When it comes to finding habitable exoplanets, the next big challenge is not just spotting exoplanets or looking at their orbits, but getting a better understanding of what conditions there might be like by analyzing their atmospheres. New tools like the James Webb Space Telescope will allow us to peer into the atmospheres of exoplanets and see what they are composed of, which can affect the planet’s surface temperature, pressure, and weather systems.

Now, astronomers using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), a ground-based telescope located in Chile, have discovered the heaviest element ever in an exoplanet atmosphere. Looking at two ultra-hot gas giants called WASP-76 b and WASP-121 b, the researchers identified the element barium in their atmospheres.

These two planets orbit extremely close to their respective stars and thus have extremely high surface temperatures which can go over 1,000 degrees Celsius. On one of the planets, WASP-76 b, it gets so got that iron falls from the sky as rain. But the researchers were surprised to find barium high in the atmospheres of these planets because it is so heavy.

A jet of radiation from two colliding neutron stars appears to be travelling at seven times the speed of light, according to measurements from the Hubble Space Telescope. Although this is merely an optical illusion, as nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, it provides key insights into mysterious gamma ray bursts, which aren’t fully understood.

Astronomers around the world are captivated by an unusually bright and long-lasting pulse of high-energy radiation that swept over Earth on Sunday, Oct. 9. The emission came from a gamma-ray burst (GRB)—the most powerful class of explosions in the universe—that ranks among the most luminous events known.

On Sunday morning Eastern time, a wave of X-rays and gamma rays passed through the solar system, triggering detectors aboard NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, and Wind spacecraft, as well as others. Telescopes around the world turned to the site to study the aftermath, and new observations continue.

Called GRB 221009A, the explosion provided an unexpectedly exciting start to the 10th Fermi Symposium, a gathering of gamma-ray astronomers now underway in Johannesburg, South Africa. “It’s safe to say this meeting really kicked off with a bang—everyone’s talking about this,” said Judy Racusin, a Fermi deputy project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who is attending the conference.

On Oct. 16, at 7:04 a.m. EDT, NASA’s Lucy spacecraft, the first mission to the Jupiter Trojan asteroids, will skim the Earth’s atmosphere, passing a mere 220 miles (350 kilometers) above the surface. By swinging past Earth on the first anniversary of its launch, Lucy will gain some of the orbital energy it needs to travel to this never-before-visited population of asteroids.

The Trojan asteroids are trapped in orbits around the sun at the same distance as Jupiter, either far ahead of or behind the giant planet. Lucy is currently one year into a twelve-year voyage. This gravity assist will place Lucy on a new trajectory for a two-year orbit, at which time it will return to Earth for a second gravity assist. This second assist will give Lucy the energy it needs to cross the main asteroid belt, where it will observe asteroid Donaldjohanson, and then travel into the leading Trojan asteroid swarm. There, Lucy will fly past six Trojan asteroids: Eurybates and its satellite Queta, Polymele and its yet unnamed satellite, Leucus, and Orus. Lucy will then return to Earth for a third gravity assist in 2030 to re-target the spacecraft for a rendezvous with the Patroclus-Menoetius binary asteroid pair in the trailing Trojan asteroid swarm.

For this first gravity assist, Lucy will appear to approach Earth from the direction of the sun. While this means that observers on Earth will not be able to see Lucy in the days before the event, Lucy will be able to take images of the nearly full Earth and moon. Mission scientists will use these images to calibrate the instruments.

The latest image from NASA‘s James Webb Space Telescope is a new perspective on the binary star Wolf-Rayet 140, revealing details and structure in a new light. Astronomer Ryan Lau of NSF’s NOIRLab, principal investigator of the Webb Early Release Science program that observed the starhis thoughts on the observations.

On the night that my team’s Early Release Science observations of the dust-forming massive binary star Wolf-Rayet (WR) 140 were taken, I was puzzled by what I saw in the preview images from the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). There seemed to be a strange-looking diffraction pattern, and I worried that it was a visual effect created by the stars’ extreme brightness. However, as soon as I downloaded the final data I realized that I was not looking at a diffraction pattern, but instead rings of dust surrounding WR 140 – at least 17 of them.

I was amazed. Although they resemble rings in the image, the true 3D geometry of those semi-circular features is better described as a shell. The shells of dust are formed each time the stars reach a point in their orbit where they are closest to each other and their stellar winds interact. The even spacing between the shells indicates that dust formation events are occurring like clockwork, once in each eight-year orbit. In this case, the 17 shells can be counted like tree rings, showing more than 130 years of dust formation. Our confidence in this interpretation of the image was strengthened by comparing our findings to the geometric dust models by Yinuo Han, a doctoral student at the University of Cambridge, which showed a near-perfect match to our observations.

Greg Stewart/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

This idea was previously hypothesized, and an earlier study by the same researchers showed the actual formation of a diamond rain during an experiment that approximated the conditions inside the faraway planets. Now, the scientists improved upon their findings in a new experiment that created conditions approximating the conditions on Neptune and Uranus even more closely.