Astronomy
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Webb Observes a Hot Jupiter's Daily Weather Cycle for the First Time, Revealing Rock Clouds That Form Every Morning and Dissolve by Nightfall
JWST has tracked the first complete daily cloud cycle on an exoplanet, finding that WASP-94Ab grows magnesium silicate clouds each morning and clears them each evening, while correcting a decade of skewed atmospheric measurements from Hubble.
JWST Peers at a Rocky Super-Earth's Surface for the First Time, Finding a Dark, Airless World That Looks Like Mercury
Astronomers used JWST's MIRI to directly study the surface geology of LHS 3844 b, a super-Earth 48.5 light-years away, revealing a basaltic, atmosphere-free world resembling Mercury — a first for exoplanet science.
JWST Detects Methane in Atmosphere of TOI-199b, the First Temperate Giant Exoplanet to Have Its Chemistry Mapped
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has characterized the atmosphere of TOI-199b, a Saturn-sized world 330 light-years away—the first temperate giant exoplanet studied in detail.
JWST Shows Neptune's Moon Nereid Is an Original Survivor, Not a Kuiper Belt Capture — Rewriting the Planet's Violent History
A Science Advances study using Webb data finds Nereid's icy composition rules out a Kuiper Belt origin, making it the sole intact remnant of Neptune's primordial moon system.
JWST Catches Two Post-Quasar Galaxies With Overmassive Black Holes 800 Million Years After the Big Bang
NIRSpec spectroscopy of COLA1 and NEPLA4 reveals black holes 400-800 times overmassive for their host galaxies, offering the first detailed look at the aftermath of early-universe quasar activity.
Hubble's Dracula's Chivito Is the Largest Planet-Forming Disk Ever Observed, Spanning 40 Times the Solar System and 10 to 30 Jupiter Masses
NASA's Hubble has imaged IRAS 23077+6707, a protoplanetary disk nicknamed Dracula's Chivito that spans nearly 400 billion miles and shows asymmetric filaments unlike any disk seen before.
JWST's COSMOS-Web Survey Maps 164,000 Galaxies Into the Most Detailed Cosmic Web Yet, Stretching Back to When the Universe Was a Billion Years Old
A UC Riverside-led team used the largest JWST observing program to trace galaxies along the cosmic web from today out to redshift z ~ 7, and released the full pipeline and catalog publicly.
JWST Finds a Massive Early-Universe Galaxy That Doesn't Spin, the First Slow Rotator Confirmed Less Than 2 Billion Years After the Big Bang
A UC Davis-led team using JWST has measured the kinematics of XMM-VID1-2075 at redshift 3.45 and found no detectable rotation, a property previously seen only in mature nearby galaxies.
Astronomers Detect a Thin Atmosphere on (612533) 2002 XV93, the First Trans-Neptunian Object Beyond Pluto Found With One
A 500-kilometer plutino in the Kuiper Belt shows refractive signs of a 100-200 nanobar atmosphere, a discovery published May 4 in Nature Astronomy that astronomers say challenges models of which small icy worlds can hold gas.
New JIRAM Analysis Suggests Io's Lava Lakes Radiate an Order of Magnitude More Power Than M-band Surveys Reported
A Mura et al. preprint using Juno's JIRAM data argues prior single-band thermal estimates of Io's paterae missed the colder crust that dominates output, lifting one lava lake's estimate from 7 GW to 80 GW.
Warwick's RAVEN AI Pipeline Validates 118 New Exoplanets in TESS Data, Adding Nearly 1,000 Fresh Candidates
A University of Warwick team applied a new machine-learning pipeline called RAVEN to four years of TESS observations, statistically validating 118 short-period planets and surfacing roughly 1,000 candidates not previously catalogued.
Astronomers Image the First Close Binary Supermassive Black Hole Pair, Caught Spiraling Toward a Merger in Markarian 501
A 23-year radio campaign on the blazar Mrk 501 reveals a second jet from a hidden supermassive companion orbiting every 121 days, the first directly imaged close SMBH binary.