy. It

observes in an astounding 102 infrared

wavelengths, a massive leap compared to

WISE's four wavelength bands. This extensive

range allows scientists to use a technique

called spectroscopy to identify the unique

signatures of specific molecules. The

mission's science team will harness this

capability to study the distribution of

frozen water and organic molecules, often

referred to as the building blocks of life.

According to across our own Milky Way galaxy

beyond our cosmic neighbourhood. Sphere X

data will be crucial for understanding the

physics that drove the universe's rapid

expansion after the Big Bang. It will also

measure the amount of light emitted by all

galaxies over cosmic time. The decision

to make this data publicly available so

quickly, within 60 days of collection is a

testament to NASA's commitment to open

science, transparency and efficiency. It

empowers the entire astronomy community to

explore and make discoveries that the Sphere

X team alone couldn't possibly achieve.

During its two year primary mission, SphereX

will survey the entire sky twice a year,

ultimately compiling four complete all sky

maps. After the one year mark, a full map

covering all 102 wavelengths will be

released. The impact of SPHEREx extends

even further as its data can be combined with

observations from other groundbreaking

missions. Imagine refining

exoplanet parameters collected by NASA's

Tess, identifying fascinating new targets for

the James Webb Space Telescope, or studying

the properties of dark matter and dark energy

alongside the European Space Agency's Euclid

mission and NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space

Telescope. The possibilities are truly

boundless. As Vandana Desai, RSS

Science Lead, wisely states, people are going

to use the data in all kinds of ways that we

can't imagine. It's an exciting time when the

universe is becoming more accessible than

ever, thanks to missions like SphereX, paving

the way for unprecedented discoveries

from the vast universe to individual

planetary systems.

Our next story takes us to a truly bizarre

discovery, an exoplanet that seems to be

actively contributing to its own demise.

Astronomers have found a doomed planet

officially named HIP67

522B, which is clinging so tightly

to its parent star that it's triggering

explosive outbursts and in turn destroying

itself. This is a completely new phenomenon

in our understanding of celestial bodies. HIP

67522B is a young

extrasolar planet orbiting an equally young

star, hip 67522, which

is only about 17 million years old. To put

that into perspective, our sun is a middle

aged 4.6 billion years old. The

exoplanet's orbit is incredibly tight,

completing a full year in just one Earth

week. Since the first exoplanets were

discovered in the mid-1990s, scientists have

wondered if a planet could orbit close enough

to impact its star's magnetic fields. With

over 5,000 exoplanet discoveries since then,

the answer remained elusive. Until now.

Ekaterina Ilien, the team leader from the

Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy,

expressed her excitement and curiosity,

stating that they had never seen a system

like HIP 67522B before,

especially one with such a young planet

orbiting so closely. She added that she had a

million questions because the details of this

new phenomenon are still unclear.

The team first identified HIP

67522B while using

NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite,

or TESS, which is designed to hunt for

exoplanets and survey flaring stars.

TESS picked up some intriguing

characteristics, prompting a follow up

investigation with the European Space

Agency's Characterising Exoplanet Satellite,

or cheops. With cheops, they observed even

more flares, with almost all of them directed

towards Earth as the planet passed in front

of its star. What they discovered was

remarkable. The stellar flares thrown out by

hip 67522 occur

precisely when its clingy planet transits or

passes in front of the star. This

strongly suggests that the flares are

triggered by the planet itself. The leading

theory is that hip

67522B is so

close to its star that it exerts a

significant magnetic influence. As the planet

whips around, it gathers energy, which is

then redirected as waves rippling down the

star's magnetic field lines. When one of

these waves hits the stellar surface, it

triggers a massive flare. Ilan

explained that the waves seem to be setting

off explosions that are in essence waiting to

happen, resulting in flares with much higher

energy than the waves themselves. This

groundbreaking finding provides the first

hard evidence that planets can indeed

influence the behaviour of their stars. And

for hip 67522B, this

influence is disastrous. The induced flares

are directed right back at the planet,

bombarding it with approximately six times

the radiation a planet at this orbital

distance would typically experience.

Currently, hip 67522B is

about the size of Jupiter, but its density is

incredibly low, comparable to candy floss.

This intense radiation bombardment is

stripping away the planet's wispy outer

layers, causing it to lose what little mass

it possesses over the next hundred million

years. Circumstances scientists predict that

hip 67522B could shrink from

its current Jupiter like size to something

closer to Neptune. The full extent of the

damage from these self inflicted flares is

still uncertain. But this bizarre celestial

dance is opening up entirely new avenues for

understanding star planet interactions and

planetary evolution.

Next up, let's take a look at an anniversary

of sorts. Since July 2022,

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has been

diligently focused on unlocking the

universe's secrets. And it has absolutely

delivered with its unparalleled ability to

detect and analyse invisible infrared light.

Webb has made observations once thought

impossible, profoundly changing our view of

the cosmos from the most distant galaxies

to the familiar corners of our own solar

system. Webb was built with the promise of

revolutionising astronomy and rewriting the

textbooks. And by any measure, it has far

exceeded those lofty expectations. In

just three years of science operations, Webb

has completed more than 860 scientific

programmes, collecting nearly 550

terabytes of data and leading to over

1600 research papers. The

sheer volume of intriguing results and new

questions it has raised is truly astonishing.

One of Webb's primary missions was to observe

cosmic dawn, the period during the universe's

first billion years when the earliest stars

and galaxies were forming. What scientists

expected to see were a few faint, nascent

galaxies, mere hints of what would eventually

become the grand structures we see today.

Instead, Webb revealed surprisingly bright

and mature galaxies that developed within a,

uh, mere 300 million years of the Big Bang.

It also found galaxies with black holes that

seemed far too massive for their age, and

even an infant Milky Way type galaxy that

existed when the universe was only 600

million years old. This

suggests that the universe evolves

significantly faster than we previously

thought. Adding to the surprises,

Webb has unveiled a new type of galaxy. A

distant population of mysteriously compact

bright red galaxies, affectionately dubbed

little red dots. What makes them so bright

and red? Are they illuminated by dense

groupings of unusually brilliant stars? By

gas spiralling into a supermassive black

hole? Or perhaps both. And what

eventually happened to them? These little red

dots appeared around 600 million years after

the Big Bang and rapidly declined in number

less than a billion years later, leaving

astronomers eager to understand their

evolution. Webb's observations are also

providing critical insights into one of

astronomy's most perplexing dilemmas the

Hubble tension. This refers to the

frustrating problem where different methods

of calculating the universe's current

expansion rate yield different results. Is it

simply a matter of measurement errors? Or is

there something truly strange happening in

the cosmos? So far, Webb's data

indicates that the Hubble tension is not due

to measurement inaccuracies. By

precisely distinguishing pulsating stars in

crowded fields, and even discovering a

distant gravitationally lensed supernova

whose image appeared at three different times

during its explosion, Webb is providing

independent checks on these crucial

measurements, suggesting this cosmic puzzle

is very real.

Beyond galaxies, the Webb telescope's

extraordinary infrared vision has also

unveiled surprisingly rich and varied

atmospheres on gas giants orbiting distant

stars. While the Hubble Space Telescope

made the first detection of gases on an

exoplanet, Webb has taken these studies to an

entirely new level. It's revealed a chemical

cocktail including hydrogen sulphide,

ammonia, carbon dioxide, methane

and sulphur dioxide, none of which had been

clearly detected in an atmosphere outside our

solar system before. Webb has even examined

the exotic climates of these gas giants,

detecting flakes of silica, uh, snow in the

skies of one searing hot world and measuring

temperature and cloud differences across

others. The telescope's exceptional ability

to measure subtle changes in infrared light

makes it possible to even analyse the thin

layers of gas around smaller rocky planets.

Webb has already ruled out significant

atmospheres on some rocky worlds and found

tantalising signs of carbon monoxide or

carbon dioxide on 55 Cancri E A, uh,

lava world orbiting a sun like star. These

findings are laying crucial groundwork for

NASA's future habitable worlds Observatory,

which will be designed to directly image and

search for life on Earth. Like planets.

Webb has also mapped intricate galaxy

structures with unprecedented detail, showing

us cosmic cities where stars form, live,

die and are recycled into the next

generation. Its infrared eyes reveal

delicate filaments of dust tracing spiral

arms, ancient star clusters forming galactic

cores, newly forming stars still hidden in

glowing cocoons of dust and gas, and clusters

of hot young stars carving enormous cavities

within the dust. It's truly helping us

understand how stellar winds and explosions

actively reshape their galactic homes.

In other observations, Webb has spotted

hundreds of objects resembling brown dwarfs

in the Milky Way and even some candidates in

a neighbouring galaxy. Brown dwarfs form like

stars, but aren't massive enough to fuse

hydrogen. Some of these objects are so small,

just a few times the mass of Jupiter, that

it's hard to tell if they're free floating

gas giant planets or something else entirely.

Thanks to Webb, we now know there's a

continuous spectrum of objects ranging from

planets to brown dwarfs to full fledged

stars. The telescope has also found potential

planets orbiting white dwarfs, hinting that

it might be possible for worlds to survive

the dramatic death of their host stars.

Closer to home, Webb has turned its gaze to

our own solar system with equally impressive

results. It observed the vast water plume

erupting from Saturn's moon Enceladus,

revealing its true scale as a cloud spanning

over 6,000 miles, about 20 times wider

than Enceladus itself. This water then

spreads out into a donut shaped torus

encircling Saturn, even raining down onto the

planet. The these unique observations of

rings, auroras, clouds, winds,

ices and gases are helping us better

understand what our cosmic neighbourhood is

made of and how it has changed over time.

Finally, Webb has also played a crucial role

in Supporting asteroid defence missions. In

2024, when an asteroid was discovered with a

preliminary chance of hitting Earth, Webb was

uniquely able to measure the object, which

turned out to be the size of a 15 story

building, helping assess the hazard. While

that particular asteroid is no longer a

threat, the study demonstrated Webb's

capabilities. The telescope also provided

vital support for NASA's Double Asteroid

Redirection Test, or DART, mission, which

deliberately impacted the Didymos binary

asteroid system. Both Webb and Hubble

observed the impact, confirming that the

composition of these asteroids is typical of

those that could threaten Earth. In just

three years, Webb has brought the distant

universe into sharp focus, revealed

unexpectedly bright and numerous galaxies,

unveiled new stars in their dusty cocoons,

and studied weather on exoplanets. This is

only the beginning. As engineers estimate

Webb has enough fuel to continue observing

for at least 20 more years, promising many

more cosmic surprises to come.

Finally, today, in a truly unexpected turn of

events, Japanese meteorological satellites,

the Himawari 8 and 9, which are typically

used for monitoring Earth's global weather

patterns, are now providing incredibly

valuable insights into Venus's atmosphere.

These satellites, launched in 2014

and 2016 by the Japan

Meteorological Agency, are equipped with

multispectral advanced Himawari imagers.

In a recent study led by the University of

Tokyo in infrared, images from these

satellites captured changes in Venus's

atmosphere, revealing previously unseen

temperature patterns in its cloud tops. This

is a significant development because

meteorological satellites can complement

observations of Venus's atmosphere, which

usually come from robotic missions and ground

based telescopes. Scientists have been

studying Venus's atmosphere for decades to

understand the dynamics of our solar system's

hottest planet. However, many

mysteries persist, such as its thermal tides

and planetary scale waves. Dedicated

robotic probes have often been limited to

single band imagery or short observation

periods. That's where the Himawari satellites

come in. Because these satellites are

scheduled to remain operational for more than

a decade, they offer an unprecedented

opportunity for long term multi band

monitoring. Their instruments provide

infrared coverage that measures Venus's

temperature across different bands, showing

temporal variations. When these geostationary

satellites align with Earth and Venus, they

can obtain images of Venus's turbulent

atmosphere, helping to fill crucial

observational gaps. The team behind the

study used hundreds of images from Himawari 8

and 9 to map the temporal dynamics and track

temperature variations in Venus's cloud tops

over time. Their analysis confirmed that both

the thermal tides and planetary waves in

Venus's atmosphere are subject to changes in

amplitude over time, which decrease with

altitude. This novel approach opens

new avenues for long term and multiband

monitoring of other solar system bodies,

including the Moon and Mercury. By

providing continuous data that dedicated

missions might miss due to their shorter

lifespans, these Earth focused satellites are

unexpectedly contributing to our broader

understanding of planetary evolution.

That's all for this episode of Astronomy

Daily. I'm Anna and I hope you enjoyed our

journey through the latest in space and

astronomy news. Thank you for tuning in. If

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