JWST May Soon Search for Planets in the "Venus Zone" to Does the Universe Have a Boundary?

Today’s news stories include Alien life may thrive in space dust released by huge asteroid impact, and more.

James Webb may soon search for planets in the Venus Zone – Here's why. "Is Earth weird or is Venus the weird one?" explores Chris Young for Interesting Engineering. A team of astronomers has proposed using the James Webb Space Telescope to peer at five planets that exist in the so-called "Venus Zone".

Oumuamua Was a Comet After All, a Study Suggests-- offer “a surprisingly simple explanation” for the curious behavior of the interstellar visitor in 2017, reports Dennis Overbye for New York Times Science. “Was it alien space junk? A wandering interstellar asteroid? Or a weird comet from another sun?”

New JWST Image Captures Clearest View of Neptune’s Rings in Decades, reports NASA. “It has been three decades since we last saw these faint, dusty rings, and this is the first time we’ve seen them in the infrared,” notes Heidi Hammel, a Neptune system expert and interdisciplinary scientist for Webb. Webb’s extremely stable and precise image quality permits these very faint rings to be detected so close to Neptune.

Theoretical Physicist Brian Greene answers 10 mind-bending questions about our Universe, reports NZ Herald. "What’s outside the Universe? Does dark matter exist? What are the prospects of finding other intelligent life? And can scientists really find a “theory of everything”?

Does the Universe have an edge?--"It’s one of the most perplexing questions in cosmology: does our Universe have an edge? If you keep travelling through space in an imaginary faster-than-light spaceship, would you ever arrive at some boundary, unable to go any further? What is outside the Universe? Does such a question even make sense? asks Sky & Night.

Alien life may thrive in space dust released by huge asteroid impact--"I calculate around 100,000 such grains could be landing on Earth every year," suggests Professor Tomonori Totani at the University of Tokyo, reports Interesting Engineering. 

Mysterious radio signal reveals intricate core of distant galaxy cluster, reports Robert Lea for Space.com.The radio halo coming from Abell 1213 is somewhat of a puzzle to astronomers.

Should the Moon Be Quarantined? explores Dr. David Warmflash for Live Science."The moon and the word "astrobiology" don't often appear in the same sentence — even with a handful of government space agencies and private corporations planning crewed forays to the lunar surface for the first time since NASA's Apollo 17 mission in 1972."

An Alien Mothership Could Be Sending Tiny Probes to Study Earth, claims paper By Harvard's Avi Loeb. Just a few weeks back, Steven Spielberg, the Hollywood director behind mega-hits like ET and Close Encounters Of Third Kind, went out on a limb and said he believed aliens existed. Further suggesting that he thought the US government was hiding information about UFO sightings, he added, "I don't believe we're alone in the universe".