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WASP-121 b Mapped, Interstellar Comet's Age & Euclid's 60M-Star Image
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
JWST has mapped an alien world's dawn and dusk sides separately for the first time, revealing an asymmetric atmosphere that rewrites exoplanet circulation models. Plus: interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS is 10–12 billion years old, Euclid captures 60 million stars in a single shot, and SpaceX's secretive Starfall mission raises questions.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
For the first time, astronomers have mapped the dawn side and the dusk side of an alien world separately, and they're not the same. JWST has done something genuinely new with the ultra-hot exoplanet WASP-121 b: it's probed the atmosphere longitude by longitude, and what it found changes how we think about these extreme worlds.
Shifting to something older. Much older.
ESA's Euclid telescope has produced the largest single image ever taken of the Milky Way's central bulge. Sixty million stars, captured in a twenty-six-hour exposure.
SpaceX quietly launched a spacecraft called Starfall on a Falcon 9 earlier this week. The payload is described as a microgravity research platform, but FAA filings also reference rapid cargo delivery capabilities.
One more development worth flagging. A physicist has proposed using high-powered lasers to manipulate gravitational waves directly, creating conditions where energy transfers between light and gravity in a measurable way.
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