HATPI is a recently commissioned time-domain facility at Las Campanas Observatory, Chile, that uses 64 wide-angle, 9.6 cm diameter lenses and back-illuminated CCDs, yielding a mosaic field-of-view of 7,100 square […]
If humankind is to explore deep space, one small passenger should not be left behind: microbes.
A Sydney PhD student has recreated a tiny piece of the Universe inside a bottle in her laboratory, producing cosmic dust from scratch. The results shed new light on how […]
The uneven detection of prebiotic organic compounds in meteorites—where amino acids and nucleobases are commonly identified but sugars remain rare and poorly characterized—limits our understanding of extraterrestrial organic chemistry.
Near-Earth objects (NEOs) are excellent laboratories for testing processes that affect airless bodies, as well as informing us about Solar System history.
The origin of life is yet a compelling scientific mystery that has sometimes been attributed to high-pressure impacts by small solar system bodies such as comets, meteoroids, asteroids, and transitional […]
The environs of other stellar systems may be directly probed by analyzing the cometary activity of interstellar objects. The recently discovered interstellar object 3I/ATLAS was the subject of an intensive […]
3I/ATLAS is an interstellar object whose activity provides critical insights into its composition and origin. However, due to its orbital geometry, the object is too close to the Sun near […]
β Pictoris is a young nearby A5V star, about 20 Myr old, embedded in a prominent debris disc. For the past 40 years, variable absorption features have been observed in […]
In December-2025, the NASA SPHEREx spacecraft re-observed ISO 3I/ATLAS post-perihelion, finding a much more active object compared to August-2025 SPHEREx pre-perihelion observations, with marked evidence for development into an cometary […]
