Astronomers have uncovered fresh clues about how distant worlds form, thanks to a new JWST mini-Neptune study that examines a rare planetary system 190 light years away. Using NASA’s powerful space telescope, researchers analysed the atmosphere of a small gas planet orbiting unusually close to its star — and found evidence that challenges long-held assumptions about where such planets originate.

In a discovery that’s quietly reshaping how astronomers think about planet formation, scientists have uncovered new clues behind one of the Milky Way’s strangest planetary pairings — a hot Jupiter and a mini-Neptune orbiting the same star.

The finding by scientists from MIT, based on observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), suggests that these two unlikely neighbours didn’t form where they are today. Instead, they likely began life much farther out in their star system and gradually migrated inward — staying together against the odds. The study, appeared in The Astrophysics Journal of Letters, reveals new measurements of the mini-Neptune’s atmosphere.

JWST mini-Neptune study : A rare planetary pairing

The system, located about 190 light years from Earth, has puzzled astronomers since its discovery in 2020. Hot Jupiters — massive gas giants that orbit very close to their stars — are usually “lonely,” with no nearby planetary companions.

But this one breaks the rule.

“This is the first time we’ve observed the atmosphere of a planet that is inside the orbit of a hot Jupiter. This measurement tells us this mini-Neptune indeed formed beyond the frost line,” says Saugata Barat, a postdoc in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research and the lead author of the study.

“This was a one-of-a-kind system,” Chelsea X. Huang, faculty at University of South Queensland, said in a media statement, explaining how such massive planets typically scatter away anything inside their orbit.

Yet in this case, a smaller mini-Neptune somehow survives closer to the star, orbiting every four days, while the hot Jupiter circles every eight.

Back in 2020, Chelsea Huang — then a Torres Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT — spotted something unusual: a mini-Neptune orbiting its star alongside an unexpected companion, a hot Jupiter.

JWST captures a crucial clue

To understand how this system formed, researchers from MIT and international institutions turned to JWST, focusing on the inner planet, TOI-1130b.

What they found was telling.

The mini-Neptune’s atmosphere is unusually “heavy,” rich in water vapour, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and traces of methane — a composition that shouldn’t exist if the planet formed close to its star.

JWST mini-Neptune study : Rethinking planet formation

That “frost line” — the region in a young star system where temperatures are low enough for ice to form — appears to be central to the story.

Scientists now believe both planets likely formed in this colder, outer region, where icy materials helped build dense atmospheres. Over time, they migrated inward together, maintaining their unusual orbital arrangement.

The findings challenge earlier assumptions that mini-Neptunes forming close to stars should have lighter atmospheres dominated by hydrogen and helium.

A system that shouldn’t exist — but does

Even observing the system was no easy task. The two planets are in what astronomers call a “mean motion resonance,” subtly tugging at each other’s orbits and making their movements harder to predict.

“It was a challenging prediction, and we had to be spot-on,” Barat said, referring to the effort required to time JWST’s observations precisely.

JWST mini-Neptune study : Why this matters

Mini-Neptunes are among the most common planets in the galaxy, yet none exist in our own solar system — making them both familiar and mysterious.

This study, appeared in Astrophysical Journal Letters, offers the clearest evidence yet that such planets can form far from their stars and migrate inward, carrying their atmospheres with them.

“This system represents one of the rarest architectures that astronomers have ever found,” Barat said in a media statement.

And in a universe full of planets, that rarity might just hold the key to understanding how many of them — including worlds very different from our own — come to be.

Breakthrough Enables Strong Encryption on Tiny, Power-Constrained Devices

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a highly energy-efficient microchip capable of running advanced post-quantum cryptography (PQC) on small, power-limited devices such as pacemakers, insulin pumps, and ingestible sensors. The breakthrough addresses a critical vulnerability in next-generation healthcare technology as quantum computing advances threaten current encryption standards.

The chip, roughly the size of a needle tip, integrates robust security features designed to protect sensitive patient data while maintaining extremely low power consumption. This makes it suitable for wireless biomedical devices that have historically lacked strong encryption due to energy constraints.

Why Post-Quantum Cryptography Matters

As quantum computers evolve, traditional encryption methods are expected to become obsolete. Governments and regulatory bodies, including the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), are already preparing to transition toward PQC algorithms to safeguard digital infrastructure.

However, PQC techniques are computationally intensive, often increasing energy usage by up to 100–1000 times—making them impractical for small, battery-powered devices until now.

This new chip bridges that gap by enabling advanced encryption without significantly increasing energy demand.

Key Innovations Behind the Chip

Multi-Layered Security Design

The chip incorporates multiple PQC algorithms to ensure long-term resilience, even if one encryption method becomes vulnerable in the future.

Built-in Random Number Generator

A highly efficient on-chip random number generator strengthens encryption by producing secure cryptographic keys internally, eliminating reliance on external components.

Protection Against Physical Attacks

The design includes safeguards against “power side-channel attacks,” where hackers attempt to extract data by analyzing power consumption patterns.

Early Fault Detection

The chip can detect voltage irregularities and abort compromised operations early, preventing energy waste and potential security breaches.

Major Gains in Energy Efficiency

The researchers report that the chip achieves 20 to 60 times greater energy efficiency compared to existing PQC implementations, while also occupying a smaller physical footprint.

This efficiency breakthrough is crucial for expanding secure computing to edge devices—systems that operate outside traditional data centers, often with strict power limitations.

More than a century after Albert Einstein predicted them, gravitational waves are transforming astronomy. Ripples in space-time produced by colliding black holes and neutron stars are now being detected routinely, revealing a universe filled with violent mergers and cosmic echoes that have travelled billions of years to reach Earth.

A Ripple Across the Cosmos

When the densest objects in the universe collide, the impact does not simply end with the destruction or merger of stars. It sends ripples through the very fabric of space and time.

These ripples—known as gravitational waves—spread outward at the speed of light, crossing galaxies and cosmic voids for millions or even billions of years. By the time they reach Earth, they are unimaginably faint distortions of space itself.

Yet scientists have learned how to detect them.

A global network of observatories now monitors these tiny disturbances: the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the United States, the Virgo detector in Italy, and the Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector (KAGRA) in Japan. Together, these instruments form one of the most sensitive scientific experiments ever constructed, capable of detecting distortions smaller than the width of a proton.

Through them, astronomers have begun to “listen” to the universe.

And what they are hearing is astonishing.

A Universe Filled with Collisions

The LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA (LVK) Collaboration has now released the latest compilation of gravitational-wave detections, to appear in a special issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters. The findings suggest that the cosmos is reverberating with collisions far more frequently than scientists once imagined.

The newly released Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog-4.0 (GWTC-4) includes detections from part of the observatories’ fourth observing run, conducted between May 2023 and January 2024.

In just nine months, the detectors recorded 128 new gravitational-wave candidates—signals that likely originated from extreme astrophysical events occurring hundreds of millions or billions of light-years away.

This newest batch more than doubles the size of the gravitational-wave catalog, which previously contained 90 candidates from earlier observing runs.

“The beautiful science that we are able to do with this catalog is enabled by significant improvements in the sensitivity of the gravitational-wave detectors as well as more powerful analysis techniques,” says Nergis Mavalvala, a member of the LVK collaboration and dean of the MIT School of Science.

What began in 2015 with the first historic detection has now become a steady stream of discoveries.

“In the past decade, gravitational wave astronomy has progressed from the first detection to the observation of hundreds of black hole mergers,” says Stephen Fairhurst, professor at Cardiff University and spokesperson for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. “These observations enable us to better understand how black holes form from the collapse of massive stars, probe the cosmological evolution of the universe and provide increasingly rigorous confirmations of the theory of general relativity.”

When Black Holes Dance

Most gravitational waves detected so far originate from binary black holes—pairs of black holes locked in orbit around each other.

Over time, gravity draws them closer together. As they spiral inward, they release enormous amounts of energy in the form of gravitational waves. In the final fraction of a second, the two objects merge in a titanic collision, forming a single, larger black hole.

These cosmic dances are among the most energetic events in the universe.

Black holes themselves are born when massive stars collapse at the end of their lives, compressing enormous amounts of matter into regions so dense that not even light can escape.

Many form in pairs. When they eventually collide, the event sends gravitational waves surging through space.

The first such detection, announced in 2016, confirmed a century-old prediction of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Since then, dozens—and now hundreds—of similar events have been observed.

But the latest catalog shows that the universe is far more diverse than scientists once believed.

Pushing the Edges of Black Hole Physics

The newly detected signals reveal a remarkable variety of cosmic systems.

Among them are the heaviest black hole binaries ever detected, systems where the masses of the two black holes are strikingly unequal, and pairs spinning at astonishing speeds.

“The message from this catalog is: We are expanding into new parts of what we call ‘parameter space’ and a whole new variety of black holes,” says Daniel Williams, a research fellow at the University of Glasgow. “We are really pushing the edges, and are seeing things that are more massive, spinning faster, and are more astrophysically interesting and unusual.”

One particularly dramatic signal—GW231123_135430—appears to have originated from two enormous black holes, each roughly 130 times the mass of the Sun. Most previously observed mergers involved black holes closer to 30 solar masses.

The extraordinary size of these objects suggests they may themselves have formed from earlier black hole mergers—a kind of cosmic generational chain.

Another remarkable event, GW231028_153006, revealed a binary in which both black holes are spinning at around 40 percent of the speed of light.

And in GW231118_005626, scientists detected an unusually uneven pair where one black hole is roughly twice as massive as the other.

“One of the striking things about our collection of black holes is their broad range of properties,” says Jack Heinzel, an MIT graduate student who contributed to the catalog’s analysis. “Some of them are over 100 times the mass of our sun, others are as small as only a few times the mass of the sun. Some black holes are rapidly spinning, others have no measurable spin.”

“We still don’t completely understand how black holes form in the universe,” he adds, “but our observations offer a crucial insight into these questions.”

Catching a Whisper in Space-Time

Detecting gravitational waves requires extraordinary precision.

The observatories use L-shaped interferometers with arms several kilometers long. Laser beams travel down these tunnels and reflect back to their source.

If a gravitational wave passes through the detector, it slightly stretches one arm while compressing the other, changing the distance the light travels by an incredibly tiny amount.

These changes can be smaller than one-thousandth the diameter of a proton.

Even with such advanced technology, detections remain unpredictable.

“You can’t ever predict when a gravitational wave is going to come into your detector,” says Amanda Baylor, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee who worked on the signal search. “We could have five detections in one day, or one detection every 20 days. The universe is just so random.”

Recent upgrades have dramatically improved the detectors’ reach. LIGO can now detect signals from neutron star collisions up to one billion light-years away, and black hole mergers far beyond that.

Testing Einstein’s Ultimate Theory

Gravitational waves are not only revealing spectacular cosmic events. They are also providing some of the most extreme tests ever conducted of Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

Black holes themselves are one of the most extraordinary predictions of the theory.

“Black holes are one of the most iconic and mind-bending predictions of general relativity,” says Aaron Zimmerman, associate professor of physics at the University of Texas at Austin.

When two black holes collide, he explains, they “shake up space and time more intensely than almost any other process we can imagine observing.”

One particularly powerful signal—GW230814_230901—allowed scientists to analyze the structure of the gravitational wave in exceptional detail.

“So far, the theory is passing all our tests,” Zimmerman says. “But we’re also learning that we have to make even more accurate predictions to keep up with all the data the universe is giving us.”

Measuring the Expansion of the Universe

Gravitational waves are also becoming powerful tools for answering one of cosmology’s biggest questions: how fast the universe is expanding.

Astronomers measure this expansion using the Hubble constant, but different methods have produced conflicting results.

Gravitational waves offer an independent approach.

“Merging black holes have a really unique property: We can tell how far away they are from Earth just from analyzing their signals,” says Rachel Gray, a lecturer at the University of Glasgow.

“So, every merging black hole gives us a measurement of the Hubble constant, and by combining all of the gravitational wave sources together, we can vastly improve how accurate this measurement is.”

Using the current gravitational-wave catalog, scientists estimate that the universe is expanding at roughly 76 kilometers per second per megaparsec.

For now, the uncertainty remains large—but future detections could sharpen the measurement significantly.

Listening to the Future

Only a decade ago, gravitational waves were purely theoretical signals.

Today, they are transforming astronomy.

With every new detection, scientists gain another glimpse into the hidden life of the universe: the birth of black holes, the evolution of galaxies, and the behavior of gravity under the most extreme conditions imaginable.

“Each new gravitational-wave detection allows us to unlock another piece of the universe’s puzzle in ways we couldn’t just a decade ago,” says Lucy Thomas, a postdoctoral researcher at the Caltech LIGO Lab.

“It’s incredibly exciting to think about what astrophysical mysteries and surprises we can uncover with future observing runs.”

The instruments on Earth are quiet, their lasers moving silently down vacuum tunnels. But far beyond our galaxy, black holes continue to collide.

And with each collision, the universe sends out another ripple—another echo across the cosmos—waiting for us to hear it.