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Beta Pic's Hidden Planet, Earth-Sized Atmosphere & Starship Flight 13
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Webb spots a hidden planet in Beta Pictoris using spectroscopy, while LHS 1140 b becomes the first rocky habitable-zone world confirmed to hold an atmosphere. Plus Starship's softest-ever splashdown, the universe's most distant supernova, and Africa's first lunar mission.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The James Webb Space Telescope has found a planet it wasn't looking for, in a system astronomers thought they already knew well, by reading the chemical fingerprints in starlight rather than seeing the planet directly. That's the lead today, and the implications run further than the single discovery.
The caveat is real. Beta Pictoris d was found during observations aimed at something else.
The second story connects directly. The exoplanet LHS 1140 b now has a confirmed atmosphere.
On the launch side, SpaceX completed Starship Flight Thirteen. The upper stage came down vertically and intact in the Indian Ocean, the softest splashdown achieved in the program.
Meanwhile, astronomers have observed the most distant supernova ever recorded. It exploded when the universe was seven hundred and thirty million years old, and the striking thing is how familiar it looks.
Finally, Africa's first lunar science payload is heading to the moon in twenty-twenty-nine. The mission, called BALLS Moon, will carry three spheres to the lunar south pole to test low-frequency radio astronomy in an environment unreachable from Earth.
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