Link to the available report by ESO: https://www.eso.org/public/videos/potw2643a/

Study: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ae9763

A rocky lava planet once thought to be too extreme to have an atmosphere appears to be wrapped in one with a reflective layer of vaporized silicate mineral clouds, the same family of compounds that make up quartz and sand.

University of Waterloo Physics and Astronomy Professor Lisa Dang and collaborators used the James Webb Space Telescope(JWST) to observe the lava planet TOI-561 b for 37 hours, capturing nearly four complete trips of the planet around its star.

The paper, "A Highly Reflective Atmosphere on the Lava World TOI-561 b Revealed by JWST/NIRSpec Phase Curve," was published in The Astronomical Journal.

"We measured how the planet's brightness and heat changed throughout its orbit," says Dang.

"This technique, known as a phase curve, revealed that the planet reflects a significant amount of light from its star, and that heat is being redistributed around the planet instead of only on the sunlit side. Together, these point to the presence of an atmosphere."

Victus Haze is a US Space Force exercise in rendezvous and proximity operations: getting one satellite up close to another, quickly. It has two players about 500 km up in the same sun-synchronous orbit. Jackal, built by True Anomaly, launched on 3 May. Puma, built by Rocket Lab, launched on 19 June on an Electron with under 17 hours' notice.

My tracker logs orbit changes and close approaches from Space-Track's public orbit data. On 22 and 23 October it logged three small burns by Jackal. Since then the distance between the two at each daily check has gone 189 km, 83, 54, 69, 47.

The clearer sign is speed. The tracker forecasts each close pass and re-runs the forecast with every orbit update. On 23 October it predicted passes of about 2 km at 11 to 14 metres a second. By 24 October that had slowed to 7.6 m/s, by 26 October to 3.5 m/s. The latest forecast puts the next close point at 12:41 UTC on 27 October, about 2.3 km apart at 3.4 m/s, roughly jogging pace. Two satellites matching speeds like that is what a rendezvous looks like from the outside.

The log also shows bursts of large orbit changes by Puma in late July and at the end of August. Public reporting describes a July sortie and a later one in which Puma manoeuvred to evade, though the Space Force hasn't confirmed the second.

Caveats: public orbit data updates a few times a day and is good to about a kilometre at this height. Anything closer than that, or a burn between updates, won't show. The pair's page has the full forecast history: https://overhead24.com/proximity/69012-69646

For decades, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has helped astronomers measure how fast the universe is expanding. But as those measurements have become more precise, scientists have uncovered a cosmic mystery: the universe appears to be expanding at different rates depending on how we measure it.

Known as the Hubble tension, this discrepancy challenges our understanding of the cosmos and could point toward something missing from our current model of the universe.

In this video, NASA scientists Jennifer Wiseman and Julie McEnery explore how Hubble helped transform our understanding of cosmic expansion, the mysterious role of dark energy, and how NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will help investigate some of the biggest unanswered questions in cosmology.