Astro Blog

https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/news/1704/discovery-alert-a-flood-of-new-planets-plus-hint-of-an-exomoon/ By Pat Brennan, NASA's Exoplanet Exploration Program.  Excerpt: Data from NASA’s now-retired Kepler Space Telescope reveals an eclectic assortment of new planets and planetary systems that promises to deepen understanding of how exoplanets form. Some of the newly-discovered planets might make tempting targets for the James Webb Space Telescope, now being fine-tuned for its first observations this summer. The Webb telescope is expected to search for signs of atmospheres around some exoplanets, and potentially determine some of the gases and molecules present. This raft of new planets also helped push NASA’s tally of confirmed exoplanets past the 5,000 mark in March 2022. ...Combing through Kepler data also revealed another potentially significant find: a possible exomoon. ...The new possible exomoon, Kepler-1708 b-i, would be very large for a moon, about 2.6 times as big around as E...

https://eos.org/articles/giant-planets-formation-caught-in-action By Jure Japelj , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Astronomers took a direct image of a massive protoplanet embedded in a protoplanetary disk. The system provides strong evidence for an as-yet-unconfirmed theory of planet formation. ...Jupiter-class gas giants on far-flung orbits have challenged what is known as the standard formation scenario. Scientists  converged  on the scenario that our solar system’s giant planets formed via accretion within the gaseous protoplanetary disk. Rocky planetary cores fed on pebbles or planetesimals, and once the cores reached a certain mass, they began gobbling up the surrounding gas, rapidly becoming giant planets. But that process works only when planets form relatively close to their host stars—the gas giants found on wide orbits would not have had time to grow a sufficiently massive core before the gaseous disk dissipated. The unstable disk model is one of several alternative models...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/02/science/nasa-exoplanets-5000.html By Becky Ferreira , The New York Times.  Excerpt: NASA recently announced that it had detected more than 5,000 exoplanets, so we asked astronomers, actors and an astronaut to share their favorite worlds orbiting distant stars.…

https://mars.nasa.gov/news/9158/what-sounds-captured-by-nasas-perseverance-rover-reveal-about-mars/ By NASA News.  Excerpt: A new study based on recordings made by the rover finds that the speed of sound is slower on the Red Planet than on Earth and that, mostly, a deep silence prevails. ​ Listen closely to sounds from Mars, recorded by NASA’s Perseverance: the rover’s mechanical whine and click in a light Martian wind; the whir of rotors on Ingenuity, the Mars helicopter; the crackling strike of a rock-zapping laser. An international team of scientists has done just that, performing the first analysis of acoustics on the Red Planet. Their new study reveals how fast sound travels through the extremely thin, mostly carbon dioxide atmosphere, how Mars might sound to human ears, and how scientists can use audio recordings to probe subtle air-pressure changes on another world – and to gauge the health of the rover. ...Most of the sounds in  the study , published April 1 in the jou...