The Webb Space Telescope has revealed a world quite alien compared to our own: WASP-107b, a Neptune-like gas giant that orbits a star some 211 light-years from Earth. Webb has now detected water vapor and sulfur dioxide in the planet’s atmosphere, as well as sand-like silicate clouds.
The Webb Space Telescope recently turned its focus to a nearby exoplanet and found that it may be a Hycean world, or a world completely covered in a single global ocean, and with a hydrogen atmosphere. And what’s more, the telescope detected a possible detection—note, possible detection, of dimethyl sulfide, a…
Beta Pictoris b is a young exoplanet about 12 times as massive as Jupiter, with an orbit nearly twice as long. Now, a timelapse video of the planet’s nearly 23-year orbit lets you see most of that journey in just ten seconds.
Researchers think they’ve gotten a glimpse at how gas giants like Jupiter form, thanks to a remarkable image of a distant star system.
A group of radio telescopes in the Chilean desert was aimed at a young star system 400 light years away when it detected something unusual: a cloud of debris chasing a planet along the same orbit. The debris could be a planet in the midst of being born or the remains of one that already exists, making this the first…
Astronomers just directly measured the mass of a lone white dwarf using the Hubble Space Telescope for the first time. The dwarf—the core remnant of a star—is named LAWD 37, and it burned out about a billion years ago.
Astronomical phenomena tend to occur over timespans that dwarf our human scale—a galaxy changes over millions and billions of years, not decades.
