This is the first time such a close grouping has been seen so soon after the Big Bang and the finding helps us better understand how supermassive black holes, one of which exists at the center of our Milky Way, formed and grew to their enormous sizes so quickly. It supports the theory that black holes can grow rapidly within large, web-like structures which contain plenty of gas to fuel them.

“This research was mainly driven by the desire to understand some of the most challenging astronomical objects—supermassive black holes in the early Universe. These are extreme systems and to date we have had no good explanation for their existence,” said Marco Mignoli, an astronomer at the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) in Bologna, Italy, and lead author of the new research published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The new observations with ESO’s VLT revealed several galaxies surrounding a supermassive black hole, all lying in a cosmic “spider’s web” of gas extending to over 300 times the size of the Milky Way. “The cosmic web filaments are like spider’s web threads,” explains Mignoli. “The galaxies stand and grow where the filaments cross, and streams of gas—available to fuel both the galaxies and the central supermassive black hole—can flow along the filaments.”

The light from this large web-like structure, with its black hole of one billion solar masses, has travelled to us from a time when the Universe was only 0.9 billion years old. “Our work has placed an important piece in the largely incomplete puzzle that is the formation and growth of such extreme, yet relatively abundant, objects so quickly after the Big Bang,” says co-author Roberto Gilli, also an astronomer at INAF in Bologna, referring to supermassive black holes.

The very first black holes, thought to have formed from the collapse of the first stars, must have grown very fast to reach masses of a billion suns within the first 0.9 billion years of the Universe’s life. But astronomers have struggled to explain how sufficiently large amounts of “black hole fuel” could have been available to enable these objects to grow to such enormous sizes in such a short time. The new-found structure offers a likely explanation: the “spider’s web” and the galaxies within it contain enough gas to provide the fuel that the central black hole needs to quickly become a supermassive giant.

But how did such large web-like structures form in the first place? Astronomers think giant halos of mysterious dark matter are key. These large regions of invisible matter are thought to attract huge amounts of gas in the early Universe; together, the gas and the invisible dark matter form the web-like structures where galaxies and black holes can evolve.

“Our finding lends support to the idea that the most distant and massive black holes form and grow within massive dark matter halos in large-scale structures, and that the absence of earlier detections of such structures was likely due to observational limitations,” says Colin Norman of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, US, also a co-author on the study.

The galaxies now detected are some of the faintest that current telescopes can observe. This discovery required observations over several hours using the largest optical telescopes available, including ESO’s VLT. Using the MUSE and FORS2 instruments on the VLT at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in the Chilean Atacama Desert, the team confirmed the link between four of the six galaxies and the black hole. “We believe we have just seen the tip of the iceberg, and that the few galaxies discovered so far around this supermassive black hole are only the brightest ones,” said co-author Barbara Balmaverde, an astronomer at INAF in Torino, Italy.

These results contribute to our understanding of how supermassive black holes and large cosmic structures formed and evolved. ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope, currently under construction in Chile, will be able to build on this research by observing many more fainter galaxies around massive black holes in the early Universe using its powerful instruments.

Those temperatures – measured by the European Space Agency’s CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite (or CHEOPS) – are enough to melt all rocks and metals, and even turn them into a gaseous form, Science Alert reported.

While the exoplanet, named WASP-189b, is not quite as hot as the surface of our Sun (6,000 degrees Celsius or 10,832 degrees Fahrenheit), it’s basically as toasty as some small dwarf stars.

The new findings immediately identify WASP-189b as one of the most extreme planets ever discovered. It has an orbit of just 2.7 days around its star, with one side seeing a permanent ‘day’ and the other side seeing a permanent ‘night’. It’s gigantic, too – about 1.6 times the size of Jupiter.

“WASP-189b is especially interesting because it is a gas giant that orbits very close to its host star,” says astrophysicist Monika Lendl from the University of Geneva in Switzerland. “It takes less than three days for it to circle its star, and it is 20 times closer to it than Earth is to the Sun.”

HD 133112 is the host star in question, 2,000 degrees Celsius (3,600 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than our Sun, and one of the hottest stars known to have a planetary system around it. CHEOPS made an interesting discovery about this celestial body too: it’s spinning so fast that it’s being pulled outwards at its equator.

WASP-189b is too far away (326 light-years) and too close to HD 133112 to observe directly, but CHEOPS knows some tricks. First, it observed the exoplanet as it passed behind its star: an occultation. Then, it watched as WASP-189b passed in front of its star: a transit.

From these readings, researchers were able to figure out the brightness, temperature, size, shape, and orbital characteristics of the exoplanet, as well as some extra information about the star that it’s circling around.

As it’s on the scale of Jupiter but much closer to its host star, and much hotter, WASP-189b qualifies as a so-called hot Jupiter planet (you can see where the name came from). Scientists are hoping that the information CHEOPS has gathered about WASP-189b will improve our understanding of hot Jupiters in general.

“Only a handful of planets are known to exist around stars this hot, and this system is by far the brightest,” says Lendl. “WASP-189b is also the brightest hot Jupiter that we can observe as it passes in front of or behind its star, making the whole system really intriguing.”

One of the questions that the new CHEOPS research has raised is how WASP-189b was formed in the first place – its inclined orbit suggests it formed further out from HD 133112 and was then driven inwards.

Besides the treasure trove of data this new study has provided, it also shows CHEOPS working as intended and working well, measuring brightness across deep space with a mind-boggling level of accuracy.

The satellite has plenty more missions to move on to next, with hundreds of exoplanets in the queue for closer observation. The data that it collects should teach us more about our own Solar System, as well as the planets outside of it.

“The accuracy achieved with CHEOPS is fantastic,” says planetary scientist Heike Rauer from the DLR Institute of Planetary Research in Germany. “The initial measurements already show that the instrument works better than expected. It is allowing us to learn more about these distant planets.”

Two telescopes in Hawaii and Chile spotted in the thick Venusian clouds the chemical signature of phosphine, a noxious gas that on Earth is only associated with life, according to a study in Monday’s journal Nature Astronomy.

Several outside experts — and the study authors themselves — agreed this is tantalizing but said it is far from the first proof of life on another planet. They said it doesn’t satisfy the “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” standard established by the late Carl Sagan, who speculated about the possibility of life in the clouds of Venus in 1967, AP reported.

“It’s not a smoking gun,” said study co-author David Clements, an Imperial College of London astrophysicist. “It’s not even gunshot residue on the hands of your prime suspect, but there is a distinct whiff of cordite in the air which may be suggesting something.”

As astronomers plan for searches for life on planets outside our solar system, a major method is to look for chemical signatures that can only be made by biological processes, called biosignatures. After three astronomers met in a bar in Hawaii, they decided to look that way at the closest planet to Earth: Venus. They searched for phosphine, which is three hydrogen atoms and a phosphorous atom.

On Earth, there are only two ways phosphine can be formed, study authors said. One is in an industrial process. (The gas was produced for use as chemical warfare agent in World War I.) The other way is as part of some kind of poorly understood function in animals and microbes. Some scientists consider it a waste product, others don’t.

Phosphine is found in “ooze at the bottom of ponds, the guts of some creatures like badgers and perhaps most unpleasantly associated with piles of penguin guano,” Clements said.

Study co-author Sara Seager, an MIT planetary scientist, said researchers “exhaustively went through every possibility and ruled all of them out: volcanoes, lightning strikes, small meteorites falling into the atmosphere. … Not a single process we looked at could produce phosphine in high enough quantities to explain our team’s findings.”

That leaves life.

The astronomers hypothesize a scenario for how life could exist on the inhospitable planet where temperatures on the surface are around 800 degrees (425 degrees Celsius) with no water.

“Venus is hell. Venus is kind of Earth’s evil twin,” Clements said. “Clearly something has gone wrong, very wrong, with Venus. It’s the victim of a runaway greenhouse effect.”

But that’s on the surface.

Seager said all the action may be 30 miles (50 kilometers) above ground in the thick carbon-dioxide layer cloud deck, where it’s about room temperature or slightly warmer. It contains droplets with tiny amounts of water but mostly sulfuric acid that is a billion times more acidic than what’s found on Earth.

The phosphine could be coming from some kind of microbes, probably single-cell ones, inside those sulfuric acid droplets, living their entire lives in the 10-mile-deep (16-kilometer-deep) clouds, Seager and Clements said. When the droplets fall, the potential life probably dries out and could then get picked up in another drop and reanimate, they said.

Life is definitely a possibility, but more proof is needed, several outside scientists said.

Cornell University astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger said the idea of this being the signature of biology at work is exciting, but she said we don’t know enough about Venus to say life is the only explanation for the phosphine.

“I’m not skeptical, I’m hesitant,” said Justin Filiberto, a planetary geochemist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston who specializes in Venus and Mars and isn’t part of the study team.

Filiberto said the levels of phosphine found might be explained away by volcanoes. He said recent studies that were not taken into account in this latest research suggest that Venus may have far more active volcanoes than originally thought. But Clements said that explanation would make sense only if Venus were at least 200 times as volcanically active as Earth.

David Grinspoon, a Washington-based astrobiologist at the Planetary Science Institute who wrote a 1997 book suggesting Venus could harbor life, said the finding “almost seems too good to be true.”

“I’m excited, but I’m also cautious,” Grinspoon said. “We found an encouraging sign that demands we follow up.”

NASA hasn’t sent anything to Venus since 1989, though Russia, Europe and Japan have dispatched probes. The U.S. space agency is considering two possible Venus missions. One of them, called DAVINCI+, would go into the Venusian atmosphere as early as 2026.

Clements said his head tells him “it’s probably a 10% chance that it’s life,” but his heart “obviously wants it to be much bigger because it would be so exciting.”

At the center of our galaxy is Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), a humongous black hole about four million times the mass of our sun. Being so big, its gravitational effects are extreme and they can be detected by looking at the stars in its immediate vicinity, Cnet reported.

Orbiting Sgr A* is a handful of stars (and some mysterious objects), locked in a cosmic two-step with the invisible monster, moving at mind-melting speeds.

And astronomers have just discovered the quickest of the lot, clocking its fastest speed around Sgr A* at 8% the speed of light.

A study, published in The Astrophysics Journal on Tuesday, examined the area surrounding Sgr A*, looking for the signature signs of stars. Previous research has discovered dozens of stars moving around the supermassive black hole on highly unusual orbits. This population of stars is known collectively as the S-stars and some of them orbit incredibly close to the black hole, making them difficult to detect.

But the research team, using instruments installed at the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, scoured through images taken between 2004 and 2016, adding five new stars, S4711-S4715, to the population and tracking their movements around Sgr A*. Their results show more evidence that a distinct population of stars orbit Sgr A* at distances comparable to the size of our solar system.

And being so close to the terrifying, bottomless abyss at the center of the Milky Way, they are privy to some extreme physics.

Florian Peissker, an astronomer at the University of Cologne in Germany, and his team have been studying the region of space close to the black hole intensely. In January, they reported observations of the star S62. Their observations, published in the Astrophysics Journal, revealed S62 was orbiting the black hole once every 9.9 years, giving it the shortest orbital period and making it the fastest star to blitz around the Milky Way’s black hole.

But Peissker and colleagues’ new data has seen S62 drop both of its records.

According to The Astronomer’s Telegram, one of the newly-discovered stars, S4711, orbits the Milky Way’s black hole once every 7.6 years, claiming the record for the shortest orbital period.

Another star, S4714, is even more extreme. It doesn’t quite get as close to Sgr A* as S4711 but it’s traveling around the black hole at 8% the speed of light. At that speed, the star is moving about 15,000 miles (24,000 kilometers) every second, which would mean it could make one full lap of the Earth in just over 1.5 seconds.

The highly-eccentric orbits of the S-stars aren’t just cosmic curiosities either; the stars help to establish further evidence for Einstein’s general theory of relativity. The theory predicts how space, time and gravity interact and suggests huge, dense objects like black holes can warp space around them. Studying the S-stars, astronomers can see some of the motion predicted by Einstein’s theory. A team from the Max Planck Institute recently did so, when they studied the star S2 earlier this year and found it adhered strictly to Einstein’s theory.

The team believes improved data analysis could yield even further insight into the space around Sgr A* and they expect more stars on extremely tight orbits to be discovered in “the near future.” The Extremely Large Telescope, which is expected to become operational in 2025, will gather 13 times more light than any optical telescope operational today and should help locate a few more. Until then, S4714 gets to wear the crown.