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Most Earth-Like Worlds Have Yet to Be Born, According to Theoretical Study
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By NASA
6 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
This artist’s concept shows a brown dwarf — an object larger than a planet but not massive enough to kickstart fusion in its core like a star. Brown dwarfs are hot when they form and may glow like this one, but over time they get closer in temperature to gas giant planets like Jupiter. NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/R. Proctor An unusual cosmic object is helping scientists better understand the chemistry hidden deep in Jupiter and Saturn’s atmospheres — and potentially those of exoplanets.
Why has silicon, one of the most common elements in the universe, gone largely undetected in the atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, and gas planets like them orbiting other stars? A new study using observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope sheds light on this question by focusing on a peculiar object that astronomers discovered by chance in 2020 and called “The Accident.”
The results were published on Sept. 4 in the journal Nature.
As shown in this graphic, brown dwarfs can be far more massive than even large gas planets like Jupiter and Saturn. However, they tend to lack the mass that kickstarts nuclear fusion in the cores of stars, causing them to shine. NASA/JPL-Caltech The Accident is a brown dwarf, a ball of gas that’s not quite a planet and not quite a star. Even among its already hard-to-classify peers, The Accident has a perplexing mix of physical features, some of which have been previously seen in only young brown dwarfs and others seen only in ancient ones. Because of those features, it slipped past typical detection methods before being discovered five years ago by a citizen scientist participating in Backyard Worlds: Planet 9. The program lets people around the globe look for new discoveries in data from NASA’s now-retired NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer), which was managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
The brown dwarf nicknamed “The Accident” can be seen moving in the bottom left corner of this video, which shows data from NASA’s now-retired NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer), launched in 2009 with the moniker WISE. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Dan Caselden The Accident is so faint and odd that researchers needed NASA’s most powerful space observatory, Webb, to study its atmosphere. Among several surprises, they found evidence of a molecule they couldn’t initially identify. It turned out to be a simple silicon molecule called silane (SiH4). Researchers have long expected — but been unable — to find silane not only in our solar system’s gas giants, but also in the thousands of atmospheres belonging to brown dwarfs and to the gas giants orbiting other stars. The Accident is the first such object where this molecule has been identified.
Scientists are fairly confident that silicon exists in Jupiter and Saturn’s atmospheres but that it is hidden. Bound to oxygen, silicon forms oxides such as quartz that can seed clouds on hot gas giants, bearing a resemblance to dust storms on Earth. On cooler gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn, these types of clouds would sink far beneath lighter layers of water vapor and ammonia clouds, until any silicon-containing molecules are deep in the atmosphere, invisible even to the spacecraft that have studied those two planets up close.
Some researchers have also posited that lighter molecules of silicon, like silane, should be found higher up in these atmospheric layers, left behind like traces of flour on a baker’s table. That such molecules haven’t appeared anywhere except in a single, peculiar brown dwarf suggests something about the chemistry occurring in these environments.
“Sometimes it’s the extreme objects that help us understand what’s happening in the average ones,” said Faherty, a researcher at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and lead author on the new study.
Happy accident
Located about 50 light-years from Earth, The Accident likely formed 10 billion to 12 billion years ago, making it one of the oldest brown dwarfs ever discovered. The universe is about 14 billion years old, and at the time that The Accident developed, the cosmos contained mostly hydrogen and helium, with trace amounts of other elements, including silicon. Over eons, elements like carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen forged in the cores of stars, so planets and stars that formed more recently possess more of those elements.
Webb’s observations of The Accident confirm that silane can form in brown dwarf and planetary atmospheres. The fact that silane seems to be missing in other brown dwarfs and gas giant planets suggests that when oxygen is available, it bonds with silicon at such a high rate and so easily, virtually no silicon is left over to bond with hydrogen and form silane.
So why is silane in The Accident? The study authors surmise it is because far less oxygen was present in the universe when the ancient brown dwarf formed, resulting in less oxygen in its atmosphere to gobble up all the silicon. The available silicon would have bonded with hydrogen instead, resulting in silane.
“We weren’t looking to solve a mystery about Jupiter and Saturn with these observations,” said JPL’s Peter Eisenhardt, project scientist for the WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) mission, which was later repurposed as NEOWISE. “A brown dwarf is a ball of gas like a star, but without an internal fusion reactor, it gets cooler and cooler, with an atmosphere like that of gas giant planets. We wanted to see why this brown dwarf is so odd, but we weren’t expecting silane. The universe continues to surprise us.”
Brown dwarfs are often easier to study than gas giant exoplanets because the light from a faraway planet is typically drowned out by the star it orbits, while brown dwarfs generally fly solo. And the lessons learned from these objects extend to all kinds of planets, including ones outside our solar system that might feature potential signs of habitability.
“To be clear, we’re not finding life on brown dwarfs,” said Faherty. “But at a high level, by studying all of this variety and complexity in planetary atmospheres, we’re setting up the scientists who are one day going to have to do this kind of chemical analysis for rocky, potentially Earth-like planets. It might not specifically involve silicon, but they’re going to get data that is complicated and confusing and doesn’t fit their models, just like we are. They’ll have to parse all those complexities if they want to answer those big questions.”
More about WISE, Webb
A division of Caltech, JPL managed and operated WISE for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. The mission was selected competitively under NASA’s Explorers Program managed by the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The NEOWISE mission was a project of JPL and the University of Arizona in Tucson, supported by NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office.
For more information about WISE, go to:
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/main/index.html
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory, and an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
To learn more about Webb, visit:
https://science.nasa.gov/webb
News Media Contacts
Calla Cofield
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
626-808-2469
calla.e.cofield@jpl.nasa.gov
Christine Pulliam
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
cpulliam@stsci.edi
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Last Updated Sep 09, 2025 Related Terms
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By NASA
6 Min Read Upcoming Launch to Boost NASA’s Study of Sun’s Influence Across Space
Soon, there will be three new ways to study the Sun’s influence across the solar system with the launch of a trio of NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) spacecraft. Expected to launch no earlier than Tuesday, Sept. 23, the missions include NASA’s IMAP (Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe), NASA’s Carruthers Geocorona Observatory, and NOAA’s SWFO-L1 (Space Weather Follow On-Lagrange 1) spacecraft.
The three missions will launch together aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. From there, the spacecraft will travel together to their destination at the first Earth-Sun Lagrange point (L1), around one million miles from Earth toward the Sun.
The missions will each focus on different effects of the solar wind — the continuous stream of particles emitted by the Sun — and space weather — the changing conditions in space driven by the Sun — from their origins at the Sun to their farthest reaches billions of miles away at the edge of our solar system. Research and observations from the missions will help us better understand the Sun’s influence on Earth’s habitability, map our home in space, and protect satellites and voyaging astronauts and airline crews from space weather impacts.
The IMAP and Carruthers missions add to NASA’s heliophysics fleet of spacecraft. Together, NASA’s heliophysics missions study a vast, interconnected system from the Sun to the space surrounding Earth and other planets to the farthest limits of the Sun’s constantly flowing streams of solar wind. The SWFO-L1 mission, funded and operated by NOAA, will be the agency’s first satellite designed specifically for and fully dedicated to continuous, operational space weather observations.
Mapping our home in space: IMAP
The IMAP mission will study the heliosphere, our home in space.
NASA/Princeton University/Patrick McPike As a modern-day celestial cartographer, IMAP will investigate two of the most important overarching issues in heliophysics: the interaction of the solar wind at its boundary with interstellar space and the energization of charged particles from the Sun.
The IMAP mission will principally study the boundary of our heliosphere — a huge bubble created by the solar wind that encapsulates our solar system — and study how the heliosphere interacts with the local galactic neighborhood beyond. The heliosphere protects the solar system from dangerous high-energy particles called galactic cosmic rays. Mapping the heliosphere’s boundaries helps scientists understand our home in space and how it came to be habitable.
“IMAP will revolutionize our understanding of the outer heliosphere,” said David McComas, IMAP mission principal investigator at Princeton University in New Jersey. “It will give us a very fine picture of what’s going on out there by making measurements that are 30 times more sensitive and at higher resolution than ever before.”
The IMAP mission will also explore and chart the vast range of particles in interplanetary space. The spacecraft will provide near real-time observations of the solar wind and energetic particles, which can produce hazardous conditions not only in the space environment near Earth, but also on the ground. The mission’s data will help model and improve prediction capabilities of the impacts of space weather ranging from power-line disruptions to loss of satellites.
Imaging Earth’s exosphere: Carruthers Geocorona Observatory
An illustration shows the Carruthers Geocorona Observatory spacecraft. NASA/BAE Systems Space & Mission Systems The Carruthers Geocorona Observatory, a small satellite, will launch with IMAP as a rideshare. The mission was named after Dr. George Carruthers, creator of the Moon-based telescope that captured the first images of Earth’s exosphere, the outermost layer of our planet’s atmosphere.
The Carruthers mission will build upon Dr. Carruthers’ legacy by charting changes in Earth’s exosphere. The mission’s vantage point at L1 offers a complete view of the exosphere not visible from the Moon’s relatively close distance to Earth. From there, it will address fundamental questions about the nature of the region, such as its shape, size, density, and how it changes over time.
The exosphere plays an important role in Earth’s response to space weather, which can impact our technology, from satellites in orbit to communications signals in the upper atmosphere or power lines on the ground. During space weather storms, the exosphere mediates the energy absorption and release throughout the near-Earth space environment, influencing strength of space weather disturbances. Carruthers will help us better understand the fundamental physics of our exosphere and improve our ability to predict the impacts of the Sun’s activity.
“We’ll be able to create movies of how this atmospheric layer responds when a solar storm hits, and watch it change with the seasons over time,” said Lara Waldrop, the principal investigator for the Carruthers Geocorona Observatory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
New space weather station: SWFO-L1
SWFO-L1 will provide real-time observations of the Sun’s corona and solar wind to help forecast the resulting space weather.
NOAA/BAE Systems Space & Mission Systems Distinct from NASA’s research satellites, SWFO-L1 will be an operational satellite, designed to observe solar activity and the solar wind in real time to provide critical data in NOAA’s mission to protect the nation from environmental hazards. SWFO-L1 will serve as an early-warning beacon for potentially damaging space weather events that could impact our technology on Earth. SWFO-L1 will observe the Sun’s outer atmosphere for large eruptions, called coronal mass ejections, and measure the solar wind upstream from Earth with a state-of-the-art suite of instruments and processing system.
This mission is the first of a new generation of NOAA space weather observatories dedicated to 24/7 operations, working to avoid gaps in continuity.
“SWFO-L1 will be an amazing deep-space mission for NOAA,” said Dimitrios Vassiliadis, SWFO program scientist at NOAA. “Thanks to its advantageous location at L1, it will continuously monitor the solar atmosphere while measuring the solar wind and its interplanetary magnetic fields well before it impacts Earth — and transmit these data in record time.”
With SWFO-L1’s enhanced performance, unobstructed views, and minimal delay between observations and data return, NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center forecasters will give operators improved lead time required to take precautionary actions that protect vital infrastructure, economic interests, and national security on Earth and in space.
By Mara Johnson-Groh
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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Last Updated Sep 04, 2025 Related Terms
Carruthers Geocorona Observatory (GLIDE) Heliophysics Heliosphere IMAP (Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe) NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) Solar Wind Space Weather The Sun The Sun & Solar Physics Explore More
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By USH
Everything we know about 3I/ATLAS to date:
On July 1, 2025, the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) station at Río Hurtado, Chile, detected something extraordinary: a fast-moving object flagged with the provisional designation A11pl3Z, later named 3I/ATLAS, also cataloged as C/2025 N1 (ATLAS).
At first glance, it was classified as a comet. But almost immediately, astronomers realized that this visitor was anything but ordinary.
3I/ATLAS imaged by the James Webb Space Telescope's NIRSpec on 6 August 2025.
Why 3I/ATLAS is different.
1. Interstellar Origins Like ʻOumuamua (1I/2017 U1) and Borisov (2I/2019 Q4) before it, 3I/ATLAS is only the third confirmed interstellar object to enter our solar system. Its steep hyperbolic orbit—with an eccentricity greater than 1.02—proves it is not gravitationally bound to the Sun.
2. A Composition Unlike Any Comet Most comets are rich in water ice. Not 3I/ATLAS. Spectroscopic analysis from both the Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) revealed it is dominated by carbon dioxide with one of the highest CO₂-to-water ratios ever measured. This makes it chemically alien compared to the comets that formed in our own solar system.
3. A Tail That Breaks the Rules Comets typically sprout tails pointing away from the Sun, driven by sublimating ice. 3I/ATLAS, however, displays a dust plume angled toward the Sun—a tail in the “wrong” direction. This phenomenon has never been observed in a natural comet and suggests either unusual physics or engineered behavior.
4. Perfectly Aligned Trajectory Instead of cutting randomly across the solar system, 3I/ATLAS travels almost exactly along the ecliptic plane, the flat orbital path where Earth, Mars, and most of the planets reside. Statistically, the odds of a random interstellar object aligning this precisely are less than 0.005%.
5. Unexplained Acceleration Data from radar tracking and JWST confirm subtle but persistent non-gravitational acceleration. Normally, such changes are explained by outgassing jets. Yet Webb detects no coma, no jets, no thermal signature to explain the push. Instead, the acceleration resembles controlled propulsion, similar to how an ion engine expels dust or gas for thrust.
6. Forward-Facing Glow: Instead of a tail behind it, 3I/ATLAS shines with a glow ahead of its motion, almost as if it were illuminating its path.
7. Stabilized Rotation: Unlike natural tumbling comets, it appears to maintain attitude control, consistent with artificial stabilization.
8. Speculations of nuclear propulsion: Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, already known for his bold ʻOumuamua interpretations, has highlighted its non-gravitational acceleration and trajectory. He even speculated that 3I/ATLAS might be nuclear-powered technology, perhaps venting dust as thrust.
9. 3I/ATLAS will not simply zip past and leave. Its calculated path takes it past several key planets: Venus flyby – August 2025 Mars encounter – September 2025 Jupiter flyby – late 2026
Tilted view of 3I/ATLAS's trajectory through the Solar System, with orbits and positions of planets shown. Such a sequence of planetary passes looks less like coincidence and more like a deliberate survey trajectory.
Finally, on October 30, 2025, the object will reach perihelion, its closest approach to the Sun. Crucially, at that moment it will be hidden directly behind the Sun from Earth’s perspective, a perfect opportunity for a stealth maneuver if it is indeed under intelligent control.
10. And the latest news on this object is that 3I/ATLAS shows signs of alien electroplating. Astronomers using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile have detected something never before seen in a natural comet, a plume of pure nickel gas, laced with cyanide, but completely lacking iron.
This is not how comets behave. In every known case, nickel and iron are paired together in space rocks, asteroids, and cosmic debris. The absence of iron in 3I/ATLAS makes it impossible to explain through natural processes.
The nickel-cyanide combination looks eerily familiar to something we know from human technology: nickel-cyanide electroplating. This industrial process is used to coat and protect metals like iron, creating a corrosion-resistant shell. When heated, such a coating releases nickel vapor and cyanide gas, the exact chemical fingerprint astronomers now see venting from 3I/ATLAS.
Renowned astrophysicist Avi Loeb has already highlighted this bizarre discovery, stressing that the nickel-only signature matches industrial alloy production rather than anything we’d expect from natural comet chemistry.
Pure nickel without iron: impossible in natural comets. Nickel + cyanide plume: matches electroplated coatings. Artificial signature: hallmark of industrial processes.
Putting it all together, so far: It is an interstellar visitor on a hyperbolic escape path. It has a carbon dioxide–dominated composition, nearly devoid of water. It has a dust plume points toward the Sun, breaking cometary rules. It has a trajectory which is perfectly aligned with the ecliptic plane. It shows mysterious acceleration without visible outgassing. It exhibits a forward glow, possible radio emissions, and signs of stabilization. It will perform planetary flybys. It probably has nuclear propulsion. It has an electroplated shell.
Mainstream astronomers remain cautious, still labeling 3I/ATLAS as a comet, but with mounting evidence, we may be staring at the first tangible proof of alien technology crossing our solar system, a probe from another civilization on a reconnaissance mission, silently mapping habitable worlds before making contact.View the full article
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By NASA
4 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
Dwarf planet Ceres is shown in these enhanced-color renderings that use images from NASA’s Dawn mission. New thermal and chemicals models that rely on the mission’s data indicate Ceres may have long ago had conditions suitable for life.NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA The dwarf planet is cold now, but new research paints a picture of Ceres hosting a deep, long-lived energy source that may have maintained habitable conditions in the past.
New NASA research has found that Ceres may have had a lasting source of chemical energy: the right types of molecules needed to fuel some microbial metabolisms. Although there is no evidence that microorganisms ever existed on Ceres, the finding supports theories that this intriguing dwarf planet, which is the largest body in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, may have once had conditions suitable to support single-celled lifeforms.
Science data from NASA’s Dawn mission, which ended in 2018, previously showed that the bright, reflective regions on Ceres’ surface are mostly made of salts left over from liquid that percolated up from underground. Later analysis in 2020 found that the source of this liquid was an enormous reservoir of brine, or salty water, below the surface. In other research, the Dawn mission also revealed evidence that Ceres has organic material in the form of carbon molecules — essential, though not sufficient on its own, to support microbial cells.
The presence of water and carbon molecules are two critical pieces of the habitability puzzle on Ceres. The new findings offer the third: a long-lasting source of chemical energy in Ceres’ ancient past that could have made it possible for microorganisms to survive. This result does not mean that Ceres had life, but rather, that there likely was “food” available should life have ever arisen on Ceres.
This illustration depicts the interior of dwarf planet Ceres, including the transfer of water and gases from the rocky core to a reservoir of salty water. Carbon dioxide and methane are among the molecules carrying chemical energy beneath Ceres’ surface.NASA/JPL-Caltech In the study, published in Science Advances on Aug. 20, the authors built thermal and chemical models mimicking the temperature and composition of Ceres’ interior over time. They found that 2.5 billion years or so ago, Ceres’ subsurface ocean may have had a steady supply of hot water containing dissolved gases traveling up from metamorphosed rocks in the rocky core. The heat came from the decay of radioactive elements within the dwarf planet’s rocky interior that occurred when Ceres was young — an internal process thought to be common in our solar system.
“On Earth, when hot water from deep underground mixes with the ocean, the result is often a buffet for microbes — a feast of chemical energy. So it could have big implications if we could determine whether Ceres’ ocean had an influx of hydrothermal fluid in the past,” said Sam Courville, lead author of the study. Now based at Arizona State University in Tempe, he led the research while working as an intern at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which also managed the Dawn mission.
Catching Chill
The Ceres we know today is unlikely to be habitable. It is cooler, with more ice and less water than in the past. There is currently insufficient heat from radioactive decay within Ceres to keep the water from freezing, and what liquid remains has become a concentrated brine.
The period when Ceres would most likely have been habitable was between a half-billion and 2 billion years after it formed (or about 2.5 billion to 4 billion years ago), when its rocky core reached its peak temperature. That’s when warm fluids would have been introduced into Ceres’ underground water.
The dwarf planet also doesn’t have the benefit of present-day internal heating generated by the push and pull of orbiting a large planet, like Saturn’s moon Enceladus and Jupiter’s moon Europa do. So Ceres’ greatest potential for habitability-fueling energy was in the past.
This result has implications for water-rich objects throughout the outer solar system, too. Many of the other icy moons and dwarf planets that are of similar size to Ceres (about 585 miles, or 940 kilometers, in diameter) and don’t have significant internal heating from the gravitational pull of planets could have also had a period of habitability in their past.
More About Dawn
A division of Caltech in Pasadena, JPL managed Dawn’s mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Dawn was a project of the directorate’s Discovery Program, managed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. JPL was responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Northrop Grumman in Dulles, Virginia, designed and built the spacecraft. The German Aerospace Center, Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Italian Space Agency and Italian National Astrophysical Institute were international partners on the mission team.
For a complete list of mission participants, visit:
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/dawn/overview/
News Media Contacts
Gretchen McCartney
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-287-4115
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Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
NASA Headquarters, Washington
2025-108
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Last Updated Aug 20, 2025 Related Terms
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By NASA
A member of the space crop production team prepares materials for Veggie seed pillows inside the Space Systems Processing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. NASA/Cory S Huston When the Crew-11 astronauts launched to the International Space Station on August 1, 2025, they carried with them another chapter in space farming: the latest VEG-03 experiments, complete with seed pillows ready for planting.
Growing plants provides nutrition for astronauts, as well as psychological benefits that help maintain crew morale during missions.
During VEG-03 MNO, astronauts will be able to choose what they want to grow from a seed library including Wasabi mustard greens, Red Russian Kale, and Dragoon lettuce.
From Seed to Space Salad
The experiment takes place inside Veggie, a chamber about the size of carry-on luggage. The system uses red, blue, and green LED lights to provide the right spectrum for plant growth. Clear flexible bellows — accordion-like walls that expand to accommodate maturing plants — create a semi-controlled environment around the growing area.
Astronauts plant thin strips containing their selected seeds into fabric “seed pillows” filled with a special clay-based growing medium and controlled-release fertilizer. The clay, similar to what’s used on baseball fields, helps distribute water and air around the roots in the microgravity environment.
Crew members will monitor the plants, add water as needed, and document growth through regular photographs. At harvest time, astronauts will eat some of the fresh produce while freezing other samples for return to Earth, where scientists will analyze their nutritional content and safety.
How this benefits space exploration
Fresh food will become critical as astronauts venture farther from Earth on missions to the Moon and Mars. NASA aims to validate different kinds of crops to add variety to astronaut diets during long-duration space exploration missions, while giving crew members more control over what they grow and eat.
How this benefits humanity
The techniques developed for growing crops in space’s challenging conditions may also improve agricultural practices on Earth. Indoor crop cultivation approaches similar to what astronauts do in Veggie might also be adapted for horticultural therapy programs, giving elderly or disabled individuals new ways to experience gardening when traditional methods aren’t accessible.
Related Resources
VEG-03 MNO on the Space Station Research Explorer
Veggie Vegetable Product System
Veggie Plant Growth System Activated on International Space Station
About BPS
NASA’s Biological and Physical Sciences Division pioneers scientific discovery and enables exploration by using space environments to conduct investigations not possible on Earth. Studying biological and physical phenomenon under extreme conditions allows researchers to advance the fundamental scientific knowledge required to go farther and stay longer in space, while also benefitting life on Earth.
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