Astronomy
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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.
Astronomers Discover a Planetary System Whose Orbits Are Visibly Changing in Real Time, a Phenomenon Never Before Observed
The TOI-201 system hosts a super-Earth, a warm Jupiter, and a record-setting brown dwarf whose gravitational interplay drives orbital shifts observable on human timescales — within 200 years its planets will stop transiting.
JWST Finds Unexpected Water-Ice Clouds on Epsilon Indi Ab, the Closest Directly Imaged Super-Jupiter
A new JWST MIRI observation of the 12-light-year-away exoplanet Epsilon Indi Ab shows less ammonia than models predict, pointing to thick water-ice cirrus clouds that current atmospheric models omit.