[Astronomy & Astrophysics] Context. Aromatic infrared bands (AIBs) are widely observed in diverse astrophysical environments and are generally attributed to vibrational emission from polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). The recent interstellar […]
Astronomy & Telescopes
Posted inAstronomy & Telescopes
ALMA Reveals Planetary Formation Structures In Small Disks
[ALMA] Thanks to the extraordinary sharpness of ALMA’s images, a research team has discovered rings, grooves, and cavities in extremely compact disks surrounding young stars.
![Full JWST spectrum of HOPS-68. We indicate the molecular absorption bands of oxygen-bearing molecules as studied in this work (SiO, H2O, CO2 and CO) and of carbon-bearing molecules as studied in paper B, as well as the most notable ice and silicate absorption features. Not indicated are 13CCH2, CS, and CH4 in the 7.3-7.8 µm region, and CH3, C4H2 and C6H2 around ∼ 16 µm, which will all be studied in paper B. Some prominent H2 emission lines are highlighted with a black arrow. HOPS-68 is not detected in continuum at wavelengths lower than 2.2 µm. The inset shows a zoom-in to the 7.8-8.6 µm region, which highlights the detection of SiO. -- [astro-ph.SR]](https://i0.wp.com/astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/A-breath.png?resize=1200%2C558&ssl=1)
Posted inAstrochemistry
A Breath Of Fresh Air: Oxygen Enhancement From Silicate Sublimation During Early Protostellar Evolution
[astro-ph.SR] Recently, an analog to the t = 0 moment of our Solar System’s meteoritic record was identified for the first time around the Class I protostar HOPS-315.
Posted inExoplanets, -moons, -comets
Ultraviolet Reflected-Light Spectroscopy of Modern Earth Analogs with Starshade Observations
[astro-ph.EP] Characterizing rocky, habitable zone planets in reflected light is a key science objective for future direct imaging missions, and the ultraviolet (UV) is uniquely suited for supporting the characterization […]
![Time evolution of the vertical gradient of AH across different height layers is shown. The black line overlaid indicates the corresponding PWV in mm.-- [astro-ph.IM]](https://i0.wp.com/astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/MidIR.png?resize=1200%2C715&ssl=1)
Posted inExoplanets, -moons, -comets
Mid-IR Water-Vapor Seeing: Implications for ELT/METIS High-Contrast Imaging from VLTI Data
[astro-ph.IM] Direct imaging and characterization of rocky exoplanets remains one of the central challenges in exoplanetary science. The mid-infrared (mid-IR) offers a favorable high-contrast imaging (HCI) regime, as the planet-star […]
![Planetary Research Program Metrics to Enable a Vital Research Community and Achieve Decadal-Level Science -- [National Academies of Sciences]](https://i0.wp.com/astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Planetary-1.png?resize=1200%2C720&ssl=1)
Posted inReports, Roadmaps, & Plans
Planetary Research Program Metrics to Enable a Vital Research Community and Achieve Decadal-Level Science
[National Academies of Sciences] Help us identify ways that the NASA Planetary Research Program can evaluate the health and effectiveness of its research and analysis program in accomplishing decadal science […]
![Set Transformer actor–critic architecture used by the RL policy. The input candidate set 𝑋 ∈ R 𝑁×𝐹 is first projected into a latent 𝑑-dimensional representation and processed by 𝐿 Induced Set Attention Blocks (ISABs). Learned inducing tokens provide the queries in the first attention operation of each ISAB, after which information is redistributed to the candidate tokens. The actor combines each contextualised target representation with the global mission state to produce one logit per available observation. Each logit is then converted into a probability to select a corresponding observation. The critic uses Pooling by Multihead Attention (PMA) to obtain a permutation-invariant summary of the candidate set, which is combined with the same global state to estimate 𝑉 (𝑠). -- [astro-ph.EP]](https://i0.wp.com/astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/aRieL-Reinforcement.png?resize=1200%2C715&ssl=1)
Posted inAriel Mission
aRieL – Reinforcement Learning For The Ariel Space Telescope Scheduling
[astro-ph.EP] The Ariel mission will conduct a population level survey of hundreds of exoplanet atmospheres, requiring observations to be scheduled across a large and diverse catalogue of potential targets.
Posted inAstronomy & Telescopes
Call For White Papers On Multi-Cycle Treasury Concepts With JWST
[ESA Hubble] STScI has issued a call for White Papers for compelling scientific ideas for Multi-Cycle Treasury (MCT) programmes that require large allocations of JWST time to complete.
Posted inExoplanets, -moons, -comets
“Mega-Earths” Are Likely An Artifact Of Stellar Activity
[astro-ph.EP]. Empirical relations and planet formation simulations suggest an upper mass limit for rocky planets of ∼10M⊕, as cores above this will almost certainly undergo runaway gas accretion.
![Activity-age relationship for solar-type stars from Pezzotti et al. (2026). HD 219134 is denoted by the green square. Kepler LEGACY data from Pezzotti et al. (2026) are shown as cyan dots, Booth et al. (2017) data are indicated by salmon pentagons, and the Sun is shown by a black circled dot. The black lines indicate the linear fit from Booth et al. (2017) (dashed line) and Pezzotti et al. (2026) (dotted line). -- [astro-ph.EP]](https://i0.wp.com/astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Detailed.png?resize=1200%2C718&ssl=1)
Posted inStellar Cartography
Detailed Study of HD 219134: A Benchmark K-dwarf With A Compact Planetary System
[astro-ph.EP] Space missions such as CoRoT, Kepler, and TESS have transformed asteroseismology and its synergies with exoplanet science.