[Kyushu University] Life in the deep sea is under immense pressure—literally. Such extreme conditions can disrupt the delicate structures of proteins essential to life. Yet somehow, the proteins in deep-sea […]
Imaging & Spectroscopy
Posted inRobotics/Rovers/UAVs
Alta-X Drone Tests Future Astrobiology / Astrogeology Droid Technology
[NASA]. An Alta-X drone flies an advanced guidance and navigation system known as the Safe and Precise Landing – Integrated Capabilities Evolution (SPLICE) experiment.
Posted inTRAPPIST-1
Radial Velocity Detection Of The TRAPPIST-1 Planetary System With SPIRou And NIRPS
[astro-ph.EP]. The TRAPPIST-1 system is well-known for its seven transiting Earth-sized exoplanets. It has been extensively studied and characterized, notably with transit timing variations (TTVs) to precisely measure the mass […]
![The black line shows the empirical high-S/N template spectrum of Proxima Centauri (left) and Barnard’s Star (right). In the top panel, the green curve shows the median spectrum obtained by taking the median flux at each wavelength across the full grid of PHOENIX M-dwarf spectra, while the shaded region denotes the corresponding 1σ envelope. Comparing this range of model spectra with the empirical M-dwarf spectra demonstrates that the PHOENIX models do not adequately reproduce the observed spectra. The middle and bottom panels show either empirical templates or postellar spectral samples constructed from synthetic SPIRou observations of the respective stars at different S/N regimes. For the postellar spectra, the 1σ, 2σ, and 3σ intervals are shown, highlighting the uncertainties recovered on individual spectral feature. -- [astro-ph.EP]](https://i0.wp.com/astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/POSTELLAR.png?resize=1200%2C721&ssl=1)
Posted inExoplanets, -moons, -comets
POSTELLAR: Posterior Stellar Spectrum Sampling – An Alternative to Approximate Stellar Spectra for Exoplanetary Analysis
[astro-ph.EP] We present a novel approach to perform posterior sampling of the underlying stellar spectrum in high-resolution spectroscopic observations.
Posted inMars
Mars Rover Curiosity’s Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) Calibration
[NASA]. NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired this image using its Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), located on the turret at the end of the rover’s robotic arm, on September 7, […]
Posted inIcy Worlds
SwRI Simulations Indicate That Large Impacts May Limit Ocean Formation In Icy Moons
[SwRI] Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) scientists provided simulations to understand the role disruptive impacts play on icy moons with subsurface oceans in our solar system.
Posted inAstrogeology
Trans-Neptunian Objects Remember Their Past
[NASA]. For the first time, scientists used the joint power of NASA’s Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes to study some of the most far-flung bodies in our solar system, […]
![RMS vs bin-size of the residuals from our TTV fits (see Section 4.1). The four panels show the 2x2 different reduction-likelihood pairings considered in this work. The two jitter treatments find binning behavior worse than that expected from pure Gaussian noise (dashed line), and instead have a slope of ∼ − 1/3, similar to other NIRSpec PRISM results (e.g. Kipping et al. 2025). The inclusion of a GP to absorb time-correlated noise greatly reduces the slopes, as again expected.-- [astro-ph.EP]](https://i0.wp.com/astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/JWST-Excludes.png?resize=1200%2C720&ssl=1)
Posted inExoplanets, -moons, -comets
JWST Excludes Exomoons Down to 0.1 Earth Radii Around a Rocky, Temperate Exoplanet
[astro-ph.EP] To date, even with JWST, it has not been possible to test for exomoons as small as the Moon. Only two reported searches for exomoons around bound planets have […]
Posted inTitan
NASA Administrator Visits Dragonfly Mass Spectrometer (DraMS)
[NASA]. Dragonfly will explore sites of interest around Titan’s equatorial regions and collect samples of surface material for analysis inside DraMS, the Dragonfly Mass Spectrometer.
Posted inExoplanets, -moons, -comets
The Metallicity Of Giant Exoplanets Around Low-mass Stars And How Ariel Can Help
[astro-ph.EP] Giant planets orbiting low-mass stars represent a unique population of giant planets that can be studied to constrain planet formation theory. Surveys of transiting giant exoplanets around M-dwarfs (GEMS) […]