Infrared space observatory advancing our view of the cosmos
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.
Scientists have captured the Sun’s surface at unprecedented resolution with the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope and other instruments and have identified widespread Kelvin–Helmholtz vortices—500–2,000km spirals of magnetised plasma. The team has linked these instabilities to how magnetic energy cascades to smaller scales and feeds flares and coronal mass ejections that produce space weather.