In the search for worlds that could harbour life, proximity matters enormously. A planet that might be habitable but sits hundreds of light-years away may as well be unreachable for practical science — too far for detailed atmospheric studies, too faint for the instruments we have or will have for decades. GJ 3378b is different. At just 25 light-years from Earth, this newly confirmed super-Earth is practically a cosmic neighbour — and it sits in the habitable zone of its host star, where temperatures could theoretically allow liquid water to exist on its surface. ‘This one is exciting,’ said Dr. Paul Robertson of the University of California, Irvine, one of the lead researchers behind the discovery.&nbsp;What We Know About GJ 3378b&nbsp;GJ 3378b orbits a faint red dwarf star in the constellation Camelopardalis — the Giraffe — completing one full orbit every 21.45 days. The planet has a mass approximately 2.3 times that of Earth and a diameter roughly twice as large, placing it firmly in the super-Earth category: bigger and heavier than Earth, but not large enough to be a gas giant. Crucially, GJ 3378b receives about 90 percent of the solar radiation that Earth receives from the Sun — sitting close enough to the habitable zone's inner edge to be warm, but not so close as to be cooked. Its position in the habitable zone is not hypothetical or borderline. It is well within the range where liquid water is physically plausible.&nbsp;How It Was Found&nbsp;The discovery used two of the world's most sensitive spectrographs dedicated to finding planets around red dwarf stars. The Habitable-zone Planet Finder instrument on the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at McDonald Observatory in Texas and the NEID spectrometer on the WIYN Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona both contributed data. The research team, led by Dr. Michael Endl of the University of Texas at Austin and Dr. Paul Robertson of UC Irvine, published their findings in the Astrophysical Journal in 2026 in a paper titled A Revised Mass and Period for the Habitable Zone super-Earth GJ 3378b: A Planet Straddling the Cosmic Shoreline.&nbsp;What The ‘Cosmic Shoreline’ Means&nbsp;The paper's subtitle — A Planet Straddling the Cosmic Shoreline — refers to a concept in planetary science used to distinguish worlds likely to retain an atmosphere from those that have had it stripped away by stellar radiation. On one side of the shoreline are planets with enough gravity and protection from their star's radiation to hold onto an atmosphere. On the other side are bare, airless rocks. GJ 3378b sits right on that boundary — massive enough to potentially hold an atmosphere, but exposed enough to its red dwarf host that the outcome is far from certain. This is precisely what makes it both exciting and uncertain.&nbsp;The Red Dwarf Problem&nbsp;Red dwarf stars are the most common type of star in the Milky Way, and many of the closest potentially habitable planets discovered so far orbit them. But red dwarfs come with a serious hazard: they are far more magnetically active than the Sun, particularly in their early lives. They emit powerful bursts of ultraviolet and X-ray radiation called stellar flares, and they drive intense stellar winds that can erode a planet's atmosphere over geological timescales. For GJ 3378b, the key question is whether its 2.3-Earth-mass bulk provides enough gravitational grip to hold onto an atmosphere despite billions of years of bombardment from its host star. No current instrument can answer that question with certainty.&nbsp;Why 25 Light-Years Matters&nbsp;Most potentially habitable exoplanets discovered so far orbit stars that are hundreds or thousands of light-years away — far enough that detailed atmospheric characterisation is essentially impossible with any telescope currently in operation or under construction. At 25 light-years, GJ 3378b is different. It is close enough to be a genuine near-term target for atmospheric study. The James Webb Space Telescope may be able to obtain some spectroscopic data on the planet's atmosphere, though red dwarf planetary atmospheres are notoriously difficult to study even with Webb. The real opportunity will come with NASA's planned Habitable Worlds Observatory, an extremely large space telescope expected to launch sometime in the 2040s, which is specifically designed to directly image rocky planets around nearby stars and analyse their atmospheric chemistry for signs of biological activity.&nbsp;The Nearest Candidates Keep Getting Closer&nbsp;GJ 3378b joins a short but growing list of potentially habitable worlds within striking distance of our solar system. Proxima Centauri b, orbiting the nearest star to the Sun at just 4.2 light-years, is another candidate — though its habitability is equally contested due to its red dwarf host's activity. The consistent finding of habitable-zone planets around nearby red dwarfs suggests that such worlds may be extraordinarily common in our galactic neighbourhood. Whether any of them actually harbour life — or even stable atmospheres — remains the central question that the next generation of telescopes will be built to answer. For now, GJ 3378b is one of the best places to start looking.

GJ 3378b is a super-Earth 25 light-years away orbiting in its red dwarf star's habitable zone. Mass 2.3x Earth, orbit 21.45 days. Researchers call it one of the most exciting nearby exoplanets found.

In the search for worlds that could harbour life, proximity matters enormously. A planet that might be habitable but sits hundreds of light-years away may as well be unreachable for practical science — too far for detailed atmospheric studies, too faint for the instruments we have or will have for decades. GJ 3378b is different. At just 25 light-years from Earth, this newly confirmed super-Earth is practically a cosmic neighbour — and it sits in the habitable zone of its host star, where temperatures could theoretically allow liquid water to exist on its surface. ‘This one is exciting,’ said Dr. Paul Robertson of the University of California, Irvine, one of the lead researchers behind the discovery. What We Know About GJ 3378b GJ 3378b orbits a faint red dwarf star in the constellation Camelopardalis — the Giraffe — completing one full orbit every 21.45 days. The planet has a mass approximately 2.3 times that of Earth and a diameter roughly twice as large, placing it firmly in the super-Earth category: bigger and heavier than Earth, but not large enough to be a gas giant. Crucially, GJ 3378b receives about 90 percent of the solar radiation that Earth receives from the Sun — sitting close enough to the habitable zone's inner edge to be warm, but not so close as to be cooked. Its position in the habitable zone is not hypothetical or borderline. It is well within the range where liquid water is physically plausible. How It Was Found The discovery used two of the world's most sensitive spectrographs dedicated to finding planets around red dwarf stars. The Habitable-zone Planet Finder instrument on the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at McDonald Observatory in Texas and the NEID spectrometer on the WIYN Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona both contributed data. The research team, led by Dr. Michael Endl of the University of Texas at Austin and Dr. Paul Robertson of UC Irvine, published their findings in the Astrophysical Journal in 2026 in a paper titled A Revised Mass and Period for the Habitable Zone super-Earth GJ 3378b: A Planet Straddling the Cosmic Shoreline. What The ‘Cosmic Shoreline’ Means The paper's subtitle — A Planet Straddling the Cosmic Shoreline — refers to a concept in planetary science used to distinguish worlds likely to retain an atmosphere from those that have had it stripped away by stellar radiation. On one side of the shoreline are planets with enough gravity and protection from their star's radiation to hold onto an atmosphere. On the other side are bare, airless rocks. GJ 3378b sits right on that boundary — massive enough to potentially hold an atmosphere, but exposed enough to its red dwarf host that the outcome is far from certain. This is precisely what makes it both exciting and uncertain. The Red Dwarf Problem Red dwarf stars are the most common type of star in the Milky Way, and many of the closest potentially habitable planets discovered so far orbit them. But red dwarfs come with a serious hazard: they are far more magnetically active than the Sun, particularly in their early lives. They emit powerful bursts of ultraviolet and X-ray radiation called stellar flares, and they drive intense stellar winds that can erode a planet's atmosphere over geological timescales. For GJ 3378b, the key question is whether its 2.3-Earth-mass bulk provides enough gravitational grip to hold onto an atmosphere despite billions of years of bombardment from its host star. No current instrument can answer that question with certainty. Why 25 Light-Years Matters Most potentially habitable exoplanets discovered so far orbit stars that are hundreds or thousands of light-years away — far enough that detailed atmospheric characterisation is essentially impossible with any telescope currently in operation or under construction. At 25 light-years, GJ 3378b is different. It is close enough to be a genuine near-term target for atmospheric study. The James Webb Space Telescope may be able to obtain some spectroscopic data on the planet's atmosphere, though red dwarf planetary atmospheres are notoriously difficult to study even with Webb. The real opportunity will come with NASA's planned Habitable Worlds Observatory, an extremely large space telescope expected to launch sometime in the 2040s, which is specifically designed to directly image rocky planets around nearby stars and analyse their atmospheric chemistry for signs of biological activity. The Nearest Candidates Keep Getting Closer GJ 3378b joins a short but growing list of potentially habitable worlds within striking distance of our solar system. Proxima Centauri b, orbiting the nearest star to the Sun at just 4.2 light-years, is another candidate — though its habitability is equally contested due to its red dwarf host's activity. The consistent finding of habitable-zone planets around nearby red dwarfs suggests that such worlds may be extraordinarily common in our galactic neighbourhood. Whether any of them actually harbour life — or even stable atmospheres — remains the central question that the next generation of telescopes will be built to answer. For now, GJ 3378b is one of the best places to start looking.

Astronomers have discovered a super-Earth orbiting a red dwarf star just 25 light-years away — one of the closest potentially habitable worlds ever found. The planet, GJ 3378b, sits squarely in its star's habitable zone, receives about 90 percent of the solar radiation Earth does, and has a mass roughly 2.3 times that of Earth. The catch: its star is a red dwarf, and those are some of the most dangerous hosts in the galaxy.

'25 light-years away': Scientists discover a potentially habitable planet near our solar system

There are currently more than 14,000 satellites orbiting the Earth. That number, already unprecedented in the history of spaceflight, is set to grow by a factor of more than a hundred. Companies have proposed launching an additional 1.7 million satellites into low-Earth orbit in the coming years — a figure that a new peer-reviewed study by the European Southern Observatory says would have devastating consequences for astronomy, potentially blinding the world's most powerful telescopes and permanently altering the night sky as humanity has known it for millennia.&nbsp;The Numbers Behind The Crisis&nbsp;SpaceX is the largest single driver of the problem. The company, which already operates thousands of Starlink satellites for internet connectivity, has filed plans with regulators to launch more than one million additional satellites — a proposed constellation described as a space-based data centre network. E-Space, a satellite startup, has proposed the Cinnamon constellation of hundreds of thousands of additional craft. China has two planned constellations, CTC-1 and CTC-2, that would add hundreds of thousands more. Perhaps most alarming to astronomers is Reflect Orbital, which has proposed 50,000 mirror-like satellites specifically designed to reflect sunlight back toward Earth at night — a commercial idea that would, as a side effect, make the night sky dramatically brighter for everyone on the planet.&nbsp;What A ‘Safe’ Number Actually Looks Like&nbsp;The ESO study, led by Olivier Hainaut — an astronomer with more than thirty years of experience at the observatory — modelled the impact of different satellite population scenarios on ground-based telescopes. His conclusion: no more than 100,000 satellites, all dimmer than naked-eye visibility at apparent magnitude 7 or fainter, could be accommodated without causing severe harm to astronomical observations. That figure — 100,000 — sounds large. Against a proposed total of 1.7 million, it is a ceiling that would be exceeded more than seventeen times over. The study has been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy &amp; Astrophysics.&nbsp;What Happens To Our Best Telescopes&nbsp;The study ran detailed simulations of what 1.7 million satellites would mean for specific observatories. The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope — currently one of the most powerful optical telescopes on the planet — would lose up to 28 percent of its imaging capability to satellite trails, bright streaks caused by sunlight reflecting off satellite bodies passing through the telescope's field of view. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, which is designed to survey the entire southern sky and is central to current plans for detecting near-Earth asteroids, would have most of its images rendered unusable for several hours every night during twilight periods when satellites catch sunlight while the sky is dark. The potential to detect hazardous asteroids — rocks that could threaten Earth — would be directly compromised.&nbsp;Mirror Satellites: A Step Further&nbsp;The Reflect Orbital proposal represents a qualitatively different threat from conventional satellite constellations. Where standard satellites leave bright trails across telescope images, 50,000 mirror-like craft designed to reflect sunlight would do something more fundamental: they would increase the overall brightness of the night sky by three to four times its current level. This is not a problem that can be solved by scheduling observations around satellite passes. A sky that is three to four times brighter at baseline means fainter objects — distant galaxies, faint exoplanets, the most ancient light in the universe — simply cannot be detected from the ground at all, regardless of how advanced the telescope. The FCC has received more than 1,500 formal comments on the Reflect Orbital application, the vast majority from the scientific community.&nbsp;Regulators Are Still Catching Up&nbsp;The FCC is currently reviewing both SpaceX's expanded Starlink application and the Reflect Orbital proposal, and has received more than 1,800 and 1,500 comments respectively. International bodies including the International Astronomical Union have called for binding regulations on satellite brightness, mandatory mitigation measures, and caps on total constellation sizes. So far, no binding global framework exists. Satellite operators are largely self-regulating, and the commercial incentives to launch more satellites — for internet coverage, data infrastructure, and the novel reflective-satellite business models — continue to drive expansion faster than regulatory responses can track.&nbsp;Astronomy's Last Warning&nbsp;Olivier Hainaut has described the current trajectory as a genuine point of no return for astronomy. Once 1.7 million satellites are in orbit — a process that, if current regulatory approvals continue, could unfold over the next decade — the damage to ground-based observation cannot be undone. The satellites will not be recalled. The night sky, once a commons shared by every human civilisation that has ever existed, will have been permanently altered by commercial decisions made by a handful of companies and approved by a single national regulator. The question, as Hainaut and his colleagues frame it, is not whether astronomy can adapt to some satellites. It is whether anyone with the authority to act will do so before the number crosses the threshold from manageable to catastrophic.

A new ESO study warns that 1.7 million proposed satellites — led by SpaceX's 1 million Starlink plan — would devastate ground-based astronomy, blinding major telescopes and brightening the night sky 4x.

There are currently more than 14,000 satellites orbiting the Earth. That number, already unprecedented in the history of spaceflight, is set to grow by a factor of more than a hundred. Companies have proposed launching an additional 1.7 million satellites into low-Earth orbit in the coming years — a figure that a new peer-reviewed study by the European Southern Observatory says would have devastating consequences for astronomy, potentially blinding the world's most powerful telescopes and permanently altering the night sky as humanity has known it for millennia. The Numbers Behind The Crisis SpaceX is the largest single driver of the problem. The company, which already operates thousands of Starlink satellites for internet connectivity, has filed plans with regulators to launch more than one million additional satellites — a proposed constellation described as a space-based data centre network. E-Space, a satellite startup, has proposed the Cinnamon constellation of hundreds of thousands of additional craft. China has two planned constellations, CTC-1 and CTC-2, that would add hundreds of thousands more. Perhaps most alarming to astronomers is Reflect Orbital, which has proposed 50,000 mirror-like satellites specifically designed to reflect sunlight back toward Earth at night — a commercial idea that would, as a side effect, make the night sky dramatically brighter for everyone on the planet. What A ‘Safe’ Number Actually Looks Like The ESO study, led by Olivier Hainaut — an astronomer with more than thirty years of experience at the observatory — modelled the impact of different satellite population scenarios on ground-based telescopes. His conclusion: no more than 100,000 satellites, all dimmer than naked-eye visibility at apparent magnitude 7 or fainter, could be accommodated without causing severe harm to astronomical observations. That figure — 100,000 — sounds large. Against a proposed total of 1.7 million, it is a ceiling that would be exceeded more than seventeen times over. The study has been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. What Happens To Our Best Telescopes The study ran detailed simulations of what 1.7 million satellites would mean for specific observatories. The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope — currently one of the most powerful optical telescopes on the planet — would lose up to 28 percent of its imaging capability to satellite trails, bright streaks caused by sunlight reflecting off satellite bodies passing through the telescope's field of view. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, which is designed to survey the entire southern sky and is central to current plans for detecting near-Earth asteroids, would have most of its images rendered unusable for several hours every night during twilight periods when satellites catch sunlight while the sky is dark. The potential to detect hazardous asteroids — rocks that could threaten Earth — would be directly compromised. Mirror Satellites: A Step Further The Reflect Orbital proposal represents a qualitatively different threat from conventional satellite constellations. Where standard satellites leave bright trails across telescope images, 50,000 mirror-like craft designed to reflect sunlight would do something more fundamental: they would increase the overall brightness of the night sky by three to four times its current level. This is not a problem that can be solved by scheduling observations around satellite passes. A sky that is three to four times brighter at baseline means fainter objects — distant galaxies, faint exoplanets, the most ancient light in the universe — simply cannot be detected from the ground at all, regardless of how advanced the telescope. The FCC has received more than 1,500 formal comments on the Reflect Orbital application, the vast majority from the scientific community. Regulators Are Still Catching Up The FCC is currently reviewing both SpaceX's expanded Starlink application and the Reflect Orbital proposal, and has received more than 1,800 and 1,500 comments respectively. International bodies including the International Astronomical Union have called for binding regulations on satellite brightness, mandatory mitigation measures, and caps on total constellation sizes. So far, no binding global framework exists. Satellite operators are largely self-regulating, and the commercial incentives to launch more satellites — for internet coverage, data infrastructure, and the novel reflective-satellite business models — continue to drive expansion faster than regulatory responses can track. Astronomy's Last Warning Olivier Hainaut has described the current trajectory as a genuine point of no return for astronomy. Once 1.7 million satellites are in orbit — a process that, if current regulatory approvals continue, could unfold over the next decade — the damage to ground-based observation cannot be undone. The satellites will not be recalled. The night sky, once a commons shared by every human civilisation that has ever existed, will have been permanently altered by commercial decisions made by a handful of companies and approved by a single national regulator. The question, as Hainaut and his colleagues frame it, is not whether astronomy can adapt to some satellites. It is whether anyone with the authority to act will do so before the number crosses the threshold from manageable to catastrophic.

A peer-reviewed study by the European Southern Observatory has found that plans to launch 1.7 million satellites into low-Earth orbit would have devastating consequences for ground-based astronomy, brightening the night sky up to four times and rendering the world's most powerful telescopes effectively blind for hours every night. SpaceX alone plans to launch more than one million Starlink satellites. Astronomers are calling it a point of no return.

1.7 million satellites could end astronomy as we know it and SpaceX is leading the charge

Every atom of iron in your blood was forged inside a star. Every atom of gold, every atom of uranium, every heavy element heavier than iron in the periodic table was created in the violent death of a massive star — a supernova explosion that scattered stellar material across interstellar space. This is not poetry. It is nuclear astrophysics. And now, for the first time, scientists have found a direct physical sample of that supernova debris — stardust — preserved inside Antarctic ice, providing a record of the solar system's journey through the cosmos that stretches back tens of thousands of years.&nbsp;What Is Stardust?&nbsp;Stardust, in the scientific sense, refers to microscopic solid particles produced by stars and ejected into space — either during the slow stellar winds of older, dying stars or in the catastrophic explosions called supernovas. These particles drift through the interstellar medium, the vast near-empty space between star systems, and can travel enormous distances over millions of years. What makes certain stardust particles particularly valuable to scientists is their radioactive signature: supernovas produce specific isotopes that do not exist naturally on Earth, making them unmistakable markers of an extraterrestrial origin.&nbsp;The Radioactive Fingerprint: Iron-60&nbsp;The specific stardust found in Antarctic ice is identified by a radioactive isotope called iron-60, written as ⁶⁰Fe. This isotope is produced almost exclusively in supernova explosions, when a massive star collapses and detonates, fusing lighter elements into heavier ones and scattering them outward at enormous speeds. Iron-60 has a half-life of about 2.6 million years — meaning it decays slowly enough to survive a long journey through space, but fast enough that any iron-60 found on Earth today must have arrived relatively recently in geological terms. It cannot have been here from the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago; it would have long since decayed.&nbsp;Why Antarctica?&nbsp;Antarctica is one of the few places on Earth where interstellar dust can be detected and measured with confidence. The continent's ice sheets have been accumulating material for hundreds of thousands of years, layer by layer, in conditions largely untouched by industrial contamination, human activity, or the geological processes that mix and dilute surface material elsewhere on the planet. By drilling into Antarctic ice cores — cylinders of ice extracted from deep below the surface, each layer corresponding to a different era — scientists can read a continuous record of what has been falling onto Earth from space over vast timescales. It is, in effect, a time capsule written in ice.&nbsp;What The Study Found&nbsp;A research team led by nuclear astrophysicist Dominik Koll of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf in Germany analysed Antarctic ice cores and found iron-60 embedded in the layers, confirming that supernova-produced stardust has been reaching Earth's surface. The study, published in Physical Review Letters in 2026, revealed something unexpected about the distribution of the iron-60 through the ice layers: concentrations were lower than predicted between approximately 40,000 and 80,000 years ago. This dip in stardust deposition is a clue about how the local interstellar environment has changed over that period.&nbsp;The Local Interstellar Cloud: The Solar System's Current Neighbourhood&nbsp;Our solar system is not sitting in empty space. It is currently moving through a region called the Local Interstellar Cloud — sometimes informally called the Local Fluff — a diffuse mass of gas, dust, and plasma that is believed to have been seeded with material from ancient supernova explosions in the region. Scientists estimate that the solar system has been travelling through this cloud for somewhere between 40,000 and 124,000 years. The iron-60 found in Antarctic ice is direct physical evidence of that passage: stardust from the cloud has been gradually filtering through the heliosphere — the bubble of solar wind that surrounds the solar system — and settling onto Earth's surface over millennia.&nbsp;What It Tells Us About The Solar System's Past&nbsp;The Antarctic ice record of stardust is, as researchers have described it, a flight recorder for the solar system's journey through the Local Interstellar Cloud. The varying levels of iron-60 through different ice layers reflect changes in the density and structure of the cloud as the solar system has moved through it. The lower concentrations between 40,000 and 80,000 years ago suggest the solar system may have been passing through a less dense region of the cloud during that period. As more ice layers are analysed and the record extends further back, scientists hope to map the full structure of the Local Interstellar Cloud and understand how the solar system's immediate cosmic neighbourhood has changed over time — one layer of ice, one grain of stardust, at a time.

Scientists found iron-60 — radioactive supernova stardust — in Antarctic ice in 2026. Here's what stardust is, why Antarctica is the best place to find it, and what it tells us about the solar system.

Every atom of iron in your blood was forged inside a star. Every atom of gold, every atom of uranium, every heavy element heavier than iron in the periodic table was created in the violent death of a massive star — a supernova explosion that scattered stellar material across interstellar space. This is not poetry. It is nuclear astrophysics. And now, for the first time, scientists have found a direct physical sample of that supernova debris — stardust — preserved inside Antarctic ice, providing a record of the solar system's journey through the cosmos that stretches back tens of thousands of years. What Is Stardust? Stardust, in the scientific sense, refers to microscopic solid particles produced by stars and ejected into space — either during the slow stellar winds of older, dying stars or in the catastrophic explosions called supernovas. These particles drift through the interstellar medium, the vast near-empty space between star systems, and can travel enormous distances over millions of years. What makes certain stardust particles particularly valuable to scientists is their radioactive signature: supernovas produce specific isotopes that do not exist naturally on Earth, making them unmistakable markers of an extraterrestrial origin. The Radioactive Fingerprint: Iron-60 The specific stardust found in Antarctic ice is identified by a radioactive isotope called iron-60, written as ⁶⁰Fe. This isotope is produced almost exclusively in supernova explosions, when a massive star collapses and detonates, fusing lighter elements into heavier ones and scattering them outward at enormous speeds. Iron-60 has a half-life of about 2.6 million years — meaning it decays slowly enough to survive a long journey through space, but fast enough that any iron-60 found on Earth today must have arrived relatively recently in geological terms. It cannot have been here from the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago; it would have long since decayed. Why Antarctica? Antarctica is one of the few places on Earth where interstellar dust can be detected and measured with confidence. The continent's ice sheets have been accumulating material for hundreds of thousands of years, layer by layer, in conditions largely untouched by industrial contamination, human activity, or the geological processes that mix and dilute surface material elsewhere on the planet. By drilling into Antarctic ice cores — cylinders of ice extracted from deep below the surface, each layer corresponding to a different era — scientists can read a continuous record of what has been falling onto Earth from space over vast timescales. It is, in effect, a time capsule written in ice. What The Study Found A research team led by nuclear astrophysicist Dominik Koll of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf in Germany analysed Antarctic ice cores and found iron-60 embedded in the layers, confirming that supernova-produced stardust has been reaching Earth's surface. The study, published in Physical Review Letters in 2026, revealed something unexpected about the distribution of the iron-60 through the ice layers: concentrations were lower than predicted between approximately 40,000 and 80,000 years ago. This dip in stardust deposition is a clue about how the local interstellar environment has changed over that period. The Local Interstellar Cloud: The Solar System's Current Neighbourhood Our solar system is not sitting in empty space. It is currently moving through a region called the Local Interstellar Cloud — sometimes informally called the Local Fluff — a diffuse mass of gas, dust, and plasma that is believed to have been seeded with material from ancient supernova explosions in the region. Scientists estimate that the solar system has been travelling through this cloud for somewhere between 40,000 and 124,000 years. The iron-60 found in Antarctic ice is direct physical evidence of that passage: stardust from the cloud has been gradually filtering through the heliosphere — the bubble of solar wind that surrounds the solar system — and settling onto Earth's surface over millennia. What It Tells Us About The Solar System's Past The Antarctic ice record of stardust is, as researchers have described it, a flight recorder for the solar system's journey through the Local Interstellar Cloud. The varying levels of iron-60 through different ice layers reflect changes in the density and structure of the cloud as the solar system has moved through it. The lower concentrations between 40,000 and 80,000 years ago suggest the solar system may have been passing through a less dense region of the cloud during that period. As more ice layers are analysed and the record extends further back, scientists hope to map the full structure of the Local Interstellar Cloud and understand how the solar system's immediate cosmic neighbourhood has changed over time — one layer of ice, one grain of stardust, at a time.

Scientists drilling into Antarctic ice have found something extraordinary: radioactive dust produced by ancient supernova explosions, which has been drifting through interstellar space for millions of years and slowly settling onto Earth's surface. The discovery, published in Physical Review Letters in 2026, is helping researchers map the solar system's journey through a vast cloud of stellar debris — and understand how the cosmos is leaving its fingerprints on our planet.

What is Stardust And why was it found in Antarctica?

In the catalogue of strange worlds beyond our solar system, hot Jupiters occupy a special category of the bizarre. These are gas giants the size of Jupiter or larger that orbit their host stars in a matter of days — so close that their surface temperatures can exceed thousands of degrees. Astronomers thought they had a fairly good handle on how these planets behave. Then they looked more closely at CoRoT-2 b, and the rulebook turned out to be wrong.&nbsp;A Planet That Should Not Exist As It Does&nbsp;CoRoT-2 b sits 696 light-years from Earth. It is a hulking world — 3.5 times the mass of Jupiter and 1.5 times its size — that races around its host star in just 41 hours, completing a full orbit in under two Earth days. By the standards of hot Jupiters, this makes it an extreme but not unusual example of its type. What makes CoRoT-2 b extraordinary is what its atmosphere is doing. On every other hot Jupiter astronomers have studied, the planet's hottest point — its thermal hotspot — is displaced slightly in the direction the planet orbits. Winds in the upper atmosphere carry heat from the blazing dayside in the direction of the planet's motion, and the hotspot follows. On CoRoT-2 b, the hotspot is displaced in the opposite direction entirely. It is, by every model astronomers have, in the wrong place.&nbsp;What A Hot Jupiter Should Look Like&nbsp;To understand why this is so puzzling, it helps to understand what makes hot Jupiters tick. Because they orbit so close to their stars, most hot Jupiters are tidally locked — the same hemisphere always faces the star, just as the same side of the Moon always faces Earth. The dayside bakes under constant stellar radiation while the nightside stays cold. Powerful atmospheric winds, driven by this extreme temperature difference, flow from the hot dayside to the cooler nightside. These winds drag the peak heat — the hotspot — slightly ahead of the subsolar point in the direction of the planet's orbit. This pattern has been observed consistently across dozens of hot Jupiters. CoRoT-2 b was supposed to follow the same pattern. It does not.&nbsp;The Very Large Telescope Reveals The Clue&nbsp;New observations from the Very Large Telescope at the European Southern Observatory have given astronomers their best clue yet about what is happening on CoRoT-2 b. The data reveals that this hot Jupiter is rotating unusually slowly — far slower than any other hot Jupiter yet studied. One full rotation of CoRoT-2 b takes approximately three Earth days. But the planet's year — the time it takes to complete one orbit of its star — is just 1.7 days. In other words, CoRoT-2 b orbits its star twice before it has finished spinning once on its own axis. This is the opposite of what most hot Jupiters do, and it appears to be the key to why the hotspot ends up in the wrong place. The findings were presented at the 248th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Pasadena, California, in June 2026.&nbsp;Why Slow Rotation Changes Everything&nbsp;In a standard tidally locked hot Jupiter, the winds flowing from the dayside to the nightside are what determine where the hotspot sits. But when a planet is rotating more slowly than it orbits, the atmospheric dynamics change in fundamental ways. The Coriolis forces that shape wind patterns — the same forces that create cyclones and trade winds on Earth — behave differently when the planet's rotation rate is out of step with its orbital speed. Instead of atmospheric winds carrying heat forward in the direction of the orbit, they can be deflected backward, dragging the hotspot in the opposite direction. This is the leading hypothesis that researchers have settled on to explain CoRoT-2 b's backwards atmosphere — and it is unlike anything observed on another planet in or out of our solar system.&nbsp;A Window Into Planetary Diversity&nbsp;The significance of CoRoT-2 b goes beyond one anomalous planet. Hot Jupiters were once considered among the best-understood class of exoplanets precisely because their extreme properties made them easy to observe and their behaviour seemed predictable. CoRoT-2 b suggests that even within this well-studied category, the range of possible atmospheric behaviours is wider than models have accounted for. If slow rotation can produce a backwards hotspot on one hot Jupiter, there may be other worlds with similarly unusual rotation states that have been misinterpreted or overlooked in existing data. The researchers behind this work have described the pleasure of studying planetary exceptions — finding worlds that do not fit the standard picture and working out why. CoRoT-2 b, it turns out, is one of the most instructive exceptions yet found.&nbsp;What Comes Next&nbsp;Follow-up observations of CoRoT-2 b are expected to further probe the planet's atmospheric structure and test the slow-rotation hypothesis against competing explanations. The Very Large Telescope's spectroscopic capabilities allow researchers to map temperature distributions across the planet's visible disc, building a more detailed picture of where heat is concentrated and how it moves. Whether the slow rotation explanation holds up or gives way to something more surprising, CoRoT-2 b has already done what the best scientific anomalies do: it has forced astronomers to look at a class of well-studied objects and ask whether they fully understand them. The answer, at least for now, appears to be no.

CoRoT-2 b is a hot Jupiter 696 light-years away whose thermal hotspot is shifted in the wrong direction. New VLT data suggests the reason is its unusually slow rotation.

In the catalogue of strange worlds beyond our solar system, hot Jupiters occupy a special category of the bizarre. These are gas giants the size of Jupiter or larger that orbit their host stars in a matter of days — so close that their surface temperatures can exceed thousands of degrees. Astronomers thought they had a fairly good handle on how these planets behave. Then they looked more closely at CoRoT-2 b, and the rulebook turned out to be wrong. A Planet That Should Not Exist As It Does CoRoT-2 b sits 696 light-years from Earth. It is a hulking world — 3.5 times the mass of Jupiter and 1.5 times its size — that races around its host star in just 41 hours, completing a full orbit in under two Earth days. By the standards of hot Jupiters, this makes it an extreme but not unusual example of its type. What makes CoRoT-2 b extraordinary is what its atmosphere is doing. On every other hot Jupiter astronomers have studied, the planet's hottest point — its thermal hotspot — is displaced slightly in the direction the planet orbits. Winds in the upper atmosphere carry heat from the blazing dayside in the direction of the planet's motion, and the hotspot follows. On CoRoT-2 b, the hotspot is displaced in the opposite direction entirely. It is, by every model astronomers have, in the wrong place. What A Hot Jupiter Should Look Like To understand why this is so puzzling, it helps to understand what makes hot Jupiters tick. Because they orbit so close to their stars, most hot Jupiters are tidally locked — the same hemisphere always faces the star, just as the same side of the Moon always faces Earth. The dayside bakes under constant stellar radiation while the nightside stays cold. Powerful atmospheric winds, driven by this extreme temperature difference, flow from the hot dayside to the cooler nightside. These winds drag the peak heat — the hotspot — slightly ahead of the subsolar point in the direction of the planet's orbit. This pattern has been observed consistently across dozens of hot Jupiters. CoRoT-2 b was supposed to follow the same pattern. It does not. The Very Large Telescope Reveals The Clue New observations from the Very Large Telescope at the European Southern Observatory have given astronomers their best clue yet about what is happening on CoRoT-2 b. The data reveals that this hot Jupiter is rotating unusually slowly — far slower than any other hot Jupiter yet studied. One full rotation of CoRoT-2 b takes approximately three Earth days. But the planet's year — the time it takes to complete one orbit of its star — is just 1.7 days. In other words, CoRoT-2 b orbits its star twice before it has finished spinning once on its own axis. This is the opposite of what most hot Jupiters do, and it appears to be the key to why the hotspot ends up in the wrong place. The findings were presented at the 248th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Pasadena, California, in June 2026. Why Slow Rotation Changes Everything In a standard tidally locked hot Jupiter, the winds flowing from the dayside to the nightside are what determine where the hotspot sits. But when a planet is rotating more slowly than it orbits, the atmospheric dynamics change in fundamental ways. The Coriolis forces that shape wind patterns — the same forces that create cyclones and trade winds on Earth — behave differently when the planet's rotation rate is out of step with its orbital speed. Instead of atmospheric winds carrying heat forward in the direction of the orbit, they can be deflected backward, dragging the hotspot in the opposite direction. This is the leading hypothesis that researchers have settled on to explain CoRoT-2 b's backwards atmosphere — and it is unlike anything observed on another planet in or out of our solar system. A Window Into Planetary Diversity The significance of CoRoT-2 b goes beyond one anomalous planet. Hot Jupiters were once considered among the best-understood class of exoplanets precisely because their extreme properties made them easy to observe and their behaviour seemed predictable. CoRoT-2 b suggests that even within this well-studied category, the range of possible atmospheric behaviours is wider than models have accounted for. If slow rotation can produce a backwards hotspot on one hot Jupiter, there may be other worlds with similarly unusual rotation states that have been misinterpreted or overlooked in existing data. The researchers behind this work have described the pleasure of studying planetary exceptions — finding worlds that do not fit the standard picture and working out why. CoRoT-2 b, it turns out, is one of the most instructive exceptions yet found. What Comes Next Follow-up observations of CoRoT-2 b are expected to further probe the planet's atmospheric structure and test the slow-rotation hypothesis against competing explanations. The Very Large Telescope's spectroscopic capabilities allow researchers to map temperature distributions across the planet's visible disc, building a more detailed picture of where heat is concentrated and how it moves. Whether the slow rotation explanation holds up or gives way to something more surprising, CoRoT-2 b has already done what the best scientific anomalies do: it has forced astronomers to look at a class of well-studied objects and ask whether they fully understand them. The answer, at least for now, appears to be no.

CoRoT-2 b is a hot Jupiter exoplanet 696 light-years away that is breaking every rule astronomers have about how these scorching worlds work. On every other known hot Jupiter, the hottest point on the planet is shifted in the direction of its orbit. On CoRoT-2 b, it is shifted the other way entirely — and new data from the Very Large Telescope suggests the reason may be something nobody expected: the planet is rotating far too slowly.

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