Models suggest that impact-ejected material from Earth could reach Venus’ clouds and potentially survive there briefly. Panspermia is the idea that life, or the ingredients needed for life, can move through space on asteroids, comets, and other objects. If life’s building blocks appear on one planet, a powerful impact could blast material from its surface [...]
WASP-94A b is a hot, tidally locked gas giant orbiting close to one of the stars in a binary system roughly 690 light-years away from Earth. In a new Science study, scientists led by Sagnick Mukherjee, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University, used the James Webb Space Telescope to learn what the weather looks like out there.
Tidal locking means that you no longer have day- and night-side temperature differences sweeping across the planet. “We wanted to understand the atmospheres of such planets,” Mukherjee says. “Are they static or dynamic? Do they have winds? Do they have clouds?” His team found that, on WASP-94A b, it’s cloudy in the morning, but the skies are clear in the evening. The fact that we didn’t know this already means we might have gotten the chemistry of this and many other exoplanets surprisingly wrong.
WASP-94A b has a mass slightly below half of Jupiter but has a diameter that’s over 70 percent wider. “This means the planet has low density, and its atmosphere extends further out into space, which makes it easier to observe,” Mukherjee explains. When astronomers study atmospheres like this, they usually rely on transmission spectroscopy. By analyzing the spectrum of light filtering through the planet’s atmosphere as it crosses in front of its star, they can figure out its chemical composition.
© NASA, ESA, and L. Hustak (STScI)
There are more opportunities to access space than ever, thanks to a bevy of commercial rockets, some with reusable boosters, led by SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9. So why is NASA launching fewer telescopes and planetary science missions than it did a quarter-century ago?
The answer is complex. It is not necessarily the money. The space agency's science budget this year is $7.25 billion, roughly the same as it was in 2000, adjusted for inflation. This is despite attempts by the Trump administration to drastically reduce NASA science funding.
In the early months of his tenure, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman's focus has been on human spaceflight and the Moon. This isn't terribly surprising given NASA's wildly successful Artemis II mission carrying four astronauts around the Moon last month. Since taking office in December, Isaacman has announced an overhaul of the Artemis program, canceling a space station to be built in orbit around the Moon in favor of construction of a base on the lunar surface.
© NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
New observations from the James Webb Space Telescope are exposing the pathways that water takes to reach terrestrial planets
© ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), Andrews et al.; N. Lira. ( CC BY 4.0 )
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