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TOI-199b, Little Red Dots Solved & LIGO's New Merger Catalog
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
JWST reveals a methane-rich Saturn-sized planet in a temperature zone that's stumped formation models for years — plus astronomers crack the 'little red dots' mystery and LIGO drops its biggest gravitational wave catalog yet. Six stories at the frontier of space and astronomy, delivered in minutes.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
A gas giant three hundred and thirty light-years away just upended what we thought we knew about how planets form. JWST has completed the first detailed spectroscopic study of TOI-199b, a Saturn-sized exoplanet sitting in a temperature range that almost no known gas giant occupies.
The other major result this cycle comes from a different kind of mystery. Early JWST observations kept turning up these small, intensely red sources at high redshift.
On the gravitational wave front, the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration has published its fourth transient catalog. GWTC-4.0 is now openly accessible through the Gravitational Wave Open Science Center.
Mars produced two separate results worth keeping in frame together. Curiosity has identified the largest polygonal fracture field it has ever observed, in a region called Valle Grande.
Closer to home, NASA has scheduled three ISS spacewalks for August, on the sixth, thirteenth, and twenty-fifth. The work covers power system upgrades, a communications antenna replacement, and infrastructure preparation.
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