Now Playing
WASP-17b Weather Mapped in 3D, Distant Supernova & Mystery JWST Signal
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
JWST maps alien weather in 3D for the first time and confirms the most distant supernova ever seen — plus an unexplained emission line with no known source. Today's biggest stories from across the universe, including solar flare risk from AR4551.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Astronomers have mapped the weather on an alien world in three dimensions for the first time, and the atmosphere isn't anything like what the models predicted. The planet is WASP-17b, a gas giant sitting thirteen hundred light-years away.
The second major development reinforces a fifty-year-old theoretical assumption that nobody had actually confirmed outside our own solar system until now. The planet is WASP-189b, a hot Jupiter studied using the Gemini South telescope.
Now to the early universe. JWST has confirmed the most distant supernova ever observed.
One development this cycle has no clean resolution yet, and it's worth flagging precisely because it doesn't. JWST picked up an emission line from a region of space that appears empty.
Closer to home, the sun's activity warrants attention. Sunspot region AR4551 fired an M-class flare recently and maintains a complex magnetic configuration that carries a continued probability of M-class and X-class events through late October.
Chapter summary auto-generated from the verified script. Listen to the full episode for the complete content.