Gliese 229B was the first known brown dwarf, discovered in 1995. In new research, astronomers observed Gliese 229 B with the GRAVITY interferometer and, separately, the CRIRES+ spectrograph at ESO’s Very Large Telescope. Both sets of observations independently resolved Gliese 229B into two components, Gliese 229 Ba and Bb. They orbit each other every 12.1 days with a semimajor axis of

2024 PT5, a new mini-moon of our planet, arrived in Earth’s orbit on September 29, 2024. 2024 PT5 will experience a temporarily captured flyby in 2024, from September 29 until November 25. Image credit: University of Colorado. 2024 PT5 was discovered on August 7, 2024 by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System in Sutherland, South Africa. This near-Earth

ESA astronomers have released a 208-gigapixel mosaic of images taken by Euclid, a mission launched in 2023 to study why the Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. This mosaic made by ESA’s Euclid space telescope contains 260 observations collected in 2024. Image credit: ESA / Euclid / Euclid Consortium / NASA / CEA Paris-Saclay

Gum 39 is one of several nebulae in a vast stellar nursery called the Running Chicken Nebula (IC 2944), which is located about 6,500 light-years away in the constellation of Centaurus. This VST image shows the nebula Gum 39. Image credit: ESO / VPHAS+ Survey. This image of Gum 39 is actually only a tiny

Marine biologists have found adult tubeworms and other vent animals below the seafloor in the East Pacific Rise, a volcanically active, fast-spreading ridge with numerous hydrothermal vent fields. Seafloor surface and crustal subseafloor vents at Fava Flow Suburbs, the East Pacific Rise. Image credit: Bright et al., doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-52631-9. The East Pacific Rise is a

A bright comet from the Oort cloud named C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) is passing by Earth and will be visible through the second half of October 2024. This image, taken by the ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) on October 10, 2024, shows comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS and its bright tail streaming from the upper left to the

Paleontologists say they’ve identified a new species of marine reptile in the ophthalmosaurid genus Platypterygius that lived approximately 125 million years ago. A pair of Platypterigius sp. Image credit: Dmitry Bogdanov / CC BY 3.0. Ophthalmosauridae are a family of ichthyosaurs that lived during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. These ichthyosaurs appeared worldwide during the

The newly-discovered isotope, plutonium-227, has a half-life of 0.78 seconds, according to a team of physicists from China. The region of the nuclear chart 87≤Z≤97 and 112≤N≤136 shows the new isotope plutonium-227 (red star) and the 12 nuclides (blue star) that were discovered at the Institute of Modern Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.