The solar system’s giant, updated
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory has begun the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, a 10-year program that will image the southern sky every few nights. The telescope has started regular operations from its Chilean mountaintop site and is already returning new detections, including thousands of asteroids and transient views such as Comet 3I/ATLAS.
Astronomers have detected helium escaping from LHS 1140b, a rocky 'super-Earth' 48 light-years away that orbits in its star's habitable zone. The finding has confirmed an atmosphere around a habitable-zone rocky exoplanet for the first time and has been published in Science; teams used ground-based infrared spectroscopy and modelling.