News from Outer Space: Life On Mars, The 3I Atlas Object, and Black Holes Colliding
Los Angeles, CA, September 2025 – Editor’s Note: These three news stories below have struck a chord with The WOW! Signal’s Editorial Team, as well as with millions of lovers of astronomy and all things “outer space” around the world:
LIFE ON MARS
A recent NASA press conference from the Perseverance team has announced their findings: the "clearest sign of life that we've ever found on Mars". NASA recently pre-trailed an "exciting" announcement coming from the Perseverance rover team. The release was light on what would be announced, but now we have an answer.
"For the last 30 years, NASA has been exploring Mars. And in that exploration, we're looking for signs of life, we're looking for water," acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy said during the press conference.
"And in the past, we thought we found signs of life. And when we did that, we put it out to the scientific community and the scientific community would come back and say 'well listen, there's different explanations for what you think was life. Actually, it was created by something else'."
That, apparently, isn't the case with the latest work.
"A year ago, we found a sample," he added. "We thought we found what we believe to be signs of microbial life on the Mars surface. So, we put it out to our scientific friends to pressure test it, to analyze it and go 'did we get this right, do we think [these are] signs of ancient life on Mars?'."
The full story can be read here: https://www.iflscience.com/nasas-mysterious-announcement-clearest-sign-of-life-that-weve-ever-found-on-mars-80770?ref=ufouapwtf.com
THE ATLAS 31 OBJECT:
Surprising new photos of comet 3I/ATLAS taken during a recent total lunar eclipse hint that the "interstellar visitor" may be turning bright green as it approaches the halfway point on its journey through the solar system. This unexpected transformation, if confirmed, is likely the result of the comet's increasing proximity to the sun, experts say.
3I/ATLAS is a roughly 7-mile-wide (11 kilometers) comet that was first spotted in early July, zooming toward us at more than 130,000 mph (210,000 km/h) from beyond the orbit of Jupiter. Astronomers quickly realized that the superfast object did not originate within our cosmic neighborhood, and was instead passing through on a one-way trip. It was likely ejected from a distant star system within the Milky Way and is probably much older than the solar system.
The comet is now closing in on a flyby of Mars next month, before reaching its minimum distance from the sun on Oct. 29. As the interstellar interloper gets closer to the sun, it has started to soak up more solar radiation, causing more ice, gas and dust to be expelled from its core, which has allowed it to start growing a traditional cometary tail.
But on Sept. 7, astrophotographers Michael Jäger and Gerald Rhemann snapped new shots of the comet in the dark skies over Namibia. These images were taken during the "blood moon" total lunar eclipse, when the full moon passed through the darkest part of Earth's shadow, meaning that the skies were darker than normal for that time of month. The resulting photos show 3I/ATLAS with a surprising emerald hue.
The new images suggest that the comet's increasing proximity to the sun has caused it to "turn green" as new, rarer chemicals are expelled from its core, Spaceweather.com reported. However, it is still too soon to tell for sure, as no other photographers or observatories have so far witnessed this change.
The full story can be read here:
BLACK HOLES COLLIDING:
Astronomers have detected a collision between two black holes in unprecedented detail, offering the clearest view yet into the nature of these cosmic oddities and confirming long-held predictions made by legendary physicists Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking.
The event, dubbed GW250114, became known in January 2025, when researchers spotted it with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) — a set of two identical instruments located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington. The instruments detected gravitational waves, faint ripples in space-time produced by the two black holes slamming into each other.
Searching for gravitational waves, phenomena predicted in 1915 as part of Einstein’s theory of relativity, is the only way to identify black hole collisions from Earth. Einstein believed that the waves would be too weak to ever be picked up by human technology, but in September 2015, LIGO recorded them for the very first time, later netting a Nobel Prize for three scientists who made key contributions to the development of this “black hole telescope.”
The newly detected black holes were each around 30 to 35 times the mass of the sun, and they were spinning very slowly, said Maximiliano Isi, an assistant professor of astronomy at Columbia University and an astrophysicist at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York City.
Isi led a new study for the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration on the GW250114 data, which published recently in the journal, Physical Review Letters.
The full story can be read here: https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/11/science/black-hole-collision-einstein-hawking
SUBMITTED BY:
Dan Harary
Editor, The WOW! Signal News
