Although the famous Carrington Event of 1859 is often described as the first major space weather event to affect technology, earlier incidents did occur. Historical records show that telegraph systems were disrupted by geomagnetic storms as early as the late 1840s.
Through ROSES-25 A.14 Atmosphere NASA is soliciting proposals for data analysis and modeling of NASA supported airborne campaign data. NASA’s Earth Science Division has supported numerous airborne campaigns during the last few years, see Section 2 of the program element text.
A.14 Atmosphere required a mandatory Notice of Intent (NOI) to propose. Proposers who have not already submitted a compliant NOI are not eligible to submit a proposal.
ROSES-2025 Amendment 74 delays the due date for A.14 Atmosphere to December 2, 2026. Also, Section 4.3.3 “Use of Generative AI” now mentions a related NSPIRES cover page question on the use of AI. An updated FAQ has been posted under “Other Documents” on the NSPIRES page for this program element.
La couche d’ozone, notre bouclier naturel contre les ultraviolets, va mieux. Pourtant, en Europe, les UV gagnent du terrain. Une apparente contradiction qui raconte une autre transformation de notre atmosphère.
Mis en orbite en mars 2025, UVSQ-SAT NG a été développé au Latmos (Laboratoire Atmosphères et Observations spatiales – CNRS, Sorbonne Université, UVSQ), avec de nombreux partenaires académiques et industriels. Ce nanosatellite poursuit une démarche engagée avec les missions qui l’ont précédé :...
Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany and Stanford University in the US have developed an energy-collecting device that can simultaneously cool, produce electricity and generate heat. In their prototype, a radiative cooling layer reached 6.5 °C below ambient temperature while a solar collector generated electricity and reached nearly 111 °C.
“The new system could be installed on the roofs and facades of buildings to provide these three energy services at once,” says Gan Huang, who is head of the Hybrid Solar Technologies lab at KIT. “It could also be attractive for AI data centres that need both intensive power and cooling at the same time.”
As many of us have experienced, summer in the northern hemisphere has been particularly hot this year – a situation that is only likely to worsen in the future as the effects of climate change take hold. With this warming will come the increased need for air conditioning to cool down buildings. The problem is that current compression-based systems consume a lot of electricity and produce large amounts of CO2.
Passive daytime radiative cooling
A potential alternative is passive daytime radiative cooling (PDRC), in which heat is continuously exchanged between objects at different temperatures by absorbing and emitting thermal radiation. When the heat absorbed by the material is less than the energy radiated to outer space, it can cool down during the day – even without electricity.
Our planet naturally experiences this effect by radiating heat out to space. This allows it to cool down at night because its temperature (of around 300 K) is much higher than that of outer space (around 3 K) and there is no incident solar irradiation from the Sun at night.
A good PDRC material needs to satisfy several criteria. For one, it must reflect sunlight strongly at solar spectrum wavelengths (of 0.3 to 2.5 µm) to avoid it heating up. It also needs to emit heat strongly in the long-wave infrared (LWIR) wavelengths (of 8–13 µm) where the atmosphere is more transparent to infrared radiation, so that it can lose energy to the cold sky. Over the past decade, researchers have succeeded in developing a wide range of PDRC materials, including multilayer nanophotonic emitters, single-layer polymers on reflectors and porous ceramics. However, conventional PDRC systems cannot harvest the coldness of outer space and solar energy from the same surface at the same time.
A hybrid PDRC and photovoltaic-thermal collector
In the new work, which is detailed in Cell Reports Physical Science, the KIT researchers made a hybrid PDRC and photovoltaic-thermal collector. The emitting layer in the device, which is transparent, consists of a silica substrate coated with the silicone polymer polydimethylsiloxane. This layer allows sunlight to pass through while simultaneously emitting heat as LWIR radiation through the atmospheric window. Beneath the transparent emitter, a Fresnel lens concentrates the transmitted sunlight onto the (gallium arsenide-based) photovoltaic-thermal collector mounted on a two-axis solar tracker. This is where electricity is generated.
In outdoor experiments performed during the day, the prototype simultaneously achieved cooling of up to 6.5 °C below ambient temperature, an electrical power density of 60.6 W/m² and heating up to 110.8 °C. “This is exciting,” says Huang, “because it shows that the hot Sun and the cold universe can be harvested together, rather than treated as separate resources as has been the case until now.”
The main challenge was ensuring that the solar collector became hot while the radiative cooler stayed cool, he explains. “We achieved this by concentrating the transmitted sunlight onto a much smaller solar collector underneath the transparent cooling layer, so reducing thermal interference between the hot and cold parts in the device.”
The team is now busy improving the efficiency and practical design of its system. “We are already working on a better optical design, improved thermal management and more efficient solar cells,” reveals Huang.
“The Sun is not the only renewable energy resource in the sky, the coldness of outer space is another,” he says. “We believe there are many exciting possibilities for a new generation of energy systems if we learn how to manage both these together.”
How 2 US, European Satellites Are Studying Hurricanes During El Niño
Hurricane Melissa is seen 50 miles south of Jamaica in this photograph taken from the International Space Station on Oct. 28, 2025.
NASA
Last November, NASA and its European partners launched the Sentinel-6B satellite to improve hurricane forecasts, help protect infrastructure, and benefit commercial industries, including shipping. The satellite now is flying 30 seconds behind its predecessor, Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich. Both satellites are providing precise sea level height measurements during what oceanographers expect to be a historic El Niño, a naturally occurring oceanic phenomenon in which warmer-than-usual Pacific waters shift global weather patterns.
The two satellites make up the Copernicus Sentinel-6/Jason-CS (Continuity of Service) mission, the latest in a series of ocean-observing radar altimetry missions that have been monitoring Earth’s changing seas continuously since the early 1990s.
The data each satellite is collecting will not only allow scientists to better understand this year’s El Niño but will also help them create more accurate hurricane predictions.
“This El Niño was a late-bloomer,” said Josh Willis, Sentinel-6B’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “It didn’t kick off until the middle of the year and is just now reaching a strength similar to what we’ve seen in the satellite record during significant El Niños in 1997 and 2015. We expect it to be big, and it’s already having big impacts.”
El Niños generally scramble weather patterns tied to rainfall and storms, including hurricanes. They also redistribute heat in the ocean, which affects sea level. Normally, Earth’s warmest ocean waters sit along the equator in the western Pacific. During El Niño, weakened winds, which usually blow westward along the equator, result in heat spreading east toward South America. The change in ocean heat shifts hurricane activity from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.
Predicting hurricane strength
On July 15, Sentinel-6B began delivering low-latency data to scientists that could be used for weather predictions. That data will take some time to work its way into the research models on which meteorologists and climate scientists rely, but when it does, those improved models could save lives.
Data from Sentinel-6 satellite missions feeds into hurricane tracking algorithms used by federal and state agencies. Those predictions can activate disaster response efforts, mobilizing resources ranging from sandbag placement to National Guard activation. They also can lead to evacuation orders that require quick but well-informed decisions about logistics at a local level. More severe events may require engaging larger organizations, such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
A tropical storm can take a week or more to become a hurricane and make its way to a coastline, but a hurricane can rapidly intensify in the 48 hours prior to landfall, leaving planners little time to prepare.
“Hurricanes have been known to speed up quickly at the last moment, so the window in which to decide what to do is short,” said Deirdre Byrne, an oceanographer and altimetry expert with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). “The goal is to forecast how much and how rapidly intensification will happen so that officials can make the right calls.”
Each Sentinel-6 satellite measures ocean height, as well as the size of waves and marine wind speed, using a radar altimeter, which bounces thousands of radar pulses a second off the crests and troughs of waves. Ocean height varies from place to place and provides insight into the ocean’s heat content, since warm water expands. That, in turn, helps forecast how fast hurricanes will grow.
Among the measurements Sentinel-6 is gathering, Byrne is most anticipating the ocean height data, which she plans to begin incorporating into the current Satellite Ocean Heat Content Suite algorithm by the end of the year.
“In terms of data quality, the Sentinel-6 missions are unparalleled,” Byrne said.
Together, the missions are also extending a precise dataset deep into its fourth decade. This record of sea level observations traces back to the TOPEX/Poseidon mission, which launched in 1992, and continues through to the present day with Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich. Sentinel-6B will take over for its predecessor as the reference satellite for global sea level measurements later this year.
“The key is consistency, measuring the same way, every time,” said Severine Fournier, Sentinel-6B deputy project scientist, JPL. “That’s what lets us predict hurricanes, and, in turn, protect coastal communities and infrastructure.”
More about Sentinel-6B
Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich, named after a former director of NASA’s Earth Science Division, is one of two satellites that compose the Copernicus Sentinel-6/Jason-CS mission.
Sentinel-6/Jason-CS, a part of the European Union’s Earth observation program called Copernicus, was jointly developed by ESA (European Space Agency), EUMETSAT (European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites), NASA, and NOAA, with funding support from the European Commission and technical support on performance from the French space agency CNES (Centre National d’Études Spatiales). Spacecraft monitoring and control, as well as the processing of all the altimeter science data, is carried out by EUMETSAT on behalf of the European Union’s Copernicus Programme, with the support of all partner agencies.
NASA JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, contributed three science instruments for each Sentinel-6 satellite: the Advanced Microwave Radiometer, the GNSS-RO, and the Laser Retroreflector Array. NASA also contributed launch services, ground systems supporting operation of the agency’s science instruments, the science data processors for two of these instruments, and support for the United States members of the international Ocean Surface Topography Science Team.
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
Hurricane Melissa is seen 50 miles south of Jamaica in this photograph taken from the International Space Station on Oct. 28, 2025.
NASA
Last November, NASA and its European partners launched the Sentinel-6B satellite to improve hurricane forecasts, help protect infrastructure, and benefit commercial industries, including shipping. The satellite now is flying 30 seconds behind its predecessor, Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich. Both satellites are providing precise sea level height measurements during what oceanographers expect to be a historic El Niño, a naturally occurring oceanic phenomenon in which warmer-than-usual Pacific waters shift global weather patterns.
The two satellites make up the Copernicus Sentinel-6/Jason-CS (Continuity of Service) mission, the latest in a series of ocean-observing radar altimetry missions that have been monitoring Earth’s changing seas continuously since the early 1990s.
The data each satellite is collecting will not only allow scientists to better understand this year’s El Niño but will also help them create more accurate hurricane predictions.
“This El Niño was a late-bloomer,” said Josh Willis, Sentinel-6B’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “It didn’t kick off until the middle of the year and is just now reaching a strength similar to what we’ve seen in the satellite record during significant El Niños in 1997 and 2015. We expect it to be big, and it’s already having big impacts.”
El Niños generally scramble weather patterns tied to rainfall and storms, including hurricanes. They also redistribute heat in the ocean, which affects sea level. Normally, Earth’s warmest ocean waters sit along the equator in the western Pacific. During El Niño, weakened winds, which usually blow westward along the equator, result in heat spreading east toward South America. The change in ocean heat shifts hurricane activity from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.
Predicting hurricane strength
On July 15, Sentinel-6B began delivering low-latency data to scientists that could be used for weather predictions. That data will take some time to work its way into the research models on which meteorologists and climate scientists rely, but when it does, those improved models could save lives.
Data from Sentinel-6 satellite missions feeds into hurricane tracking algorithms used by federal and state agencies. Those predictions can activate disaster response efforts, mobilizing resources ranging from sandbag placement to National Guard activation. They also can lead to evacuation orders that require quick but well-informed decisions about logistics at a local level. More severe events may require engaging larger organizations, such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
A tropical storm can take a week or more to become a hurricane and make its way to a coastline, but a hurricane can rapidly intensify in the 48 hours prior to landfall, leaving planners little time to prepare.
“Hurricanes have been known to speed up quickly at the last moment, so the window in which to decide what to do is short,” said Deirdre Byrne, an oceanographer and altimetry expert with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). “The goal is to forecast how much and how rapidly intensification will happen so that officials can make the right calls.”
Each Sentinel-6 satellite measures ocean height, as well as the size of waves and marine wind speed, using a radar altimeter, which bounces thousands of radar pulses a second off the crests and troughs of waves. Ocean height varies from place to place and provides insight into the ocean’s heat content, since warm water expands. That, in turn, helps forecast how fast hurricanes will grow.
Among the measurements Sentinel-6 is gathering, Byrne is most anticipating the ocean height data, which she plans to begin incorporating into the current Satellite Ocean Heat Content Suite algorithm by the end of the year.
“In terms of data quality, the Sentinel-6 missions are unparalleled,” Byrne said.
Together, the missions are also extending a precise dataset deep into its fourth decade. This record of sea level observations traces back to the TOPEX/Poseidon mission, which launched in 1992, and continues through to the present day with Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich. Sentinel-6B will take over for its predecessor as the reference satellite for global sea level measurements later this year.
“The key is consistency, measuring the same way, every time,” said Severine Fournier, Sentinel-6B deputy project scientist, JPL. “That’s what lets us predict hurricanes, and, in turn, protect coastal communities and infrastructure.”
More about Sentinel-6B
Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich, named after a former director of NASA’s Earth Science Division, is one of two satellites that compose the Copernicus Sentinel-6/Jason-CS mission.
Sentinel-6/Jason-CS, a part of the European Union’s Earth observation program called Copernicus, was jointly developed by ESA (European Space Agency), EUMETSAT (European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites), NASA, and NOAA, with funding support from the European Commission and technical support on performance from the French space agency CNES (Centre National d’Études Spatiales). Spacecraft monitoring and control, as well as the processing of all the altimeter science data, is carried out by EUMETSAT on behalf of the European Union’s Copernicus Programme, with the support of all partner agencies.
NASA JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, contributed three science instruments for each Sentinel-6 satellite: the Advanced Microwave Radiometer, the GNSS-RO, and the Laser Retroreflector Array. NASA also contributed launch services, ground systems supporting operation of the agency’s science instruments, the science data processors for two of these instruments, and support for the United States members of the international Ocean Surface Topography Science Team.
Researchers developed a model showing how lava-covered planets close to their stars can hold onto their atmospheres, which could help guide the search for life beyond our solar system. Some planets orbit so close to their stars that intense radiation should strip away their atmospheres. Yet several of these scorching, lava-covered worlds still retain thick [...]
For almost five decades, Saturn’s north pole has been famous for hosting a bizarre, six-sided jet stream known as the hexagon, a feature first spotted by NASA’s Voyager spacecraft in the 1980s and still churning today.
A new theoretical kind of extraterrestrial life could survive the harsh acid clouds of Venus, according to MIT researchers.
Despite longstanding conceptions that Venus would be too deadly for even the hardiest of extremophiles, new evidence suggests a rethinking of life from the ground up may be in order. The work was revealed in a recent paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which describes how extraterrestrial life could form from peptides to thrive only in such a hostile environment.
Based on recent evidence, it may be time to cast a wider net in the search for extraterrestrial life and look at planets that bear little resemblance to Earth.
The Brutal Venusian Environment
“We really don’t know the full extent of what planet archetypes are out there,” said senior co-author Sara Seager, the Class of 1941 Professor of Planetary Sciences in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and a professor at MIT’s departments of Physics and of Aeronautics and Astronautics. “We’re seeking exoplanets that might be a true Earth twin, but what if they’re all Venuses? Our findings definitely open up a whole range of possibilities.”
About 30 to 40 miles above Venus’s scorching surface, which reaches temperatures close to 900° F, lies a pocket of milder temperatures that some scientists think may be conducive to life. However, this region’s heavy cloud cover poses its own challenges. Instead of being composed primarily of water, the clouds on Venus are 98% sulfuric acid, which is strong enough to dissolve metals and would kill any known life on Earth.
While traditional astrobiological thinking held that this would be far too extreme for complex biological molecules to hold together, new evidence is overturning that idea. Recent work at MIT suggests that peptides can endure such challenging conditions, maintaining their stability and adopting shapes useful to biological processes.
“If peptides find their way to that cloud layer of concentrated sulfuric acid, they will stay and be stably preserved in that cloud of droplets,” said senior co-author Mei Hong, an MIT professor of chemistry and one of the senior authors of the new study. “And once these macromolecules have a defined three-dimensional structure, they can potentially have a function.”
Seeding Extraterrestrial Life
Following the concept of panspermia, which holds that the building blocks of life are transmitted throughout the universe on meteoroids, asteroids, and comets, the researchers investigated whether any building blocks could survive the Venusian conditions to give rise to extraterrestrial life.
Work began in Seager’s lab in 2020, studying how biological molecules could endure the stress of such an acidic environment. With nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, they analyzed the structures of molecules in sulfuric acid solution. Surprisingly, nucleic acids, lipids, and amino acids all maintained their integrity under acidic conditions.
The next step was to investigate whether peptides could likewise hold their integrity and also assume useful biological shapes. They were surprised to find how resilient the peptides were, holding on for weeks at a time. Ironically, the lack of water in the environment could be a blessing, as without it, the hydrolysis reaction that breaks down peptides cannot occur.
“Without water, an acid that you would consider a harsh solvent suddenly is not as menacing as one might think,” Hong said.
New Concepts in Extraterrestrial Life
Additionally, the sulfuric acid molecules acted as scaffolds, allowing biologically useful shapes to form that otherwise wouldn’t, such as omega loops, which are found in some naturally occurring proteins on Earth but not typically in peptides.
“What hadn’t been known is that peptides can survive so well and have specific three-dimensional shapes in an acidic environment,” Hong explained.
Follow-up work will take these ideas even further, synthesizing a DNA alternative called PNA, made from peptides. Their existing work shows that a single PNA strand is stable in sulfuric acid, but the new research will attempt to recreate DNA’s double-strand structure with peptides. They also plan to investigate whether long peptides can hold omega loops under these acidic conditions.
Based on their results, extraterrestrial life could easily be hiding in environments highly divergent from anything seen on Earth. Continued investigation may reveal that rather than being poisonous, environments like Venus may be the only places certain lifeforms could exist.
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.
Stars do not actually switch their lights on and off when they twinkle. The flicker happens between the star and your eyes, as its light passes through Earth’s moving atmosphere. Planets are affected by the same air, but they usually look steadier because their light arrives from a small disk rather than a single point. […]
Satellites designed to provide internet service are now serving an unexpected second purpose: helping scientists map the nearly invisible atmosphere at the edge of space. Researchers at Kyoto University have used orbital changes from about 1,200 Starlink satellites to map Earth’s thermosphere, a thin and difficult-to-observe region of the upper atmosphere. Their analysis produced the [...]
Pluto’s tenuous atmosphere appears to have begun contracting after years of holding steady, according to a new study published in the Planetary Science Journal.
The Chicxulub impact not only plunged Earth into an impact winter but also produced a dust blanket that later overheated the planet, according to new research from Purdue University and the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Black carbon particles released by rocket launches remain in the upper atmosphere for much longer than sooty particles produced by sources on the ground. This finding, which comes from a study led by researchers at University College London (UCL), UK, suggests that the soot created in deploying “megaconstellations” containing hundreds or thousands of satellites could have poorly understood and potentially serious consequences for the Earth’s climate.
“Rocket launches are a unique source of pollution, injecting harmful chemicals directly into the upper layers of the atmosphere and contaminating Earth’s last remaining relatively pristine environment,” says the study’s lead author, UCL atmospheric chemist Connor Barker.
The number of rockets being launched into space has increased dramatically since 2019, and the trend shows few signs of stopping. This year has already seen more launches than the whole of 2020, and space industry experts believe the eventual total could surpass 2025’s figure of 329. The increase has primarily been driven by the Falcon 9 rockets launched by the US firm SpaceX, though China also logged a record 92 launch attempts in 2025.
“An unregulated geoengineering experiment”
In the new work, Barker and colleagues analysed data from rocket launches and satellite re-entries from 2020 to 2022. Their results, which they detail in Earth’s Future, show that the soot particles lingering in the upper atmosphere are 540 times more effective at altering climate than ground-based soot emissions from sources such as cars and power plants.
“Space industry pollution is like an unregulated geoengineering experiment,” says Barker. Soot particles from burning kerosene in rocket fuel absorb sunlight, he explains, which prevents it from reaching the Earth’s surface. The result is a small cooling effect, which might sound like a good thing in the context of rising global temperatures. However, Barker stresses that this cooling is minimal compared to the global warming caused by other human-generated emissions, while the particles themselves could have “many other serious unintended consequences”.
Predictions likely to underestimate future impact
As well as quantifying recent space industry emissions, the researchers make predictions about future ones. According to their calculations, by 2029 the space industry will be releasing about 870 tonnes of soot into the atmosphere each year. By way of comparison, Baker notes that according to the latest UK government figures, the annual emissions of the country’s entire passenger car fleet amounted to just 728 tonnes.
The team based its predictions on projections of data from 2020-2022, which is considered the beginning of the megaconstellation satellite era. Because of this, Barker cautions that they are likely to be underestimates, making the problem even more urgent. “It is critical that we understand the environmental impacts of satellite megaconstellations now while their impact is small, before any unforeseen consequences are difficult to reverse or repair,” he tells Physics World.
While scientists have made great progress in the last few years, Baker says that are still large uncertainties in our emission estimates for the industry and our understanding of how they affect the atmosphere. “We hope that this work spurs further research to measure space industry emissions and highlights the need to regulate the geoengineering impacts of the space industry,” he says.
Team leader Eloise Marais, a professor of atmospheric chemistry and air quality at UCL, echoes this sentiment. “So far, there has been limited effort to effectively regulate this type of pollution,” she says.
The researchers are now working on an emissions tracker to visualize these emissions across the entire space age. “We are also using satellite imagery to remotely detect and quantify rocket launch emissions,” Barker reveals.
Planetary researchers have found the first evidence that bursts of energetic particles from the Sun could warm the lower atmosphere of Mars during massive dust storms, hinting at an unexpected link between space weather and Martian climate.
The researchers behind the historic discovery, which they are calling “a major milestone in the search for life on other planets,” said the detection of an atmosphere on an Earth-like rocky exoplanet offers the strongest evidence to date that worlds with similar compositions and temperatures to Earth that are also capable of supporting life could exist beyond our solar system.
Models Predicted First Earth-like Rocky Habitable Zone Exoplanet Atmosphere
In a statement announcing the detection of an atmosphere around a habitable-zone rocky exoplanet, the discovery was motivated by theoretical predictions suggesting that LHS 1140 b may contain an atmosphere. The planet was even more tantalizing because its orbit around its host red dwarf star allows for liquid water on its surface, a key ingredient for life as we know it.
Although thousands of exoplanets have been confirmed since 1995, including habitable-zone rocky worlds similar in size and composition to Earth, the team notes that determining whether any of these potential Earth analogs maintain an atmosphere. Like water, an atmosphere is considered a likely necessity for life to emerge.
“An atmosphere is essential for a planet to support life as we know it,” explained Collin Cherubim, the lead author of a study detailing the findings, who recently earned his Ph.D. in Earth and Planetary Sciences from Harvard University.
Robin Wordsworth, the Gordon McKay Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering and Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard, said that as recently as twenty years ago, astronomers still didn’t know if other, terrestrial-type planets “even existed.” However, he explained, they quickly found that this type of planet was common, including some orbiting within their star’s habitable zone.
“The next question was whether any of them had managed to keep an atmosphere,” the professor added.
Infrared Observations Confirm Historic First
Before performing any direct observations, the team used computer models to predict what they might find on LHS 1140 b. As noted, those models predicted an upper atmosphere rich in helium. The models also suggested that the atmospheric helium was slowly escaping into space.
To test the model’s predictions, Cherubim and colleagues gained access to the Warm Infrared Echelle (WINERED) Spectrograph on the Magellan Observatory in Chile. The team noted that this powerful telescope allowed them to observe an alignment of LHS 1140 b and another planet transiting its star “on the same night.”
When analyzing the data, the team found that one of the planets appeared to lack any measurable atmosphere. However, as their models had predicted, helium was actively escaping from LHS 1140 b. The finding confirmed that this rocky exoplanet orbiting within its star’s habitable zone was actively maintaining an atmosphere.
David Charbonneau, the head of the Harvard Department of Astronomy and an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, and Cherubim’s co-advisor with Wordsworth, was initially skeptical because the entire concept was based on a mathematical prediction of a phenomenon astronomers had never witnessed directly. However, Professor Charbonneau ended up praising the student’s determination and follow-through, which led to the historic detection.
“Collin analyzed the planets we knew about and predicted that this one would have a helium atmosphere,” Charbonneau said. “Then he organized telescope time, got the data, and the detection was statistically rock solid.”
“Hopefully it’s just the First of Many More Observations to Come”
When discussing the implications of the findings, Cherubim noted that “this is the first time anyone has found an atmosphere on a rocky planet in the habitable zone of another star.” Professor Wordsworth agreed, once again noting that until now, planets in these categories with atmospheres had been purely theoretical.
“Now we know at least one has,” the professor said.
The data also suggest that LHS 1140 b’s atmosphere has likely survived for more than three billion years, roughly three-quarters of Earth’s existence. This durability makes LHS 1140 b an excellent candidate for future exoplanet atmosphere studies.
More broadly, the team said that using ground-based observatories to search for escaping gases, such as the helium detected leaving LHS 1140 b, “may become an important tool for studying atmospheres on rocky exoplanets.” They also note the potential value of atmospheric detection for astrobiologists searching for signs of life in the cosmos.
As for Cherubim, he plans on following up his historic discovery with a more detailed analysis of the planet’s atmospheric composition. He also said he would like to investigate the possible presence of surface oceans or other planetary characteristics typically associated with habitability and life. The entire team also said they would like to use Cherubim’s model to search for similar Earth-like, habitable-zone rocky exoplanets.
“This has been a model validation, and hopefully it’s just the first of many more observations to come,” Cherubim said.
Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him directly at christopher@thedebrief.org.
A population study suggests the human body may already be responding to changes in the composition of the atmosphere. The air outside may be leaving a subtle signature in human blood. Researchers have identified gradual changes in a key carbon dioxide-related blood marker and warn that it could approach the upper limit of its healthy [...]
Using spectral data from the Magellan Clay telescope at Las Campanas Observatory, astronomers detected helium escaping from LHS 1140b, a rocky exoplanet that orbits in the habitable zone of the nearby low-mass star LHS 1140.
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