Stuart Broad hopes to go out on the highest of highs today with a series-levelling victory over Australia after deciding this final Ashes Test and the 167th of his career will be his last.

Broad, 37, will retire upon the conclusion of this match following a 17-year career that has seen him become England’s second most prolific Test bowler overall behind close friend and new ball partner Jimmy Anderson, and the number one when it comes to Ashes wickets.

He will now join Sky Sports’ commentary team with immediate effect, after deciding to quit playing while still at the top of his game rather than hold on to tour India in early 2024.

Only Australia’s Mitchell Starc has managed more than the 20 wickets that Broad has taken during an Ashes series in which he became only the fifth player in Test history to reach the 600 mark and the first Englishman to take 150 against Australia, surpassing Ian Botham’s tally of 148 in the process.

Mail Sport understands that Broad decided the time was right at the close of the second day’s play of a contest at the Kia Oval that Ben Stokes’ team must win to secure a 2-2 draw.

He informed long-standing team-mates Anderson and Joe Root of his decision before play on Saturday morning, and was said to be fighting back tears in the process.

England fed off the emotion on Saturday, powering their way to a lead in excess of 300 runs on the third day.

The news comes just hours after fellow veteran Anderson, 41, insisted he had more to offer at the highest level.

Exiting centre stage on his own terms and at the end of the most prestigious of series feels appropriate.

Like his father Chris, facing Australia has brought out the best in Broad: his five-wicket burst at the Oval in 2009 set up victory and a 2-1 series win while his eight for 15 at Trent Bridge in 2015 was one of the great Ashes performances.

In between, he also ransacked the Australian batting with a man-of-the-match performance at Chester-le-Street in 2013 as England eased to a 3-0 victory.

But he has also been public enemy number one in Australian cricket circles, the target of booing from the stands during the winter of 2013-14, triggered by a refusal to walk after nicking behind in the Trent Bridge Test the previous summer.

He has also gained a reputation for revving up the atmosphere in home Tests with his gesticulating to crowds and was this week involved in another Aussie-riling moment when he randomly walked up to the striker’s end and switched the bails – Marnus Labuschagne countered his way from the field after edging the very next delivery.

Broad’s early career saw him feature across all three international formats and he came back from being hit for six sixes in an over by Yuvraj Singh at the 2007 Twenty20 World Cup by being a member of the team that lifted England’s first ever global trophy at the same event in the Caribbean three years later.

The Nottinghamshire seamer also captained England in T20 cricket for a period before concentrating on Test cricket from 2016 onwards.

England had already moved away from him and Anderson following a disastrous 50-over World Cup the previous year.

His resurgence under the captaincy of Ben Stokes followed a controversial omission for the tour of the Caribbean in the spring of last year, and followed another episode in 2020 when his omission from a Test against West Indies in Southampton triggered a public outburst and him to contemplate whether he had an England future.

Now, however, he will have the chance to say goodbye in style to Test cricket and will do so with only Muttiah Muralitharan, Shane Warne, Anil Kumble and Anderson above him statistically amongst its bowlers.

NASA‘s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has detected a new carbon compound in space for the first time that forms the foundations of all known life.

Known as methyl cation (CH3+), the molecule was found in a young star system about 1,350 light-years away in the Orion Nebula, an enormous cloud of dust and gas where vast numbers of new stars are being forged.

CH3+ is theorized to be particularly important because it reacts readily with many other molecules, and scientists suspect it forms a cornerstone of interstellar organic chemistry.

The discovery, led by the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Toulouse, will give astronomers more clues to how the universe formed.

Marie-Aline Martin-Drumel of the University of Paris-Saclay in France, a member of the science team, said in a statement: ‘This detection not only validates the incredible sensitivity of Webb but also confirms the postulated central importance of CH3+ in interstellar chemistry.’

The molecule was detected in a young star system with a protoplanetary disk known as d203-506.

A protoplanetary disk is a rotating circumstellar disk of dense gas surrounding a young, newly formed star.

While the star in d203-506 is a small red dwarf, the system is bombarded by intense ultraviolet (UV) light from nearby hot, young, massive stars. 

Scientists believe that most planet-forming disks undergo intense UV radiation since stars tend to form in groups that often include massive, UV-producing stars.

And most complex organic molecules are destroyed by UV radiation, which scientists said is a surprise to detect CH3+. 

But in this case, the radiation could fuel the molecule with energy, allowing it to form in the first place. 

Broadly, the team notes that the molecules they saw in d203-506 are quite different from typical protoplanetary disks. In particular, they could not detect any signs of water.

Lead author Olivier Berné of the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Toulouse said: ‘This clearly shows that ultraviolet radiation can completely change the chemistry of a protoplanetary disk. 

‘It might actually play a critical role in the early chemical stages of the origins of life.’

Experts believe JWST – the most powerful device ever launched into space – will help lead the charge in discovering an exoplanet hospitable for life in the next 25 years.

Astrophysicist Sasha Quanz, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, believes aliens will be confirmed in two and a half decades, but JWST will not do it – its successors will.

These statements are echoed in a recent study from the University of California that stated extraterrestrials will make contact with humans by 2029, but not with the help of telescopes.

The JWST has already detected carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere of two exoplanets outside our Solar System – the first-ever observations of this kind.

This is because JWST can analyze molecules in the atmosphere of distant worlds and identify those essential for life.

Building off of the technology and success of JWST, NASA is developing a multi-billion successor tasked with searching for life on Earth-like planets as soon as the early 2040s.

The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HabEx) will specifically examine the air of Earth-like ‘exoplanets’ for signs they could sustain life.