Image (Credit): Vincent Van Gogh’s The Starry Night. (MoMA)
This week’s image is from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. It shows Vincent Van Gogh’s famous painting The Starry Night. Created during his time at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy, it is believed Van Gogh painted the piece in June 1989. But is it a true recreation of the night sky that June?
In a recent study, scientists from South Korea stated they now believe the painting shows the night sky on July 22, 1989 with its portrayal of the Moon, Venus, and the Hyades star cluster in the constellation Taurus. The team of scientists used various pieces of evidence, including letters from the artist, to get a better idea of the night sky and weather during that summer.
You can read more about this new study, The Actual Sky of Van Gogh’s Starry Night: a Multidisciplinary Reconstruction, at this link.
If you are simply interested in the art itself, this link at MoMA will tell you more.
The rapidly growing census of exoplanets now includes over a thousand multi-planet systems, revealing architectures that span more than four orders of magnitude in mass and five in orbital scale. Explaining the origin of this striking diversity remains a central challenge for planet formation theory, compounded by observational biases that limit access to Solar System-like regimes. Here we introduce architecture-agnostic metrics to uniformly analyse four independently defined samples of multi-planet systems, uncovering unifying patterns across their diversity. We identify a clear bimodality in system masses, dividing known architectures into two distinct families. The lower-mass family, predominantly hosted by subsolar-to-solar stars, exhibits tightly packed configurations with mass distributions consistent with the ‘peas-in-a-pod’ pattern and modal dynamical excitation comparable with that of the Solar System. By contrast, the high-mass family forms in metal-rich environments around solar-to-supersolar stars, displays gravitationally compact architectures and is an order of magnitude dynamically hotter than both the Solar System and the lower-mass counterparts. Their high level of dynamical excitation points to violent evolutionary pathways driven by global instabilities and planet–planet scattering. Together, these results show that the architectures of planetary systems are born from the combined influence of formation processes and host star properties. Signatures of these roots are preserved across the post-formation dynamical evolution that reshaped most known multi-planet systems.
Citation: Turrini, D., Danielski, C., Polychroni, D. et al. Two families of multi-planet systems with distinct architectures and stellar hosts. Nat Astron (2026).
Volatile depletion in rocky planets relative to their host stars is commonplace in both the Solar System and exoplanetary systems, yet the connections between planet formation and composition remain elusive. Here we model devolatilization during pebble accretion in combination with collisional growth from volatile-depleted planetesimals to explore the formation pathways of Earth and Mars. Using Bayesian inference, we found that bulk silicate Earth is best reproduced by ≳75% contribution from two protoplanets formed via pebble accretion, supplemented by up to ~25% material from planetesimals that are compositionally akin to the asteroid Vesta. Using instead a planetesimal volatile-depletion curve that is not observed among known meteorite parent bodies would allow the planetesimal contribution to reach %. In comparison, bulk silicate Mars reflects 27 ± 5% pebble-accreted material and 73 ± 5% Vesta-like planetesimals. We identified volatile depletion as a chemical fingerprint of hybrid accretion, in which both pebble accretion and collisional assembly contribute to terrestrial planet growth. By quantitatively linking formation pathways to volatile budgets, our findings demonstrate how planetary accretion histories can be inferred from elemental signatures, with broad implications for interpreting the chemical diversity of rocky exoplanets.
Citation: Wang, H.S., Johansen, A., Xu, Z. et al. Volatile depletion in rocky planets as a chemical fingerprint of hybrid accretion. Nat Astron (2026).
Newly formed exoplanets are often buried within disks of gas and dust, the leftover building blocks from a planet’s formation, also known as a protoplanetary disk. The difficulty of just locating such a new celestial body is part of what makes the discovery of the exoplanet Elias 2-24b—now the youngest ever confirmed—so exciting…Elias 2-24b is located approximately 450 light-years from Earth. It orbits its star at a distance of approximately 55 astronomical units (one astronomical unit being the average distance between Earth and the sun). Its mass is estimated to be at most 1.9 to 4.0 times that of Jupiter, though researchers believe its volume is likely to be much smaller than our local gas giant. Since its host star is less than 1 million years old, Elias 2-24b is estimated to be similarly young.
In a cosmic first, scientists say they have detected a planet that may have formed from the burned remains of its dead host star. The planet is likely a gas giant orbiting a white dwarf called HS 0209+0832 located about 270 light-years from Earth, according to the authors of a study published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy. After analyzing observations from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and other instruments, the team found chemical evidence that suggests the planet could have condensed from material expelled by the star as it fizzled out of energy and collapsed into a white dwarf.
Scientists have discovered a new planet that defies all expectations. It’s a lava world, but it’s also cold. In fact, it’s the coldest lava world we’ve ever seen with an atmosphere. Researchers spotted HD 3167 b, a rocky super-Earth covered in lava, orbiting a star 154 light-years away. This planet orbits so closely to its star that a “year” on the world (one revolution around its star) takes only one Earth day. But it’s not just a lava-covered rock — it’s the smallest lava world researchers have ever found. And yet, it has managed to hang onto its atmosphere.
Residing in the centre of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) is the closest massive black hole1 (MBH). Its vicinity has allowed measuring individual stellar orbits around it. The stars act as test particles and probe the gravitational potential around the 4.3 × 106M⊙ MBH. These observations have determined the central mass to sub-per-cent precision, and the mildly relativistic motions of stars have given access to the dominant relativistic corrections, the gravitational redshift, the transverse Doppler effect and the prograde precession imposed by the Schwarzschild metric nature of the potential. These effects are of order β2 = (v/c)2 (for velocity v and speed of light c). The Kerr metric for a rotating black hole leads to corrections of order β3. Here, we report the discovery of a faint main-sequence star (mK = 19.3), S301, on an 8.7-year orbit and with small enough a pericentre distance, such that the peak velocity of the star reaches 25,000 km s−1. Within the measurement abilities of current near-infrared interferometry and future spectroscopy on an extremely large telescope, the motion of S301 is directly sensitive to the spin of Sgr A*. The high eccentricity of S301 suggests that it is the captured component of a binary that was torn apart by the Hills mechanism.
Citation: Abd El Dayem, K., Abuter, R., Aimar, N. et al. Discovery of a star sensitive to the spin of Sagittarius A*. Nature657, 359–363 (2026).
