Tag: planets

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Cosmic Space

Webb Telescope detects activity within dwarf planets

Makemake and Eris
An artist's conception compares the size of 889-mile-wide Makemake and 1,445-mile-wide Eris. (SWRI Illustration)

They may be dwarf planets, but they’re not dead planets.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has provided scientists with evidence of geothermal activity deep within two far-out dwarf planets, Eris and Makemake.

“We see some interesting signs of hot times in cool places,” Christopher Glein, an expert in planetary geochemistry at the Southwest Research Institute, said this week in a news release. Glein is the lead author of a study analyzing the JWST findings that was recently published by the journal Icarus.

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Cosmic Space

Webb Telescope captures its first photo of alien planet

This image shows the exoplanet HIP 65426 b in different bands of infrared light, as seen from the James Webb Space Telescope. In each of the infrared images, the planet's parent star is shown as a white five-pointed star. Credit: NASA/ESA/CSA, A. Carter (UCSC), the ERS 1386 team and A. Pagan (STScI).

NASA has released the first direct image of an exoplanet taken by the James Webb Space Telescope — and although there’s no chance that this particular alien world could harbor life as we know it, the picture serves as an early demonstration of the observatory’s power.

“We’ve only just begun,” Aarynn Carter, a researcher at the University of California at Santa Cruz who led the analysis of the JWST image, said today in a NASA image advisory. “There are many more images of exoplanets to come that will shape our overall understanding of their physics, chemistry and formation.”

The planet in question, HIP 65426 b, is about 355 light-years away in the constellation Centaurus. Discovered five years ago, it’s a gas giant that’s roughly seven times as massive as Jupiter — and it’s about 100 times farther out from its parent star than Earth is from the sun.

That extreme distance from a dwarf star would make HIP 65426 b a prohibitively chilly ball of gas. But the distance also provides enough separation for JWST to distinguish the planet from the star.

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Cosmic Space

Uranus and Enceladus top planetary scientists’ to-do list

Image: OCEANUS at Uranus
An artist's conception shows a probe called OCEANUS approaching Uranus. (Purdue Engineering)

Uranus has long been the butt of jokes, but the ice giant is finally getting its day in the sun, thanks to a recommendation in the National Academies’ newly released survey of potential interplanetary missions.

The decadal survey, drawn up by teams of scientists, serves as a roadmap for research in planetary science and astrobiology over the next 10 years. And the survey’s highest priority for multibillion-dollar flagship missions is to send an orbiter and a piggyback atmospheric probe to Uranus (preferably pronounced “urine-us,” not “your-anus”). Launch would come as early as 2031 or 2032, when the orbital mechanics are optimal for a multibillion-mile cruise.

In preparation for this decadal survey, a team of scientists led by NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory drew up preliminary plans for a mission to Uranus or its ice-giant neighbor, Neptune.  Separately, Purdue University researchers developed a mission concept called OCEANUS (Observatory Capture Exploring the Atmospheric Nature of Uranus and Neptune) that included a Saturn flyby as well as a years-long study of Uranus.

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Cosmic Space

Astronomers detect first hints of extragalactic planet

Suspected planet in M51
The white square highlights the suspected planet in M51. (NASA / CXC / SAO / DiStefano et al.; Optical: NASA / ESA / STScI / Grendler)

A blip recorded by the NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has pointed astronomers to what might be a planet detected passing across a star in a galaxy beyond our own — but we may not know for sure anytime soon.

The observation of an X-ray transit in the spiral galaxy M51, about 28 million light-years away in the northern constellation Canes Venatici, is reported in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Even if the detection of a planet in M51 goes unconfirmed, the Chandra observations demonstrate that X-ray transits could become a new method for tracking planets far beyond our solar system.

“We are trying to open up a whole new arena for finding other worlds by searching for planet candidates at X-ray wavelengths, a strategy that makes it possible to discover them in other galaxies,” Rosanne Di Stefano of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, lead author of the newly published study, said in a news release.

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Cosmic Space

Jupiter and Saturn pair up to make a Christmas Star

Jupiter and Saturn
Ths graphic shows how Jupiter and Saturn line up in the sky as seen from mid-northern latitudes. (Sky & Telescope Illustration)

Are you ready for a remake of the Christmas Star story? Depending on how much stock you put in historical hypotheses, this year’s solstice on Dec. 21 could bring a replay of the phenomenon that the Three Kings saw in the Gospel of Matthew.

That’s when Jupiter and Saturn can be seen incredibly close together in the night sky. If the skies are clear, the two planets will be hard to miss in southwest skies just after sunset, as seen from mid-northern latitudes. Jupiter will sparkle brighter, and Saturn will be shining only a tenth of a degree to the upper right. With a small telescope, you might be able to see both planets and their moons in a single field of view.

“Some astronomers suggest the pair will look like an elongated star, and others say the two planets will form a double planet,” NASA says in a blog posting about the Dec. 21 conjunction. “To know for sure, we’ll just have to look and see. Either way, take advantage of this opportunity because Jupiter and Saturn won’t appear this close in the sky until 2080!”

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GeekWire

Solving the case of the disappearing planet

More than a decade ago, Fomalhaut b was considered one of the first exoplanets to be directly imaged — but now it’s vanished, and scientists suspect it was actually nothing more than a huge cloud of dust created by a cosmic smashup.

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GeekWire

New Earth-sized planet ‘rescued’ from old data

Exoplanet
An artist’s conception shows Kepler-1649c orbiting around its host red dwarf star. (NASA / Ames Research Center Illustration / Daniel Rutter)

An alien Earth that just might be habitable has been discovered in years-old records, thanks to sharp-eyed astronomers who gave the data a second look.

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GeekWire

TESS adds new types of planets to its collection

TESS probe
An artist’s conception shows NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. (NASA Illustration)

Astronomers report that NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, has detected its first Earth-sized planet lying in its parent star’s habitable zone, plus its first planet orbiting two stars.

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GeekWire

Real-life planet quest goes far beyond Star Wars

Luke Skywalker on Tatooine
Luke Skywalker’s home planet, Tatooine, and its two suns are a good example of science echoing Star Wars. Or is it the other way around? (Lucasfilm / 20th Century Fox Photo)

Over the past 42 years, filmgoers have seen exotic worlds come to life in a succession of Star Wars movies — a series that is now coming to a climax with “Star Wars: Episode IX, The Rise of Skywalker.” But are those exoplanets really all that exotic anymore?

Sure, we’ve seen two suns in the sky over the sands of Tatooine, Luke Skywalker’s home planet. We’ve been to an ice planet (Hoth) and a lava planet (Mustafar). We’ve even spent time on a habitable exomoon that’s in orbit around a gas giant (Endor).

Back in 1977, most of us might have thought those types of worlds to be science-fiction fantastical. Today, they’re seen as totally plausible categories in the study of thousands of planets beyond our solar system. And Rory Barnes, a University of Washington astronomer who focuses on astrobiology and the habitability of exoplanets, suspects Star Wars creator George Lucas knew this could happen.

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GeekWire

Scientists puzzle over ‘super-puff’ planets

Super-puff planets
An illustration depicts the sunlike star Kepler 51 and three giant planets that have an extraordinarily low density. (NASA / ESA / STScI / Hustak, Olmsted, Player and Summers)

Readings from the Hubble Space Telescope have shed light on a bizarre class of alien planets that have the density of cotton candy.

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