NASA’s Webb Detects Methane on Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS - NASA Science (.gov)

Using the NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, a team of researchers led by University of Minnesota astrophysicist Mason Huberty had a closer look at a group of almost 10,000 galaxies spanning billions of light-years in the Fornax constellation. As detailed in a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal, they honed in on a small space in the region that they thought was entirely unoccupied. But to their astonishment, they observed a single emission line emanating from it — twice over a span of just three months. Emission lines are bright, narrow bands of light emitted at a specific wavelength by distant celestial objects and other phenomena. Puzzlingly, prior observations from the same region didn’t feature the same reading.

Fraction of planetesimal interactions that resulted in a capture (left) or a temporary capture (right) for planetesimals of different sizes (R) and stars with different separations. Each point represents anywhere from 10,000-100,000 simulations. The single case results were also obtained with REBOUND using the same set-up for direct comparison. The grey dotted line represents the theoretical amount of captures for the single case derived by Grishin et al. (2019). -- [astro-ph. EP] [astro-ph. EP] Planet formation requires growth over 12 orders of magnitude in size, from micron-sized dust grains to fully formed planets.