Artist’s impression of fluffy planet WASP-107b and its parent star LUCA School of Arts, Belgium/ Klaas Verpoest (visuals), Johan Van Looveren (typography). Science: Achrène Dyrek (CEA and Université Paris Cité, France), Michiel Min (SRON, the Netherlands), Leen Decin (KU Leuven, Belgium)/European MIRI EXO GTO team/ ESA/NASA Huge clouds made of […]
exoplanet
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The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) will likely be sped up thanks to new results that narrow down how alien radio signals would drift in frequency as a result of the Doppler shift caused by their home planet’s orbit around its star. A Doppler shift is the lengthening or shortening […]
For nearly twenty years, scientists have tracked puzzling signals from a massive planet known as ’55 Cancri e.’ The fiery ‘hell planet’ — a so-called super-Earth nearly 40 light years away — can reach temperatures above 4,400 degrees Fahrenheit on its daylight side. Soon, with help from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), researchers […]
Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have for the first time detected tiny quartz crystals containing silica — a common mineral on Earth — within the atmosphere of a blazing […]
Thousand-mile-per-hour winds are blowing a hail of tiny quartz crystals through the silicate-enhanced, scorching hot atmosphere of a distant gas giant planet called WASP-17b, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has found. “We knew from Hubble [Space Telescope] observations that there must be aerosols — tiny particles making up clouds […]
On Wednesday (Oct. 11), an international team of astronomers reported the first-ever sightings of the aftermath of two giant planets colliding around a sun-like star in another planetary system. Such clashes among planets are not uncommon in our own solar system’s history, so these latest findings shed light on how […]
Scientists have shared new insights regarding metal fragments recovered from the Pacific that came from outside our solar system. Alien-hunting Harvard physicist Avi Loeb and his team published a preprint study Thursday, explaining that the properties of a meteor that crashed in 2014 ‘can be naturally explained.’ The researchers trawled the […]
Efforts to observe the atmospheres of planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system are being stymied by rambunctious activity on the surface of the red dwarf star at its center, new findings from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) show. In March 2023, the JWST‘s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) observed a secondary transit […]