Exoplanets

The James Webb Space Telescope is so powerful that it has given us new glimpses into the mysteries of the early universe. Scientists have also used Webb to detect carbon dioxide and water vapor on distant exoplanets. Now, James Webb has detected methane in an exoplanet’s atmosphere for the first time.The exoplanet in question is WASP-80 b, which is what astronomers call a “warm Jupiter.” This means the planet is large like Jupiter, but its surface temperature averages around 825 kelvins (roughly 1,025…

Consider this: Astronomers think of the Hubble Space Telescope as small.That may surprise you, since after three decades of taking images with depth and detail most ground-based telescopes couldn’t achieve, popular conception holds that Hubble must be one of the biggest telescopes ever built.But its mirror is only 2.4-meters wide. That’s not terribly large. Even the newer JWST, now taking images evoking gasps similar to Hubble’s, has a mirror that’s 6.5 meters wide, which only puts it in medium-to-big territory among…

Researchers using data from the Kepler Space Telescope have found that some exoplanets are shrinking due to loss of their atmospheres, likely caused by radiation from their cores. This discovery helps explain the observed size gap in exoplanets and indicates a significant atmospheric loss process different from the previously theorized photoevaporation.A new study could explain the ‘missing’ exoplanets between super-Earths and sub-Neptunes.Some exoplanets seem to be losing their atmospheres and shrinking. In a new study…

It’s hard to believe that just four decades ago, we had no idea whether planets existed outside our solar system. Scientists discovered the first exoplanet in 1992, and since then our understanding of the universe has changed irrevocably. Now, scientists estimate that there are as many planets around us as there are stars. The cosmos are littered with icy, gaseous, and rocky bodies that may one day reveal life on another world.As of October 24, 2023, scientists have confirmed the existence of 5,535 planets outside of our…

“There is no dark side of the moon, really. Matter of fact, it’s all dark.” —Pink Floyd With my apologies to Roger Waters, who wrote those lyrics, there is a dark side of the moon. And sometimes it’s not all that dark. You can see that for yourself over the next few nights. Go outside just after sunset, and turn your gaze to the west. You’ll see brilliant Venus setting not far above the horizon and, depending on the exact day you look, the thin crescent moon nearby. If you go out tonight (Friday, July 21, 2023), the…

I discovered over the past several years that I’m not as rare as I once thought I was. There are many people out there who have a science and arts interest and aren’t quite sure how to combine them. I wrote this for people who have more than one interest, maybe more than two, and they’re not sure what to do about that. I wrote it for people who think that it’s too late to have that life or career they wanted to have because of personal, financial, logistical challenges. As an older returning student, I had thought, “It’s…

Astronomers have, so far, discovered nearly 5,500 exoplanets—alien worlds orbiting alien stars—with over 7,000 candidate planets still waiting to be confirmed. That’s a lot of planets. We search for these distant worlds because we’re curious and we want to know what other planets are like. By understanding other worlds, we can better understand our own. But make no mistake: Scientists are humans, and we want the answer to one of the biggest questions of the scientific age: Are we alone? We may get an answer soon. Our…

Over the past two weeks, I have circumnavigated the globe by land, air and sea. The reason? A kitchen sink–sized chunk of interstellar material that my colleagues and I believe collided with the Earth at 100,000 miles per hour nearly a decade ago. After years of effort, we may have finally found pieces of this elusive object on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, about a mile beneath the waves. The story began In April 2019, when I found what’s thought to be the first known interstellar meteor, hiding in plain sight in…

What if the search for life in the universe is really a search for how the cosmos computes? That’s the intriguing, and perhaps unsettling, possibility that we are exploring as a part of our quest to find out whether or not we are alone. Since the beginnings of our scientific understanding of genetic inheritance in the 1800s and our discovery of molecules like DNA and RNA in the 1900s, we’ve seen that life is informational in nature. There is a “code” of sorts at the heart of living things. It’s a hugely complex code for…

For the second time, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has looked for and failed to find a thick atmosphere on an exoplanet in on one of the most exciting planetary systems known. Astronomers report today that there is probably no tantalizing atmosphere on the planet TRAPPIST-1 c, just as they reported months ago for its neighbour TRAPPIST-1 b. There is still a chance that some of the five other planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system might have thick atmospheres containing geologically and biologically interesting…