[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.
imaging
Posted inAtmospheres, Climate, Weather
Simulations Of The Evolving Ozone Layer: Implications For The Early Earth, Exoplanets, And The Search For Life
[astro-ph.EP] Over 4 billion years, Earth’s atmosphere has been transformed from a composition devoid of molecular oxygen (O2) to one where O2 is now 21% of our modern atmosphere by […]
Posted inAstrochemistry
VUV And mid-UV Photoabsorption Cross Sections Of Thin Films Of Glycine And Alanine: Application To Their Photochemistry In The Solar System
[Photochemistry and Photobiology] Experiments conducted in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) since the 1990s have investigated the evolution of organic matter in solid-phase (including amino acids) under solar photon irradiation to […]
![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.
![Pressures determined by ruby fluorescence measurements at different locations within the sample chamber: (a) during powder compaction, (b) after decompression. No ruby fluorescence spectrum was obtained on the sphere marked with an asterisk, likely due to insufficient Cr doping, resulting in an undetectable fluorescence signal. -- [astro-ph.EP]](https://i0.wp.com/astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Elastic.png?resize=1200%2C720&ssl=1)
Posted inTitan
Elastic Properties of Titan Tholins Revealed by Brillouin Spectroscopy
[astro-ph.EP] Titan tholins, complex organic solids synthesized by simulating photochemical processes in Titan’s atmosphere, are widely regarded as analogs to organic surface materials on the Saturnian moon.
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 […]
![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 inExoplanets, -moons, -comets
The Accretionally Heated Atmospheres Of Protoplanets And Brown Dwarfs
[astro-ph.EP] The ranks of accreting planets and brown dwarfs are growing. To help interpret their spectra, we study how accretion affects a planet’s atmosphere. The atmosphere is irradiated from above […]
![[Left]: A concept raytrace showing the IFS, with just the FUV channels shown. The NUV channels take the zero-order from each FUV grating and reflect it towards the IFS fold mirror (on either side) into a similar format NUV IFS (see Haughton et al., 2026 for a depiction of the INFUSE design that this IFS is based on13). The IFS assembly is forward (out of the page) from the MOS at the focal plane, with the IFS fold mirror canted slightly to move the slicer, gratings, and detectors over 0.7 meters from the MOS optical path. [Right]: The slicer-based IFS operates by reflecting portions of the image plane to different gratings, which then focus a spectrogram to a unique portion of the detector. In essence, each reflective slice operates like a long-slit spectrograph, with the slicer geometry separating the multi-slit spectrograph to avoid spectral confusion.-- astro-ph.IM](https://i0.wp.com/astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/An-Ultraviolet.png?resize=1200%2C563&ssl=1)
Posted inAstronomy & Telescopes
An Ultraviolet Instrument On The Habitable Worlds Observatory: Considerations and Capability Trades On The Multi-Object, Integral-field, and High-resolution Modes Of A Potential UVI
[astro-ph.IM] The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) is NASA’s next-generation astrophysics platform, delivering transformative capability in the search for life and study of the origins of the universe.