Month: April 2020

Enlarge / It's-a me, your Nintendo account's hijacker! (credit: Aurich Lawson / Nintendo)

Throughout the month of April, and particularly this weekend, users of online Nintendo accounts on devices like the Switch have reported receiving email notices that their accounts have been accessed by outside parties. Our ability to verify these claims was bolstered by an unfortunate intrusion on Monday: the hijacking of an Ars Technica staffer's account.

Roughly one hour before this article's publication, Reviews Editor Ron Amadeo received a plain-text email notice from Nintendo, titled simply, "[Nintendo Account] New Sign-In." The notice included the following sign-in details: a 5:25pm ET timestamp; the sign-in taking place via the Firefox browser (which Amadeo says "is not even installed" on any devices he used today), and a location estimate of "United States," which the email says is "estimated based on the IP address used." IP addresses generally pin users down to the county level when traced in the United States, and they are often as specific as individual cities or states.

The email caught Amadeo's attention in part because all of his Nintendo devices are, in his words, "collecting dust." Our cursory research for other affected users brought up threads on Reddit, Twitter, and ResetERA. One Twitter thread included a questionnaire with questions about possible account variables: whether users had logged in to the service via a website (which Amadeo had not), whether users had tied their Epic Games or Fortnite credentials to the service (Amadeo had not), and other questions. He did answer "yes" to one question, which over 90 percent of respondents had, as well: use of the Nintendo Network ID service. (Amadeo had used this for Nintendo's previous home console, the Wii U.)

Enlarge / The incredible vanishing exoplanet—what models suggest we'd see as the debris of a collision diffuses away. (credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Gáspár and G. Rieke )

We've not actually "seen" the vast majority of exoplanets we've found orbiting distant stars. Instead, their existence has been inferred based on changes in the light of the stars that they orbit. That makes the 20 or so we have imaged directly exceptional. Direct imaging typically requires a very large planet, which means this sample isn't entirely representative, but these planets do provide a unique opportunity for us to observe how bodies interact with each other and their environments in exosolar systems.

But, if two researchers at the University of Arizona are right, we can scratch one of these examples off the list. They say that the supposed planet has vanished in more recent images, which indicates it was never actually there in the first place. Instead, they argue that we've been observing the debris of a smash-up between two very large asteroids.

Well, it looked like a planet...

How could astronomers have identified a planet that didn't exist? Well, it really looked like it did. Back in 2008, when scientists first announced its discovery, the planet Fomalhaut b seemed to be very much there. Consecutive images taken a couple of years apart appeared to show it orbiting, and its orbit took it through a disk of dust and frozen material that is exactly where we'd expect planet formation to take place. So, at first glance, everything looks good.

Enlarge / An image of interstellar comet  2I/Borisov, (credit: NASA)

Comets are essentially time capsules. Most formed during the early days of our Solar System, amidst the disk of dust and gas around the Sun. The majority of this dust and gas coalesced into planets, but some of the leftovers—especially toward the outer edge of the disk—wound up in comets.

Because comets spend much of their time in cold expanses far from the Sun, their interiors are relatively well preserved. Thus most comets offer scientists an unprecedented view of what conditions were like in the earliest days of the Solar System, before planets formed.

To date, astronomers have studied hundreds of comets in out Solar System to understand its origin. But now, they've been able to look at the interior of an interstellar comet for the first time. In two new papers published in Nature Astronomy, scientists trained two of their most powerful observatories on 2I/Borisov, the first confirmed comet to enter our Solar System from elsewhere.