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Science

James Webb Space Telescope finds its first exoplanet

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CNN
 — 

The James Webb Space Telescope can add another cosmic accomplishment to its list: The space observatory has been used to confirm the existence of an exoplanet for the first time.

The celestial body, known as LHS 475 b and located outside of our solar system, is almost exactly the same size as Earth. The rocky world is 41 light-years away in the Octans constellation.

Previous data collected by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, had suggested the planet might exist.

A team of researchers, led by staff astronomer Kevin Stevenson and postdoctoral fellow Jacob Lustig-Yaeger at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, observed the target using Webb. They watched for dips in starlight as the planet passed in front of its host star, called a transit, and watched two transits occur.

“There is no question that the planet is there. Webb’s pristine data validate it,” Lustig-Yaeger said in a statement.

The planet’s discovery was announced Wednesday at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle.

“The fact that it is also a small, rocky planet is impressive for the observatory,” Stevenson said.

Webb is the only telescope that has the capability to characterize the atmospheres of exoplanets that are the size of Earth. The research team used Webb to analyze the planet across multiple wavelengths of light to see whether it has an atmosphere. For now, the team hasn’t been able to make any definitive conclusions, but the telescope’s sensitivity picked up on a range of molecules that were present.

“There are some terrestrial-type atmospheres that we can rule out,” Lustig-Yaeger said. “It can’t have a thick methane-dominated atmosphere, similar to that of Saturn’s moon Titan.”

The astronomers will have another chance to observe the planet again over the summer and conduct follow-up analysis on the potential presence of an atmosphere.

Webb’s detections also revealed that the planet is a few hundred degrees warmer than our planet. If the researchers detect any clouds on LHS 475 b, it may turn out to be more like Venus — which is considered to be Earth’s hotter twin with a carbon dioxide atmosphere.

“We’re at the forefront of studying small, rocky exoplanets,” Lustig-Yaeger said. “We have barely begun scratching the surface of what their atmospheres might be like.”

The planet completes a single orbit around its red dwarf host star every 2 Earth days. Given that the star is less than half the temperature of our sun, it’s possible that the planet could still maintain an atmosphere despite its close proximity to the star.

The researchers believe their discovery will just be the first of many in Webb’s future.

“These first observational results from an Earth-sized, rocky planet open the door to many future possibilities for studying rocky planet atmospheres with Webb,” said Mark Clampin, Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters, in a statement. “Webb is bringing us closer and closer to a new understanding of Earth-like worlds outside the Solar System, and the mission is only just getting started.”

More Webb observations were shared at the meeting on Wednesday, including never-before-seen views of a dusty disk swirling around a nearby red dwarf star.

The telescope’s images mark the first time such a disk has been captured in these infrared wavelegnths of light, which are invisible to the human eye.

The dusty disk around the star, named AU Mic, represents the remnants of planet formation. When small, solid objects called planetesimals — a planet in the making — crashed into each other, they left behind a big, dusty ring around the star and formed a debris disk.

“A debris disk is continuously replenished by collisions of planetesimals. By studying it, we get a unique window into the recent dynamical history of this system,” said lead study author Kellen Lawson, postdoctoral program fellow at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and member of the research team that studied AU Mic.

Webb’s capabilities allowed astronomers to see the region close to the star. Their observations and data could provide insights that aid in the search for giant planets that form wide orbits in planetary systems, not unlike Jupiter and Saturn in our solar system.

The AU Mic disk is located 32 light-years away in the Microscopium constellation. The star is about 23 million years old, so planet formation has already ceased around the star — since that process usually takes less than 10 million years, according to the researchers. Other telescopes have spotted two planets orbiting the star.

“This system is one of the very few examples of a young star, with known exoplanets, and a debris disk that is near enough and bright enough to study holistically using Webb’s uniquely powerful instruments,” said study coauthor Josh Schlieder, principal investigator for the observing program at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

The Webb telescope was also used to peer inside NGC 346, a star-forming region located in a neighboring dwarf galaxy called the Small Magellanic Cloud.

About 2 billion to 3 billion years after the big bang that created the universe, galaxies were filled with fireworks of star formation. This peak of star formation is called “cosmic noon.”

“A galaxy during cosmic noon wouldn’t have one NGC 346, as the Small Magellanic Cloud does; it would have thousands,” said Margaret Meixner, an astronomer at the Universities Space Research Association and principal investigator of the research team, in a statement.

“Even if NGC 346 is now the one and only massive cluster furiously forming stars in its galaxy, it offers us a great opportunity to probe the conditions that were in place at cosmic noon.”

Observing how stars form in this galaxy allows astronomers to compare star formation in our own Milky Way galaxy.

In the new Webb image, forming stars can be seen pulling in ribbon-like gas and dust from a surrounding molecular cloud. This material feeds the formation of stars, and eventually, planets.

“We’re seeing the building blocks, not only of stars, but also potentially of planets,” said co-investigator Guido De Marchi, a space science faculty member of the European Space Agency, in a statement. “And since the Small Magellanic Cloud has a similar environment to that of galaxies during cosmic noon, it’s possible that rocky planets could have formed earlier in the history of the Universe than we might have thought.”

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Two supermassive black holes, very close together, found by astronomers

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CNN
 — 

Two supermassive black holes have been spotted feasting on cosmic materials as two galaxies in distant space merge — and are the closest to colliding black holes astronomers have ever observed.

Astronomers spotted the pair while using the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array of telescopes, or ALMA, in northern Chile’s Atacama Desert, to observe two merging galaxies about 500 million light-years from Earth.

The two black holes were growing in tandem near the center of the coalescing galaxy resulting from the merger. They met when their host galaxies, known as UGC 4211, collided.

One is 200 million times the mass of our sun, while the other is 125 million times the mass of our sun.

While the black holes themselves aren’t directly visible, both were surrounded by bright clusters of stars and warm, glowing gas — all of which is being tugged by the holes’ gravitational pull.

Over time, they will start circling one another in orbit, eventually crashing into one another and creating one black hole.

After observing them across multiple wavelengths of light, the black holes are located the closest together scientists have ever seen — only about 750 light-years apart, which is relatively close, astronomically speaking.

The results were shared at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society being held this week in Seattle, and published Monday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The distance between the black holes “is fairly close to the limit of what we can detect, which is why this is so exciting,” said study coauthor Chiara Mingarelli, an associate research scientist at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York City, in a statement.

Galactic mergers are more common in the distant universe, which makes them harder to see using Earth-based telescopes. But ALMA’s sensitivity was able to observe even their active galactic nuclei — the bright, compact regions in galaxies where matter swirls around black holes. Astronomers were surprised to find a binary pair of black holes, rather than a single black hole, dining on the gas and dust stirred up by the galactic merger.

“Our study has identified one of the closest pairs of black holes in a galaxy merger, and because we know that galaxy mergers are much more common in the distant Universe, these black hole binaries too may be much more common than previously thought,” said lead study author Michael Koss, a senior research scientist at the Eureka Scientific research institute in Oakland, California, in a statement.

“What we’ve just studied is a source in the very final stage of collision, so what we’re seeing presages that merger and also gives us insight into the connection between black holes merging and growing and eventually producing gravitational waves,” Koss said.

If pairs of black holes — as well as merging galaxies that lead to their creation — are more common in the universe than previously thought, they could have implications for future gravitational wave research. Gravitational waves, or ripples in space time, are created when black holes collide.

It will still take a few hundred million years for this particular pair of black holes to collide, but the insights gained from this observation could help scientists better estimate how many pairs of black holes are close to colliding in the universe.

“​​There might be many pairs of growing supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies that we have not been able to identify so far,” said study coauthor Ezequiel Treister, an astronomer at Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago, Chile, in a statement. “If this is the case, in the near future we will be observing frequent gravitational wave events caused by the mergers of these objects across the Universe.”

Space-based telescopes like Hubble and the Chandra X-ray Observatory and ground-based telescopes like the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, also in the Atacama Desert, and the W.M. Keck telescope in Hawaii have also observed UGC 4211 across different wavelengths of light to provide a more detailed overview and differentiate between the two black holes.

“Each wavelength tells a different part of the story,” Treister said. “All of these data together have given us a clearer picture of how galaxies such as our own turned out to be the way they are, and what they will become in the future.”

Understanding more about the end stages of galaxy mergers could provide more insight about what will happen when our Milky Way galaxy collides with the Andromeda galaxy in about 4.5 billion years.

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Science

10 moments in 2022 straight out of a sci-fi movie

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CNN
 — 

From a spacecraft the size of a refrigerator plowing into an asteroid (deliberately) to a helicopter trying to catch a rocket plummeting back to Earth, 2022 offered surreal moments in space that could have been ripped from the pages of a science fiction movie script.

Among the memorable events were billionaires mapping out plans to explore the cosmos and scientists attempting to find answers to perplexing questions, only to discover deeper mysteries.

Researchers managed to grow plants in lunar soil for the first time, while engineers successfully tested an inflatable heat shield that could land humans on Mars. And scientists determined that a rare interstellar meteor crashed into Earth nearly a decade ago.

Here’s a look back at 10 times space travel and exploration felt more like a plot from a Hollywood movie than real life.

A NASA spacecraft intentionally slammed into Dimorphos, a small asteroid that orbits a larger space rock named Didymos. While this collision seemed like something out of the 1998 movie “Armageddon,” the Double Asteroid Redirection Test was a demonstration of deflection technology — and the first conducted on behalf of planetary defense.

Many tuned in on September 26 to watch as the surface of Dimorphos came into view for the first time, with DART’s cameras beaming back live imagery. The view ended after the spacecraft collided with the asteroid, but images captured by space telescopes and an Italian satellite provided dramatic photos of the aftermath.

The DART mission marked the first time humanity intentionally changed the motion of a celestial object in space. The spacecraft altered the moonlet asteroid’s orbit by 32 minutes. Neither Dimorphos nor Didymos pose a threat to Earth, but the double-asteroid system was a perfect target to test deflection technology.

Fast radio bursts in space have intrigued astronomers since their 2007 discovery, but a mysterious radio burst with a pattern similar to a heartbeat upped the ante this year.

Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are intense, millisecond-long bursts of radio waves with unknown origins — which only fuels speculation that their cause is more alien than cosmic.

Astronomers estimate that the “heartbeat signal” came from a galaxy roughly 1 billion light-years away, but the location and cause of the burst are unknown.

Additionally, astronomers also detected a powerful radio wave laser, known as a megamaser, and a spinning celestial object releasing giant bursts of energy unlike anything they had ever seen before.

Speaking of strange objects, astronomers made a new leap forward in understanding odd radio circles, or ORCs. No, they aren’t the goblinlike humanoids from “The Lord of the Rings” books, but these fascinating objects have baffled scientists since their discovery in 2020.

The space rings are so massive that they each measure about 1 million light-years across — 16 times bigger than our Milky Way galaxy. Astronomers believe it takes the circles 1 billion years to reach their maximum size, and they are so large they have expanded past other galaxies.

Astronomers took a new detailed photo of odd radio circles using the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory’s MeerKAT telescope, narrowing down the possible theories that might explain these celestial oddballs.

Black holes are known for behaving badly and shredding stars — so astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope were surprised when they saw a black hole fueling star birth.

Their observation revealed a gaseous umbilical cord stretching from a black hole at the center of a dwarf galaxy to a stellar nursery where stars are born. The stream of gas provided by the black hole triggered a fireworks show of star birth as it interacted with the cloud, which led to a cluster of forming stars.

This year, astronomers also captured an image of the supermassive black hole lurking at the center of our galaxy, and Hubble spied a lone black hole wandering the Milky Way. And X-ray signals from black holes were converted into eerie sounds we won’t soon forget.

Rocket Lab, a US-based company that launches out of New Zealand, is trying to figure out a way to recapture its rocket boosters as they tumble down toward Earth after launch. In 2022, the company made two attempts to deploy a helicopter with a hook attachment. The wild spectacle is all part of Rocket Lab’s plans to save money by recovering and reusing rocket parts after they vault satellites to space.

The first attempt in May appeared to go as planned when the helicopter snagged a booster. But the pilots made the decision to drop the rocket part due to safety concerns.

On the second attempt, the rocket never came into view, and pilots confirmed the booster wouldn’t be returning to the factory dry. In a tweet, the company reported there was a data loss issue during the rocket’s reentry.

NASA flew its first virtual assistant on a moon mission with the space agency’s historic Artemis I flight — a version of Amazon’s Alexa.

While not exactly reminiscent of HAL 9000, the antagonistic voice assistant in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the decision did spark plenty of facetious comparisons.

The Artemis I mission was uncrewed, but NASA’s ground control teams used the voice assistant, called Callisto, to control cabin lighting and play music during the journey. It did not have the ability to open or close doors, for the record.

Artemis I was just a test mission, and NASA is still evaluating how the voice recognition system may be included on future missions.

Japanese fashion mogul Yusaku Maezawa picked eight passengers who he said will join him on a trip around the moon, powered by SpaceX’s yet-to-be-flown Starship spacecraft. The group includes American DJ Steve Aoki and popular space YouTuber Tim Dodd, better known as the Everyday Astronaut.

The mission, called Dear Moon, was first announced in 2018 with the intention of flying by 2023. Maezawa initially aimed to take a group of artists with him on a six-day trip around the moon but later announced he had expanded his definition of an “artist.” Instead, Maezawa announced in a video last year that he would be open to people from all walks of life as long as they viewed themselves as artists.

Separately, millionaire Dennis Tito — who became the first person to pay his way to the International Space Station in the early 2000s — made his own lunar travel plans with SpaceX.

Chunks of space debris were reportedly found on farmland in Australia’s Snowy Mountains, and NASA and authorities confirmed that the objects were likely scraps of hardware from a SpaceX Dragon capsule intentionally jettisoned as the spacecraft reentered Earth’s atmosphere in May 2021.

It’s common for space debris to fall to Earth. But it’s far less common for the objects to wind up on land since most space garbage is discarded in the ocean.

Perhaps among the most unique space start-ups in the world, SpinLaunch aims to whip satellites around in a vacuum-sealed chamber and toss them into space rather than put them on a rocket.

The company began testing a scaled-down version of its technology last year, but things ramped up in 2022. SpinLaunch notched its 10th test flight in October.

There’s a science fiction connection as well. SpinLaunch founder Jonathan Yaney cites the work of Jules Verne — the “Journey to the Center of Earth” writer who died more than 50 years before the first satellite traveled to space — as the inspiration for SpinLaunch.

It’s not clear whether the company’s technology will ever come to fruition. But in the meantime, this group will be in the New Mexico desert attempting to bring art to life.

If it wasn’t surreal enough watching Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos and other celebrities travel to space on his self-funded, suborbital rocket last year, hearing that the rocket exploded a little more than a year later over West Texas — albeit on a trip without any passengers — was a harrowing moment that brought home the adage “space is hard.” However, the crew capsule, which was carrying science projects and other inanimate payloads on September 12, was able to land successfully.

“The capsule landed safely and the booster impacted within the designated hazard area,” the Federal Aviation Administration said in a September statement. Bezos’ Blue Origin has been in limbo since and has not returned to flight.

And with Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic still grounded, neither of the companies spearheading suborbital space tourism last year are conducting routine flights.



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Science

Dazzling galactic diamonds shine in new Webb telescope image

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CNN
 — 

The James Webb Space Telescope has captured a unique perspective of the universe, including never-before-seen galaxies that glitter like diamonds in the cosmos.

The new image, shared on Wednesday as part of a study published in the Astronomical Journal, was taken as part of the Prime Extragalactic Areas for Reionization and Lensing Science observing program, called PEARLS.

It’s one of the first medium-deep-wide-field images of the universe, with “medium-deep” meaning the faintest objects visible, and “wide-field” referring to the region of the cosmos captured in the image.

“The stunning image quality of Webb is truly out of this world,” said study coauthor Anton Koekemoer, research astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, who assembled the PEARLS images into mosaics, in a statement. “To catch a glimpse of very rare galaxies at the dawn of cosmic time, we need deep imaging over a large area, which this PEARLS field provides.”

The Webb telescope focused on a part of the sky called the North Ecliptic Pole and was able to use eight different colors of near-infrared light to see celestial objects that are 1 billion times fainter than what can be seen with the unaided eye.

Thousands of galaxies gleam from a range of distances, and some of the light in the image has traveled almost 13.5 billion years to reach us.

“I was blown away by the first PEARLS images,” said study coauthor Rolf Jansen, research scientist at Arizona State University and a PEARLS coinvestigator, in a statement.

“Little did I know, when I selected this field near the North Ecliptic Pole, that it would yield such a treasure trove of distant galaxies, and that we would get direct clues about the processes by which galaxies assemble and grow, he said. “I can see streams, tails, shells and halos of stars in their outskirts, the leftovers of their building blocks.”

Researchers combined Webb data with three colors of ultraviolet and visible light captured by the Hubble Space Telescope to create the image. Together, the wavelengths of light from both telescopes reveal unprecedented depth and detail of a wealth of galaxies in the universe. Many of these distant galaxies have always eluded Hubble, as well as ground-based telescopes.

The image represents just a portion of the full PEARLS field, which will be about four times larger. The mosaic is even better than scientists expected after running simulations in the months before Webb began making scientific observations in July.

“There are many objects that I never thought we would actually be able to see, including individual globular clusters around distant elliptical galaxies, knots of star formation within spiral galaxies, and thousands of faint galaxies in the background,” said study coauthor Jake Summers, a research assistant at Arizona State University, in a statement.

Other pinpricks of light in the image represent a range of stars in our Milky Way galaxy.

Measuring diffuse light in front of and behind the stars and galaxies in the image is like “encoding the history of the universe” because it tells a story of cosmic evolution, according to study coauthor Rosalia O’Brien, a graduate research assistant at Arizona State University, in a statement.

The PEARLS team hopes in the future to see more objects in this region, like distant exploding stars or flares of light around black holes, as they vary in brightness.

“This unique field is designed to be observable with Webb 365 days per year, so its time-domain legacy, area covered, and depth reached can only get better with time,” said lead study author Rogier Windhorst, regents professor at Arizona State University and PEARLS principal investigator, in a statement.

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Science

Dance of merging galaxies captured in new Webb telescope image

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CNN
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The beautiful chaos of two merging galaxies shines in the latest image captured by the James Webb Space Telescope.

Vice President Kamala Harris and French President Emmanuel Macron viewed the new Webb image, along with a new composite of the Pillars of Creation captured by the space observatory, during a visit to NASA Headquarters in Washington on Wednesday.

The Webb telescope, designed to observe faint, distant galaxies and other worlds, is an international mission between NASA and its partners, the European Space Agency and Canadian Space Agency.

The pair of galaxies, known as II ZW 96, are located some 500 million light-years from Earth in the Delphinus constellation. Dots of light in the image’s background represent other distant galaxies.

The swirling shape of the two galaxies was created when they began merging, disturbing their individual shapes. Galactic mergers occur when two or more galaxies collide in space.

Bright regions where stars are born glow at the center of the image, while the spiral arms of the lower galaxy are twisted by the gravitational pull of the merger.

Stars form when clouds of gas and dust collapse inside of galaxies. When galaxies merge, more star formation is triggered — and astronomers want to know why.

The luminous areas of star birth are of interest to astronomers using Webb because they appear even brighter when viewed in infrared light.

While infrared is invisible to the human eye, Webb’s capabilities allow it to spy previously unseen aspects of the universe.

Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera and Mid-Infrared Instrument were both used to capture the new image.

Astronomers are using the observatory to study how galaxies evolve and, among other topics, why luminous infrared galaxies like II ZW 96 shine brightly in infrared light, reaching luminosities more than 100 billion times that of our sun.

Researchers have turned Webb’s instruments on merging galaxies, including II ZW 96, to pick out fine details and compare the images with those previously taken by ground-based telescopes and the Hubble Space Telescope. Together, the observations can reveal a more complete picture of how galaxies change over time.

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James Webb telescope: New data on WASP-39b is a ‘game changer,’ scientists say

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CNN
 — 

The James Webb Space Telescope has captured a detailed molecular and chemical portrait of a faraway planet’s skies, scoring another first for the exoplanet science community.

WASP-39b, otherwise known as Bocaprins, can be found orbiting a star some 700 light-years away. It is an exoplanet — a planet outside our solar system — as massive as Saturn but much closer to its host star, making for an estimated temperature of 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit (871 degrees Celsius) emitting from its gases, according to NASA. This “hot Saturn” was one of the first exoplanets that the Webb telescope examined when it first began its regular science operations.

The new readings provide a full breakdown of Bocaprins’ atmosphere, including atoms, molecules, cloud formations (which appear to be broken up, rather than a single, uniform blanket as scientists previously expected) and even signs of photochemistry caused by its host star.

“We observed the exoplanet with multiple instruments that, together, provide a broad swath of the infrared spectrum and a panoply of chemical fingerprints inaccessible until (this mission),” said Natalie Batalha, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who contributed to and helped coordinate the new research, in a NASA release. “Data like these are a game changer.”

The new data provided the first sign in an exoplanet’s atmosphere of sulfur dioxide, a molecule produced from chemical reactions triggered by the planet’s host star and its high-energy light. On Earth, the atmosphere’s protective ozone layer is created in a similar way from heat and sunlight in a photochemical reaction.

Bocaprins’ close proximity to its host star makes it an ideal subject for studying such star-planet connections. The planet is eight times closer to its host star than Mercury is to our sun.

“This is the first time we have seen concrete evidence of photochemistry — chemical reactions initiated by energetic stellar light — on exoplanets,” said Shang-Min Tsai, a researcher at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, in a NASA release. “I see this as a really promising outlook for advancing our understanding of exoplanet atmospheres.”

Other compounds detected in Bocaprins’ atmosphere include sodium, potassium and water vapor, confirming previous observations made by other space and ground-based telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope.

Having such a complete roster of chemical ingredients in an exoplanet atmosphere provides insight into how this planet — and perhaps others — formed. Bocaprins’ diverse chemical inventory suggests that multiple smaller bodies, called planetesimals, had merged to create an eventual goliath of a planet, of similar size to the second-largest planet in our solar system.

“This is just the first out of many exoplanets that are going to be studied in detail by JWST. … We are already getting very exciting results,” Nestor Espinoza, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, told CNN. “This is just the beginning.”

The findings are favorable for suggesting the capability of Webb’s instruments to conduct investigations on exoplanets. By revealing a detailed descriptor of an exoplanet’s atmosphere, the telescope has performed beyond scientists’ expectations and promises a new phase of exploration on the broad variety of exoplanets in the galaxy, according to NASA.

“We are going to be able to see the big picture of exoplanet atmospheres,” said Laura Flagg, a researcher at Cornell University and a member of the international team that analyzed data from Webb, in a statement. “It is incredibly exciting to know that everything is going to be rewritten. That is one of the best parts of being a scientist.”

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Webb telescope makes another discovery on faraway exoplanet

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CNN
 — 

The James Webb Space Telescope has captured a detailed molecular and chemical portrait of a faraway planet’s skies, scoring another first for the exoplanet science community.

WASP-39b, otherwise known as Bocaprins, can be found orbiting a star some 700 light-years away. It is an exoplanet — a planet outside our solar system — as massive as Saturn but much closer to its host star, making for an estimated temperature of 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit (871 degrees Celsius) emitting from its gases, according to NASA. This “hot Saturn” was one of the first exoplanets that the Webb telescope examined when it first began its regular science operations.

The new readings provide a full breakdown of Bocaprins’ atmosphere, including atoms, molecules, cloud formations (which appear to be broken up, rather than a single, uniform blanket as scientists previously expected) and even signs of photochemistry caused by its host star.

“We observed the exoplanet with multiple instruments that, together, provide a broad swath of the infrared spectrum and a panoply of chemical fingerprints inaccessible until (this mission),” said Natalie Batalha, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who contributed to and helped coordinate the new research, in a NASA release. “Data like these are a game changer.”

The new data provided the first sign in an exoplanet’s atmosphere of sulfur dioxide, a molecule produced from chemical reactions triggered by the planet’s host star and its high-energy light. On Earth, the atmosphere’s protective ozone layer is created in a similar way from heat and sunlight in a photochemical reaction.

Bocaprins’ close proximity to its host star makes it an ideal subject for studying such star-planet connections. The planet is eight times closer to its host star than Mercury is to our sun.

“This is the first time we have seen concrete evidence of photochemistry — chemical reactions initiated by energetic stellar light — on exoplanets,” said Shang-Min Tsai, a researcher at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, in a NASA release. “I see this as a really promising outlook for advancing our understanding of exoplanet atmospheres.”

Other compounds detected in Bocaprins’ atmosphere include sodium, potassium and water vapor, confirming previous observations made by other space and ground-based telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope.

Having such a complete roster of chemical ingredients in an exoplanet atmosphere provides insight into how this planet — and perhaps others — formed. Bocaprins’ diverse chemical inventory suggests that multiple smaller bodies, called planetesimals, had merged to create an eventual goliath of a planet, of similar size to the second-largest planet in our solar system.

“This is just the first out of many exoplanets that are going to be studied in detail by JWST. … We are already getting very exciting results,” Nestor Espinoza, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, told CNN. “This is just the beginning.”

The findings are favorable for suggesting the capability of Webb’s instruments to conduct investigations on exoplanets. By revealing a detailed descriptor of an exoplanet’s atmosphere, the telescope has performed beyond scientists’ expectations and promises a new phase of exploration on the broad variety of exoplanets in the galaxy, according to NASA.

“We are going to be able to see the big picture of exoplanet atmospheres,” said Laura Flagg, a researcher at Cornell University and a member of the international team that analyzed data from Webb, in a statement. “It is incredibly exciting to know that everything is going to be rewritten. That is one of the best parts of being a scientist.”

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James Webb Space Telescope: No evidence linking namesake to firings of LGBTQ staff

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CNN
 — 

Despite numerous calls from astronomers to rename its powerful new telescope, NASA officials stood by the naming of the James Webb Space Telescope before its launch.

With the telescope nearly a year into its stint in space, the agency has released its chief historian’s investigation into the namesake of the telescope. James Webb, NASA’s second-ever administrator, worked at the US State Department during the Lavender Scare, a period in which LGBTQ federal employees were often fired or forced to resign, and the decision to name the telescope for him courted criticism from researchers.

There’s no evidence that proves Webb was directly involved in those firings in the 1950s or in the 1963 firing of gay NASA employee Clifford Norton, according to Brian Odom, the NASA historian who completed the investigation.

Officials at NASA announced in 2002 that the telescope would be named for Webb, who oversaw the Apollo moon landing program in the 1960s and helped burnish the fledgling agency’s reputation. It was considered an unusual choice at the time, since Webb was an administrator and not a scientist.

Months before the telescope was set to finally launch, though, several astronomers called on NASA to remove Webb’s name from the telescope, which has since recorded several never-before-seen images of the universe.

In a 2021 piece for Scientific American, a group of astronomers wrote that Webb’s legacy “at best is complicated and at worst reflects complicity in homophobic discrimination in the federal government.”

Even scientists who work on the telescope have expressed their dissatisfaction with its name. Earlier this summer, Dr. Jane Rigby, the operations project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope, tweeted that “a transformative telescope should have a name that stands for discovery and inclusion.”

Officials at NASA have refused to rename it, though, citing an investigation into Webb’s career. The results of that investigation weren’t made public until now, almost a year after the telescope launched.

In his report on his investigation into Webb, Odom acknowledged the pain caused by the Lavender Scare but said that “no available evidence directly links Webb to any actions or follow-up related to the firing of individuals for their sexual orientation.”

The findings of that investigation, Odom wrote, were based on more than 50,000 pages of historical documents from various archives, including NASA headquarters, the Truman Presidential Library and the National Archives.

Odom investigated two meetings that predated Webb’s time at NASA: In 1950, then-undersecretary Webb met with President Harry S. Truman and later two White House aides and Democratic Sen. Clyde Hoey of North Carolina to discuss the Hoey Committee, a Senate subcommittee created to investigate how many LGBTQ people worked for the federal government and whether they were “security risks.”

In his meeting with Truman, Webb discussed with the president how the committee and the White House “might ‘work together on the homosexual investigation,’” according to historian David K. Johnson, author of “The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government,” one of the many documents Odom cites in his report.

No evidence links Webb to any action that followed those discussions, Odom said.

The historian also investigated the firing of Norton, a budget analyst at the space agency. Norton sued the Civil Service Commission after his firing, and his case, Norton v. Macy, was one of several that helped overturn the executive order that allowed federal agencies to fire LGBTQ employees for their sexuality, Odom wrote.

Odom said he found no evidence to show that Webb was aware of Norton’s firing; since it was federal policy at the time to oust LGBTQ employees, Odom wrote, Norton’s departure was “highly likely — though sadly — considered unexceptional.”

No documents could prove that Webb was directly linked to firings of LGBTQ employees, Odom said.



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Science

James Webb Space Telescope reveals birth of a star in a cosmic hourglass

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The cosmic chaos caused by a very young star has been captured in the latest enchanting image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.

The protostar the image centers around is hidden from view in the neck of a dark, hourglass-shape cloud of gas and dust. The dark line across the middle of the neck is a protoplanetary disc — dense gas and dust that could form a planet in the future — about the size of our solar system. Light from the protostar spreads above and below this disc, according to a news release.

It has a long way to go until it becomes a full-fledged star. L1527, as the protostar and its cloud are known, is only about 100,000 years old — a relatively young celestial body compared with our sun, which is about 4.6 billion years old.

The blue and orange clouds in the image outline cavities created as material shoots away from the protostar and collides with the surrounding matter, the release noted.

The nebula’s vibrant colors are only visible in infrared light detected by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera, or NIRCam. Infrared light is invisible to the human eye, making Webb particularly essential to revealing otherwise hidden aspects of the universe.

The blue areas are where the dust is thinnest. The thicker the layer of dust, the less blue light is able to escape, creating pockets of orange.

“Shocks and turbulence inhibit the formation of new stars, which would otherwise form throughout the cloud. As a result, the protostar dominates the space, taking much of the material for itself,” according to the news release.

The protostar doesn’t yet generate its own energy through nuclear fusion of hydrogen, an essential characteristic of stars. Its shape — a puffy clump of hot gas somewhere between 20% and 40% of the mass of our sun — is also unstable.

The image provides context for what our sun and solar system looked like in their infancy.

Webb, which first began sharing new perspectives on the universe in July, is an international partnership between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.

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Science

James Webb captures ‘bejeweled’ image of dwarf galaxy

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CNN
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The James Webb Space Telescope has snapped a remarkably detailed image of a nearby dwarf galaxy. The near-infrared view reveals the deepest glimpse yet into a stellar panorama that could offer astronomers an ideal means of studying aspects of the early universe.

The image shows a panoply of stars within a lonely dwarf galaxy called Wolf – Lundmark – Melotte, which lies about 3 million light-years from our home galaxy, the Milky Way, and is about one-tenth the size.

The WLM galaxy is intriguing to astronomers because it has remained largely isolated and bears a similar chemical makeup to galaxies in the early universe, according to NASA.

The Webb telescope, which launched in December 2021, is the most powerful space observatory to date. It’s capable of detecting the faint light of incredibly distant galaxies as they glow in infrared light, a wavelength invisible to the human eye.

The Hubble Space Telescope and the now-defunct Spitzer Space Telescope have imaged the WLM galaxy, but Webb used its Near-Infrared Camera, also called NIRCam, to capture it in unprecedented detail.

“We can see a myriad of individual stars of different colors, sizes, temperatures, ages, and stages of evolution; interesting clouds of nebular gas within the galaxy; foreground stars with Webb’s diffraction spikes; and background galaxies with neat features like tidal tails,” said Kristen McQuinn, an assistant professor in the department of physics and astronomy at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey, in a comment posted on NASA’s website. A tidal tail is a thin “tail” of stars and interstellar gas extending off a galaxy.

“It’s really a gorgeous image,” added McQuinn, who is one of the lead scientists on the Webb Early Release Science program.

On Twitter, NASA’s official Webb telescope account declared that, compared with past space observatory images, Webb’s NIRCam image “makes the whole place shimmer” — a reference to the song “Bejeweled” on Taylor Swift’s new album, “Midnights.”

Some of the stars pictured in this latest Webb image are low-mass stars that were formed in the early universe and are able to survive for billions of years, McQuinn noted on NASA’s site.

“By determining the properties of these low-mass stars (like their ages), we can gain insight into what was happening in the very distant past,” she said.



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