# An ASTROPHYSICIST'S TOP 5 space news stories of 2025 ## Метаданные - **Канал:** Dr. Becky - **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jt7Jm94Pe2E - **Дата:** 26.12.2025 - **Длительность:** 10:01 - **Просмотры:** 74,521 ## Описание 2025 has seen a LOT of big astrophysics and astronomy news announced, and while I’ve tried to cover as much as I can on this channel, I could never keep up with the pace of work of my colleagues because over 33,000 astronomy research papers have been published in 2025 alone! Some of those made a bigger impact than others though, so as is becoming tradition on this channel, I figured since we’re nearing the end of the year, let’s count down my Top 5 biggest space news stories of 2025... 00:00 - Introduction 00:43 - NUMBER 5 02:14 - NUMBER 4 04:08 - NUMBER 3 06:22 - NUMBER 2 07:57 - NUMBER 1 Madhusudhan et al. (2025) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.12267 Madhusudhan et la. (2023) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.05566 Taylor et al. (2025) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.15916 Luque et al. (2025) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.13407 Wellbanks et al. (2025) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.21788 More on the DESI data release and research papers - https://www.desi.lbl.gov/2025/03/19/desi-dr2-results-march-19-guide/ DESI collaboration (2025) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.14738 My previous video on DESI Y1 results - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRUTnoveZs8 Access the DESI DR1 data yourself - https://data.desi.lbl.gov/doc/ More on Comet 3I/ATLAS - https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/ESA_observations_of_interstellar_comet_3I_ATLAS Video filmed on a Sony ⍺7 IV Video edited by Martino Gasparrini: https://www.fiverr.com/mgs_editing --- 📚 My book, "A Brief History of Black Holes", out NOW in hardback, paperback, e-book and audiobook (which I narrated myself!): http://lnk.to/DrBecky --- 👕 My merch, including JWST designs, are available here (with worldwide shipping!): https://dr-becky.teemill.com/ --- 🎧 Royal Astronomical Society Podcast that I co-host: podfollow.com/supermassive --- 🔔 Don't forget to subscribe and click the little bell icon to be notified when I post a new video! --- 👩🏽‍💻 I'm Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford (Christ Church). I love making videos about science with an unnatural level of enthusiasm. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don't know. If you've ever wondered about something in space and couldn't find an answer online - you can ask me! My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars. http://drbecky.uk.com ## Содержание ### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jt7Jm94Pe2E) Introduction 2025 has seen a lot of astrophysics and astronomy news stories announced. And while I've tried to cover as much as I can on this channel, I could never keep up with the pace of work of my colleagues because over 32,000 astronomy research papers have been published in 2025 alone. Some of those made a bigger impact than others, though. So, as has become tradition for this channel at the end of the year, let's count down my top five of the biggest astrophysics, astronomy, space news stories of 2025. But before you watch this video, why don't you put a guess for what you think will make my number one spot down in the comments below. In the meantime though, let's start with number five. asteroid 2024 YR4 and its potential ### [0:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jt7Jm94Pe2E&t=43s) NUMBER 5 chance of impact with Earth in 2032 that we now thankfully know is not going to happen. But cast your mind way back to the beginning of 2025 when this asteroid had just been discovered and initial calculations of its orbit back in January gave it a 1. 2% chance or a 1 in 83 chance of impact with Earth in December 2032. That gave this asteroid a rating of three on the Torino impact hazard scale. that tells us how worried we should be about a certain asteroid, which for a while put 2024 YR4 at the top of the risk list for nearear potentially hazardous asteroids. In February, with more data and more observations, that chance actually went up as high as 3. 1% chance of impact. But thankfully, with more observations with the likes of the Very Large Telescope in Chile, that probability was cut in half. And then by the 24th of February, a flurry of observations from groundbased observatories during the darker skies around the new moon brought that probability of impact with Earth down to just 0. 0 0. 1%. I just double check what the chance is now in December 2025 and it's down at 0. 08%. So nothing to worry about at all. Just a fun occasion when it does pass close to us in 2032. Maybe even impacting with the moon. the probability for which now sits at 4. 3% for a moon impact. So, I'm sure we're all keeping our fingers crossed that does actually happen. And then a moon impact with an asteroid makes it into my top five news stories list for 2032. But next up on my 2025 ### [2:14](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jt7Jm94Pe2E&t=134s) NUMBER 4 list is number four, the first images from the Reuben Observatory, which we retreated to at the end of June 2025. Now, first proposed back in 2001, and after 15 years of construction, Rubin is a telescope that is now up and running with the most ambitious astronomy project ever, imaging the entire sky every three nights for the next 10 years. If anything moves, changes, or flares in the sky, we will spot it with Reubin's 8. 4 m telescope. It's estimated that it's going to detect 20 billion objects in the sky over those 10 years and flag 10 million things that have changed in the sky after each 3-day pass. In 10 years of operations, it will collect around 60 pabytes of data, which is 1 million times larger than all the data on Wikipedia. Now, we saw the very first images from the telescope released back in June from just 7 days of observations that gave us a taste of what we can expect over the next 10 years. For a comparison, here's a previous survey image of a patch of sky in the Virgo cluster. And then here is what Reuben saw in just 10 total hours of observation time. The change in the level of detail here is just stunning. This is also just a tiny sliver of the entire image that was released back in June, within which 4,000 asteroids were detected in just that one short space of time. Of those 1,800 were previously known objects that had already been recorded, but 2,14 of them were new asteroids in the solar system, which is just an absolutely crazy number. If you consider the size of this patch of sky versus the area of sky Reubin will survey in the next 10 years and extrapolate from there, it's likely that Reubin will detect over 1. 5 million asteroids in the next year alone. That's more than have been detected in the past 200 years. So the numbers when it comes to Reuben are crazy and it's why it makes number four on my list. Above it at number three ### [4:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jt7Jm94Pe2E&t=248s) NUMBER 3 though were the claims of a detection of a bio signature, a possible sign of life on the exoplanet K218b. But let me be clear here early on. No, we have not detected alien life in this planet's atmosphere. The detection itself of dimethyl sulfide is tentative and the molecule itself doesn't necessarily mean life. So K28b is a planet orbiting another star in our galaxy of stars, the Milky Way. It's about 124 lighty years away from Earth, and it takes 33 days to orbit its red dwarf star, which is much smaller and cooler than our sun. Meaning it still sits in what's known as the habitable zone around its star, where it's not too hot and not too cold for life as we know it to potentially exist there. And back in 2023, Medusa and collaborators released this paper claiming a tentative detection of a molecule known as dimethyl sulfide in K28B's atmosphere, a molecule that is associated with life here on Earth. So, it's considered a good molecule to look for when it comes to the search for life in the universe. But this detection was very tentative because the data they had from the James Web Space Telescope, JWST, wasn't good enough to make a strong claim. But back in April 2025, Medusa and collaborators published another paper, this time analyzing different JWST data of K28B that was taken at a longer wavelength, so redder light, and once again claimed a detection of dimethyl sulfide in the atmosphere of K28b. They did this by waiting for the planet to pass in front of its star so that they can see the impact of the atmosphere on the starlight. Each molecule likes to absorb specific wavelengths or colors or energies of light. And so by finding those specific signatures, we can know a molecule is there. It sounds simple, but in practice, this is very difficult because of noisy data. And because the signatures of these molecules all overlap, hence why these claimed detections have been tentative, they don't have the strong evidence yet, we need to claim a firm detection in physics. So, it's unsurprising that a whole slew of papers has since come out challenging that detection and interpreting the data with different models which don't make a claim for any dimethyl sulfide in K28B's atmosphere. The debate is definitely still raging though, so I'm sure there'll be more to come on this in 2026, so make sure you subscribe so you don't miss out. Next up ### [6:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jt7Jm94Pe2E&t=382s) NUMBER 2 on my list, just coming in at the number two spot, was the big claim of dark energy changing with time that came from the dark energy spectroscopic survey or DESI back in March 2025. Desi is a survey telescope like Reuben. And the goal is to make a big map of the positions of all galaxies within 11 billion lightyears. And with that map, we can do lots of things like find where all the matter is and isn't and also look at how the space between galaxies, i. e. The expansion of the universe has been changing over time. We know already that the expansion rate is accelerating, but that rate of acceleration was thought to be a constant, a cosmological constant. Now, we don't know what this is, like what's actually causing this acceleration of the expansion of the universe. We just call it dark energy. But the results from Desi have shown strong evidence for this dark energy changing with time. I. e. the acceleration rate of the expansion rate of the universe changing with time. I've covered how they did this using something known as barionic acoustic oscillations in a few videos on my channel before, which I'll link below for you for a proper deep dive into the science if you fancy it. But what these results from Desi are suggesting is that our best model of the universe might be wrong and need tweaking to account for the fact that dark energy changes behavior over time, which is a big deal for fixing the crisis in cosmology problem which has been plaguing astrophysics for over a decade now. Could changing dark energy be the missing piece of the puzzle? Maybe we'll find out in 2026. But finally, at my ### [7:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jt7Jm94Pe2E&t=477s) NUMBER 1 number one spot for 2025, did you guess it? It's the discovery of comet 3i Atlas, the interstellar visitor to the solar system. This was discovered back in July 2025, and it caused so much excitement for my astrophysics colleagues. So, this is an asteroid or a comet-like object, a lump of rock that instead of orbiting the sun as part of our solar system, is just passing through the solar system. It formed around another star in our galaxy and has since been ejected from its orbit around that star and traveling through the space between stars interstellar space ever since until it happened upon the solar system. Now, there's only been two of these things found in the past. The first one, one eye, dubbed AmuA Mua, was found in 2017. And the second one that was discovered, two I Borisov, was detected back in 2019. So, these are very rare and we know that they're interstellar objects because their movements through the sky allow us to work out that their orbits aren't bound to the sun, right? They don't loop back around. And by studying these objects, once we find them, we can learn so much about what they're made of, which then allows us to learn more about how planet systems are made around stars and answer questions about our own solar system, too. We can ask things like are the comet-like things in our solar system made of similar or different things to objects formed in other star systems out there in the galaxy? How unique really is the solar system? And there's been some really interesting results about 3i Atlas so far like JBST's observations which revealed a really high ratio of carbon dioxide to water than compared to typical comets in the solar system. a result which is still being heavily debated along with each new observation we get of this interstellar visitor of three eye atlas. And it's the mystery and intrigue around this object that earns it the top spot on my list for this year. So there you have it, my top five astronomy and astrophysics research news stories of 2025. And I don't know about you, but I cannot wait to see what astrophysics discoveries 2026 will bring. --- *Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/15126*