Astronomers spot potential 'interstellar visitor' shooting through the solar system toward Earth

 

Image credit: David Rankin/Catalina Sky Survey

Joel Kontinen 

An intruder from the reaches of time has appeared on Earth. Scientist said that the intruder comes from outside the solar system. This would be the third such incident, but it may not be inhabited:

“A newly discovered object, dubbed A11pl3Z, appears to be moving too fast and straight to have originated in the solar system. If confirmed, it will be the third interstellar visitor ever spotted

A11pl3Z is most likely a large asteroid, or maybe a comet, potentially spanning up to 12 miles (20 kilometres). It is traveling toward the inner solar system at around 152,000 mph (245,000 km/h) and is approaching us from the part of the night sky where the bar of the Milky Way is located.”

The earlier incident features Comet 2I/Borisov, which was system and Oumuamua, a cigar-shaped object that made headlines in 2017.

Source:

Harry Baker 2025 Astronomers spot potential 'interstellar visitor' A11pl3Z shooting through the solar system toward Earth | Live Science July 3

 

James Webb telescope discovers frozen water around a distant, sunlike star

 

Image courtesy of NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford (STScI)

Joel Kontinen

Could there be water around a distant star? This is what scientist have found out recently.  This brings to live the saying that where there is water, there might be live.

But if all planets had water or ice, it was the way God created the universe.

“The new discovery centres on a star called HD 181327, located about 155 light-years away, in the constellation Telescopium. At just 23 million years old, HD 181327 is a cosmic infant compared with our 4.6 billion-year-old sun, and it's encircled by a broad, dusty debris disk that is rich in small, early building blocks of planets.”

The millions of years in this study are fake, as God did not take so long to form the universe.

Source:

Sharmila Kuthunur 2025 Milestone discovery: James Webb telescope discovers frozen water around a distant, sunlike star | Live Science May 24

Some evolutionists think they know what the face of a Denisovan looked like

 

Image courtesy of Hebei GEO University

Joel Kontinen

Some evolutionists think that they have figured out how the Denisovans looked like. However, the book of Genesis says that we are all children of one mother, and she was not a Denisovan.

This is what New Scientist writes:

The Denisovans, a mysterious group of ancient humans originally identified purely from DNA, finally have a face.

Using molecular evidence, Qiaomei Fu at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing and her colleagues have confirmed what many researchers suspected: that a skull from China known as “dragon man” belonged to a Denisovan.

This fits with other evidence suggesting that the Denisovans were large and stocky. “I think we’re looking at individuals that are all [around] 100 kilos [of] lean body mass: enormous, enormous individuals,” says Bence Viola at the University of Toronto in Canada, who was not involved in the study.

Source:

Michael Marshall 2025 We finally know what the face of a Denisovan looked like | New Scientist 18 June 

Small and speedy dinosaur recognised as a new species

 

Image courtesy of © The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London

Joel Kontinen

Some evolutionists believe that the dinosaurs are divided into too many clans but now it seem that they have overrated it and that there are not so much different dinosaurs at all.

Enigmacursor darted around North America in the Late Jurassic 145-150 million years ago and its skeleton now be on display in London’s Natural History Museum

A newly discovered species of dinosaur is going on display in London’s Natural History Museum.

Enigmacursor mollyborthwickae was a speedy, two-legged herbivore, 64 centimetres tall and 180 cm long that lived about 145 million to 150 million years ago, during the Late Jurassic Period.

Its reconstructed skeleton will be on display in the museum’s Earth Hall from 26 June, alongside its contemporary, Sophie the Stegosaurus.

Susannah Maidment and Paul Barrett, both palaeontologists at the Natural History Museum, have analysed the Enigmacursor specimen, which was uncovered from the Morrison Formation in the western US in 2021-22.

Back then, it was thought to be a Nanosaurus – a poorly known species of small herbivorous dinosaur. The Enigmacursor fossil isn’t complete, but using the few teeth – which reveal it ate plants – and portions of the neck, backbone, tail, pelvis, limbs and feet, Maidment and Barrett have defined this fossil as a new species, placed it in an evolutionary tree and reconstructed it for display.

They have based the structure of missing elements, like the skull, on similar small dinosaurs like Yandusaurus and Hexinlusaurus. Generally, we know little about smaller dinosaurs, both because they are less likely to fossilise than bigger animals and because fossil hunters tend to seek larger, more valuable examples.

“This is a two-legged dinosaur and it’s got very small forearms that it probably would have used to grasp food to bring it to its mouth,” says Maidment. “And it’s got incredibly large feet and very long limbs. So, it was probably quite fast by dinosaur standards.”

That is where the “cursor” part of its name comes from: it means “runner”. Maidment says it was probably charging around in the shadows of behemoths like Diplodocus and Stegosaurus.

The specimen’s vertebrae weren’t fused, which implies it wasn’t fully mature when it died. “I think this animal was probably a teenager, but it may well have been sexually mature, so it might not have got that much bigger,” says Maidment.

“Enigmacursor represents one of the rarities from further down the food chain of the dinosaur era,” says David Norman at the University of Cambridge. “This newly described animal was clearly a small, wallaby-sized herbivore that scampered around the Late Jurassic countryside.”

The discovery sheds light on the early evolutionary stages of the herbivorous dinosaurs that would go on to dominate Cretaceous ecosystems in North America, says Maidment, and helps us build a more realistic ecological picture of the life and times of dinosaurs.

Source:

Chris Simms 2025 Enigmacursor mollyborthwickae: Small and speedy dinosaur recognised as a new species | New Scientist 25 June 

Stellar flares may hamper search for life in promising star system

 

Image courtesy of Mark Garlick/Alamy

Joel Kontinen

Some planets are formed that they have life. But only exoplanets tend not to have it. The latest case is the Trappist 1 saga which probably has none.

Astronomers have been trying to detect atmospheres on planets orbiting TRAPPIST-1, but bursts of radiation from the star make this challenging.

The search for atmospheres around the TRAPPIST-1 star system, one of the most promising locations for life elsewhere in the galaxy, might be even more difficult than astronomers first thought because of short-lived radiation blasts from the star.

TRAPPIST-1, first discovered in 2016, is a small red dwarf star about 40 light years from Earth with at least seven planets orbiting it. It is a prime target for astronomers hoping to detect extraterrestrial life because several of its planets appear to sit in a habitable zone where temperatures are just right for liquid water.

Source: 

Alex Wilkins 2025 Stellar flares may hamper search for life in promising star system | New Scientist 23 June

Enigmatic lizards somehow survived near Chicxulub asteroid impact

 

A yellow-spotted tropical night lizard (Lepidophyma flavimaculatum)

Image courtesy of Dante Fenolio/Science Photo Library

Joel Kontinen

Lizards are not dinosaurs. but somehow the dinosaur eating catastrophe that happened some 66 million years old did not affect these lizards. They may have been present some 66 million years ago.

The night lizards may have been the only terrestrial vertebrates that survived in the region of the asteroid impact 66 million years ago, which led to the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs

A small, secretive group of lizards that still exists today may have been the only terrestrial vertebrates that survived in the vicinity of the Chicxulub asteroid collision, which led to the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs.

It has long been known that xantusiid night lizards are an ancient lineage that have persisted for tens of millions of years. But Chase Brownstein at Yale University and his colleagues suspected that the group may have actually arisen earlier than previously thought: in the Cretaceous Period, which ended around 66 million years ago.

The end of the Cretaceous was marked by a giant asteroid strike in the vicinity of Yucatán peninsula in Mexico, which left a crater over 150 kilometres wide and caused the extinction of most of the animal and plant species across the world.

Brownstein and his team used previously published DNA sequence data for xantusiids to create an evolutionary tree for the group. They combined this with skeletal anatomy across living and fossil night lizards, allowing the team to determine how old their lineages are and estimate how many offspring the ancestral night lizards would have produced.

They found that the most recent common ancestor of living xantusiids emerged deep within the Cretaceous, over 93 million years ago, and they probably only had clutches of one or two offspring.

“I think it is very possible that these ancient populations were as close or closer to the impact site than those today,” says Brownstein. “It’s almost as if xantusiid distribution sketches a circle around the impact site.”

Based on fossil evidence, it is unlikely that the ancient night lizards simply recolonised the region later on, says Brownstein.

“We know from our reconstructions that the common ancestor of living species was almost certainly living in North America, where the fossil record of xantusiids is pretty much fairly continuous on either side of the boundary layer marking the impact,” he says.

Many night lizard species live in rock crevices and their slow metabolisms are comparable to those of other survivors of the mass extinction, such as turtles and crocodiles. “This, perhaps, would have allowed them to take shelter during the impact and its immediate aftermath,” says Brownstein.

Nathan Lo at the University of Sydney says the lizards are remarkable. “They lived in the region around the asteroid’s point of impact, [yet] they managed to survive, even though the asteroid would have wiped out organisms that were within hundreds of kilometres of the impact point.”

They managed this despite not having many of the usual traits that we would expect to see in survivors of mass extinctions. “The species that tend to survive through these extinction events are those that are small in size, reproduce quickly and that have large geographic ranges,” says Lo. “But these lizards generally reproduce slowly and seem to have quite small ranges.”

 Source: 

James Woodford 2025 Enigmatic lizards somehow survived near Chicxulub asteroid impact | New Scientist 25 June 

Sea spiders 'farm' methane-eating bacteria on their bodies

 

Image courtesy of Biance Dal Bó

Joel Kontinen

Could a sizable amount of methane be harmful for us and the world? Now it seems that a Sea-spiders species kills off methane. This was probably brought off by intelligent design that want to keep us going strong.

Spider-like creatures living near methane seeps on the seafloor appear to cultivate and consume microbial species on their bodies that feed on the energy-rich gas. This expands the set of organisms known to rely on symbiotic relationships with microbes to live in these otherworldly environments.

Shana Goffredi at Occidental College in California and her colleagues collected sea spiders – marine arthropods named for their resemblance to arachnids – living near three different methane seeps in the Pacific Ocean. They found three previously unknown species from the sea spider genus Sericosura that appear to be abundant only near these gas seeps.

Other types of sea spiders that don’t live near seeps largely eat other invertebrates. But the researchers found the new sea spiders appear to get most of their nutrition by eating a distinctive set of bacterial species that live on their bodies. These bacteria harvest energy by metabolising methane and methanol coming from the seeps, energy that would otherwise be inaccessible to the sea spiders.

The researchers found the bacteria were confined to the spiders’ exoskeletons like a “microbial fur coat”, growing in what Goffredi describes as “volcano-like” clusters. The layers of bacterial growth also had markings like lawnmower tracks where the spiders may have munched on them using their hard “lips” and three tiny teeth.

To confirm the sea spiders really were eating the bacteria, the researchers also used a radioactive labelling technique to track how the carbon in methane was consumed by the sea spiders in the lab. “We watched that methane go into the microbes that are on the surface of the spiders, and then we watched that carbon molecule move into the tissues of the spider,” says Goffredi.

Source:

James Dinneen 2025 Sea spiders 'farm' methane-eating bacteria on their bodies | New Scientist 20 June