3 entries tagged astronomy. All writing.
TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 23, 2026 A Comet Carrying Someone Else's Recipe for Water A paper led by Kenji Furuya of Japan's RIKEN institute finds that the water boiling off our solar system's third interstellar visitor, 3I/ATLAS, carries a deuterium-to-hydrogen ratio tens of times higher than any comet native to our own solar system — a chemical fingerprint the authors say points to a colder, more metal-poor stellar nursery than the one that built the Sun. TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 21, 2026 Fifty-Two Weeks, No Remainder A study by Prof. Eshbal Ratzon of Tel Aviv University argues that the Qumran sect really did run its famous 364-day calendar in daily life — at least at first — and then quietly stopped, because 364 days is a day and a quarter short of a solar year and the error compounds. Here is what the calendar was for, why a number divisible by seven was worth that much trouble, what the roughly twenty calendrical scrolls actually contain, and why the argument matters to anyone reading Second Temple texts. TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 19, 2026 Twice the Mass of Jupiter, and a Problem for How Stars Form The James Webb Space Telescope's newest, largest public image is a panorama of a stellar nursery called IC 348 — and buried in it are the smallest brown dwarfs ever confirmed, weighing in at about twice the mass of Jupiter. That number is smaller than the theory of how stars form says it should be able to produce, and one of the objects appears to have its own disk of material, meaning something that is itself barely planet-sized may be forming planets of its own.