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Inside-Out Planets, Alien Weather & the Most Distant Radio Burst
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Space exploration news that challenges everything: a backwards planetary system, Webb's first real-time alien cloud monitoring, and a record-breaking fast radio burst from cosmic noon. Today's data is stress-testing our best models — and the models are losing.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
A star called LHS 1903 has a planetary system that's built backwards, and it's forcing a serious rethink of how planets form in the first place. The standard model is tidy: rocky planets form close to their stars, gas giants form far out.
Shift from planet formation to planet atmospheres, and Webb has delivered something genuinely new. The target was WISE 0855, the coldest known brown dwarf.
Webb also extended the record for fast radio burst detection. FRB 20240304B now holds the title of most distant fast radio burst with an identified host galaxy, sitting at a redshift of two point one four eight.
One more planetary finding worth noting: a sub-Jupiter exoplanet candidate called PALTA-1 b has been identified orbiting an ultracool dwarf star via eight years of astrometric monitoring. Giant planets around the smallest stars are rare.
On the operational side, SpaceX launched twenty-seven Starlink V2 Mini satellites from Vandenberg on October twelfth. Booster B1088 completed its twentieth flight.
The thread connecting today's developments is simple. Our models are being stress-tested by actual data.
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