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November 21, 2025—Could we one day detect comets around other stars? Plus, how black holes preserve information and the CDC ends research on monkeys. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | Jeffery DelViscio/Scientific American; Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures | | - For his new book, Nanocosmos: Journeys in Electron Space, Michael Benson used a scanning electron microscope to photograph snowflakes, radiolarians (unicellular organisms) and moon rocks. Science Quickly host Kendra Pierre-Louis met up with Benson to learn more about his photography technique. Watch the full interview here.
| | Below is an excerpt from the latest edition of "The Universe," a weekly column by astronomer Phil Plait. I think you'll love Phil's approachable, and often amusing, way of explaining the cosmos. Sign up for an alert and read it first every week. | | An artist's impression of exocomets orbiting the star Beta Pictoris. ESO/L. Calçada (CC BY 4.0) | | I do so love an ostentatious comet.
As I wrote in a recent "The Universe" column, when these dusty ice balls are billions of kilometers from the sun, they're frozen solid. But as they near our star on their orbit, they warm up. The ice thaws and turns directly to gas, which expands around a comet's solid nucleus as a fuzzy head and, sometimes, as a long, spectacular tail.
Some of these comets can get bright enough for us to see without optical aid, but the vast majority of them never become very conspicuous. When they're out in the deep solar system, beyond the orbit of Neptune, we need gigantic telescopes to see them at all, so feebly do they reflect sunlight.
Given that we now know that planets are the norm around other stars, too, it's not a big leap to think those stars might host comets as well. The sun sits in the center of a vast collection of small cometary bodies, which may number as many as a trillion. If that's the case for other stars, might we be able to detect them?
This may seem hopeless at first blush; the next nearest star is 10,000 times farther away than Neptune, so even in this best-case scenario, any comets beyond our solar system would be impossibly faint. Searching for them might seem like a fool's errand.
And yet, incredibly, we know of dozens of stars that sport exocometary companions! And just as astonishing, the first such alien comets were detected nearly 40 years ago.
Read the rest of Phil's column here, and sign up in the blue box at the top of the article for an email alert and read it first every week.
| | | The Information Conundrum | According to the fundamental laws of physics, information is never destroyed. This aligns with the quantum principle that the universe is reversible: based on what is known now, one could rewind (or even fast forward) time and be able to deduce what once existed (or will exist). But what about what gets sucked into a black hole? This idea presents a conundrum for physicists, since black holes draw everything within their boundaries into them, even light, and over time they leak particles and eventually evaporate entirely. So what happens to the information that went into them?
A possible answer: Scientists made a breakthrough on this problem several years ago when they considered spacetime itself as a quantum phenomenon. Black holes would not be fixed entities, but would embody various shapes based on quantum probabilities. Inside some black holes wormholes would form connecting to other black holes. Then information pulled into them would not be destroyed, but travel through the wormholes.
Why this is interesting: This puzzle might some day reveal how quantum physics and general relativity fit together. As space editor Clara Moskowitz writes, "The fact that black holes store information implies that spacetime itself can store information and possibly that spacetime is information."
This article is part of a package in collaboration with Forbes on time capsules, preserving information and communicating with the future. Read more from the report. | | | | |
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| | Even if this email gets deleted or overlooked under a heap of accumulating messages in your inbox, I'm comforted to know that its information will, at least according to physics, persist for eternity. Thank you to all Today in Science readers for reading and for being a part of this science-information-loving community. | | —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor
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