Part 16 of a series reassessing the documentary record behind the 1933 Magenta narrative. TL;DR Historical Palomar plates contain unexplained, star-like marks. Some have been recovered by a separate detection pipeline; that establishes reproducible marks in the scans, while their physical origin remains disputed. The Earth-shadow claim has several reported significances under different comparisons. The original paper’s coverage-adjusted result is 7.6σ, rather than its idealized 22σ headline....

It's been 30 days since 3I/ATLAS made its closest approach to Jupiter. One paper has appeared on arXiv since then. One. From a team using a 10-inch telescope. Nothing from Hubble. Nothing from JWST. Nothing from Juno. Nothing from ESA. Nothing from any major observatory on Earth. No new papers in Icarus. No new papers in MNRAS. No new papers in ApJL. No new papers in A&A. The community that produced dozens of papers per month for 9 straight months hasn't published a single major result from t...

A new peer-reviewed study published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society by Oxford University Press finds that purple bacteria could dominate some exoplanets and create detectable light signatures, meaning alien life may appear purple rather than green. https://t.co/bmOab3CQGP