Aster · News
Week of October 24–30, 2026Nº 2
Chile’s Rubin Observatory found its first possible dwarf planet, and two astronauts stepped outside to give the Space Station more power. Back on Earth there was a new dinosaur in Argentina, a hidden layer over France’s oldest paintings and the end of the leap second. In music, Apple and Moog brought news. This was the most interesting stuff of the week.
Space & astronomy
It’s called 2026 ED138 and sits about 46 times the Earth–Sun distance away, farther than Pluto. Based on its brightness, it could be 600 to 1,500 km across. Astronomer Matthew Holman spotted it in data taken this year: the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s telescope in Chile had caught it 30 times over 20 nights. It still has to be confirmed as big enough to be round.
· Source: Universe Today
NASA’s Anil Menon and the Canadian Space Agency’s Joshua Kutryk spent 7 hours and 11 minutes outside to install the seventh of eight new arrays, which adds about 8 kilowatts. With all eight, the station will go from 160 to roughly 215 kilowatts. Kutryk is the fifth Canadian to walk in space; the last array goes up on November 5.
· Source: Spaceflight Now
Using the VLA and ALMA radio telescopes, a team saw the red supergiant’s atmosphere stretch into an egg shape at times. That fits the pull of a small star called Siwarha orbiting inside its outer atmosphere on a cycle of about 5.9 years. The authors note the evidence isn’t yet enough to confirm it. The study appeared in The Astronomical Journal.
· Source: Universe Today
Researchers from Sorbonne University and the CNRS shone ultraviolet light, without touching the walls, on drawings about 37,000 years old in this French cave. They found a transparent calcite film that may protect them like a natural varnish, though if it thickens it could also hide them. Some lines also seem to have been drawn with still-hot charcoal.
· Source: Sci.News
It’s called Rinconraptor pipoae, lived about 83 million years ago and was a megaraptorid, a group of meat-eaters with powerful arms. It was found near Rincón de los Sauces in Neuquén, Argentina, from ten tail vertebrae and parts of an arm and a leg. A CONICET team presented it in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica.
· Source: Sci.News
A University of Cambridge team simulated 100,000 histories of comet impacts. In 54% of them, none delivered enough hydrogen cyanide, a key molecule for the chemistry that comes before life: small comets break apart in the air and impact heat destroys those molecules. Mars, with weaker gravity and thinner air, fared better.
· Source: Sci.News
The General Conference on Weights and Measures, meeting in Versailles, agreed to stop adding leap seconds to official time (UTC) starting in 2027. Since 1972, 27 had been added to keep pace with Earth, whose spin is slowly getting slower; the last one came in 2016. Now the gap can grow up to an hour before it’s corrected, which would take centuries.
· Source: Universe Today
The French company released the weights of Mistral Large 4, nicknamed “Le Chonk,” so anyone can download it and run it on their own hardware, under its own license. It has about a trillion parameters, of which it uses roughly 49 billion at a time, and the company says it excels at cybersecurity. It was trained in Europe on about 4,000 Nvidia chips.
· Source: TechCrunch
Apple announced the new version of its production app, free for existing owners. The assistant, in beta and English-only at first, can add tracks, open plugins or adjust levels when you ask. There’s also a sound browser that understands phrases like “heavy techno drums” and a splitter that breaks drums into six stems. It ships in November.
· Source: MusicRadar
The Model 112, with a 12-inch speaker and 440 W, costs $799; the Model 210, with two 10-inch speakers and 550 W, costs $999. Both have a flat response so they don’t color the sound of synths and drum machines, plus a four-channel stereo mixer, Bluetooth and the option to link two in stereo. They’re on sale now.
· Source: Synthtopia
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