Key Highlights
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The European Space Agency’s Gaia mission has detected subtle wobbles in baby star systems, hinting at the presence of unseen planets carving gaps in their surrounding discs of gas and dust. This provides a new, indirect method for spotting planets in their earliest stages of formation, long before they can be seen directly.
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Scientists have measured a time delay in the high-energy X-ray “echo” from around a supermassive black hole, providing a new way to weigh the black hole and map its immediate environment. This technique, applied to the galaxy IC 4329A, confirms previous mass estimates and helps astronomers understand the physics of matter just before it falls into the black hole.
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New computer simulations of a giant crater on the metal-rich asteroid Psyche suggest that studying its large impact basins could reveal whether the asteroid is the solid core of a failed planet. This research prepares for NASA’s upcoming Psyche mission, which aims to determine if the asteroid is a primordial unmelted object or the exposed heart of an ancient protoplanet.
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A new theoretical framework for gravity, which replaces the concept of curved spacetime with a property called “nonmetricity,” has been fully mapped out in a way that allows for computer simulations. This alternative formulation, known as STEGR, produces the same results as Einstein’s theory but could lead to new approaches for simulating complex cosmic events like black hole collisions.
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As artificial intelligence becomes essential for analyzing vast astronomical datasets, researchers are grappling with a fundamental question: does finding patterns with AI count as true scientific understanding? This has sparked a call for astronomers to collaborate with philosophers of science to define what it means to “discover” and “understand” in the age of machine learning.
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