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    Discovery marks the first detection of variable water clouds outside of the solar system

    October 12, 2026, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    A planet with a striped pattern consisting of purple and tan bands, set against a backdrop of stars in the distant universe
    Artist’s concept of a brown dwarf. Brown dwarfs begin their lives like stars but they never accumulate enough mass to fuse atoms steadily at their cores and ignite with starlight.
    NASA/JPL-Caltech

    A Jupiter-sized world just 7.5 light-years away is cloudy, chemically complex and, it turns out, more like home than anyone expected. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, Brittany Miles, assistant astronomer at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory, led a team that spent 11 hours staring at WISE 0855, the coldest known brown dwarf, collecting a spectrum of its light every 15 minutes.

    The result is the most detailed time-series portrait ever taken of this frigid world—and the first direct confirmation that water clouds on another body are changing thickness over time, just like we...

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