Cosmos & Physics · Week of July 23, 2026
India orbits privately, ITER assembles its heart, and a Jupiter-mass exomoon defies taxonomy
- Skyroot's Vikram-1 reaches orbit, making India the third private-launch nationAt 12:05 pm on Saturday, July 18, a seven-storey rocket cleared the tower at Sriharikota, and about fifteen minutes later it released six payloads into a roughly 450-kilometre orbit.
- ITER's vacuum vessel completes fabrication, entering its final assembly phaseITER's vacuum vessel completes fabrication, entering its final assembly phase
- A Jupiter-mass 'exomoon' orbiting a brown dwarf forces astronomers to rethink definitionsArticle — "A Jupiter-mass 'exomoon' orbiting a brown dwarf forces astronomers to rethink definitions": Article — "A Jupiter-mass 'exomoon' orbiting a brown dwarf forces astronomers to rethink definitions": Read the arXiv…
- Juno maps Io's hidden subsurface heat, challenging tidal-dissipation modelsArticle — "Juno maps Io's hidden subsurface heat, challenging tidal-dissipation models": Here is the thing most people will get wrong about Juno's new look at Io: they'll read "first temperature map beneath the surface o…
- AI disproves the Jacobian conjecture, and mathematicians confront machine-assisted proofThree points collapse into one: (0, 0, −1/4), (1, −3/2, 13/2), and (−1, 3/2, 13/2) all land on (−1/4, 0, 0). The Jacobian determinant of the map that does this is −2 everywhere — a nonzero constant, the exact condition a…
Threads we are following
- Will Skyroot publish a per-kilogram price and hit its one-rocket-a-month cadence before 2027 commercial service?
- Whether ITER's recovered six-month margin survives the 30-month first-of-a-kind torus welding campaign beginning in 2027
- Whether follow-up observations and the ELT confirm the CD-35 2722 companion formed by cloud collapse rather than disc accretion
- Whether pinning down the crust's loss tangent and magma temperature will finally resolve the conduction-versus-buried-lava fork
- Alpöge's promised full write-up disclosing how the model was prompted, and whether the counterexample hides a positive result
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