From the brightness variations of its host star, an exoplanet ’s size and other properties can be determined. In order to avoid mistakes, the star’s magnetic field is decisive.

700 light years away from Earth in the constellation Virgo, the planet WASP-39b orbits the star WASP-39. The gas giant, which takes little more than four days to complete one orbit, is one of the best-studied exoplanets.

Shortly after its commissioning in July 2022, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope turned its high-precision gaze on the distant planet. The data revealed evidence of large quantities of water vapor, of methane and even, for the first time, of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of WASP-39b. A minor sensation!

Mission to explore the surface of the only moon in the solar system with an Earth-like atmosphere will launch in 2028 and arrive at Saturn’s giant moon in 2034.

Io is simply littered with volcanoes, and we caught a few of them in action.

A team of geologists and planetary scientists from the California Institute of Technology, the University of California Santa Cruz, New York University, and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center reports evidence that Io’s volcanic activity has been ongoing since the beginning of the solar system. In their study, published in the journal Science, the group studied sulfur isotopes in Io’s atmosphere to determine how long the moon has been volcanically active.

From the spiral arms of galaxies to microscopic snow crystals, nature seems to fall into fractal-like patterns that repeat in increasingly smaller increments. No matter how small you go, parts of the pattern still resemble the whole.

One exception appears to be molecules, which have not been known to exhibit self-similarity at changing scales. That is, until now.

Researchers from Germany, Sweden, and the UK have discovered an enzyme produced by a single-celled organism that can arrange itself into a fractal – not just any fractal, but a repeating pattern of triangles known as a Sierpiński triangle.