Category Astronomy/Space

WASP-121b, a scorching gas giant orbiting its star every 30 hours, is literally bleeding its atmosphere into space. Astronomers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), the National Centre of Competence in Research PlanetS, and the Trottier Institute for Research on Exoplanets (IREx) at the University of Montreal (UdeM) have made a major breakthrough using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). For the first time, researchers have followed gas escaping from an exoplanet’s atmosphere continuously over a full orbit around its star.

The observations revealed an unexpected and dramatic result. The gas giant WASP-121b is surrounded by not one, but two enormous streams of helium that stretch across more than half of its orbit...

Over the years, passing spacecraft have observed mystifying weather patterns at the poles of Jupiter and Saturn. The two planets host very different types of polar vortices, which are huge atmospheric whirlpools that rotate over a planet’s polar region. On Saturn, a single massive polar vortex appears to cap the north pole in a curiously hexagonal shape, while on Jupiter, a central polar vortex is surrounded by eight smaller vortices, like a pan of swirling cinnamon rolls.

Given that both planet...

Through new experiments, researchers in Japan and Germany have recreated the chemical conditions found in the subsurface ocean of Saturn’s moon, Enceladus. Published in Icarus, the results show that these conditions can readily produce many of the organic compounds observed by the Cassini mission, strengthening evidence that the distant world could harbor the molecular building blocks of life.

Beneath its thick outer shell of ice, astronomers widely predict that Saturn’s sixth largest moon hosts an ocean of liquid water in its south polar region...

An international team of astronomers, including researchers from the Department of Physics at The University of Hong Kong (HKU), has uncovered the first decisive evidence that at least some fast radio burst (FRB) sources—brief but powerful flashes of radio waves from distant galaxies—reside in binary stellar systems. This means the FRB source is not an isolated star, as previously assumed, but part of a binary stellar system in which two stars orbit each other.

Using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) located in Guizhou, also known as the “China Sky Eye,” the team detected a distinctive signal that reveals the presence of a nearby companion star orbiting the FRB source.

The discovery, publ...