Tag: Exoplanets
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Sydney Students Sharpen JWST Images with New Software
Two Sydney students unlock a sharper view from the James Webb Space Telescope Two innovative students from Sydney have led a globally significant effort to sharpen the James Webb Space Telescope’s vision. By tackling onboard instrument distortions, they boosted the telescope’s ability to detect Earth-like planets and observe distant cosmic phenomena with unprecedented clarity. The…
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Interstellar Visitors Are Upending Our Theories On Planet And Comet Formation
Introduction: A new era of cosmic visitors Over the last eight years, humanity has been visited not by missions or probes, but by a trio of interstellar objects that burned bright in the sky and baffled scientists. Oumuamua, 2I/Borisov, and 3I/ATLAS are not mere curiosities. They are empirical jolts to our understanding of how planets…
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How Australian scientists sharpened James Webb Telescope’s vision from a million kilometres away
Overview: A distant problem, a local solution When the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) launched in 2021, the world watched with awe at humanity’s most powerful eye into the cosmos. Yet even as the telescope floated in space, a stubborn challenge persisted: subtle image blur arising from how Webb’s instruments handle light. For Australian scientists,…
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How Australian Scientists Sharpen James Webb’s Vision from 1.5 Million Kilometres Away
Overview: A Quiet Engineering Triumph Behind James Webb’s Sharp Vision When the James Webb Space Telescope (Webb) launched in 2021, the world watched a leap forward in astronomy. Yet behind the awe-inspiring images lay a stubborn, practical problem: Webb’s most precise imaging depended on the performance of a tiny, critical component called the aperture masking…
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World Space Week Spotlight: Living in Space and Our Future
World Space Week: A Global Celebration of Space In this week’s This Week In Space episode, hosts Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik welcome Alma Okpalefe, the executive director of the World Space Week Association, to discuss one of the planet’s largest coordinated science celebrations. Chartered by the United Nations in 1999, World Space Week unites…
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Baby Exoplanet Born in Ring Gap: Stunning View from Ground Telescopes
New Proof of Planet Formation: A Baby Exoplanet in a Disk Gap Astronomers have captured one of the most compelling visuals yet of a planet in the making. A baby exoplanet named WISPIT 2b is seen nestled within a ring-shaped gap in the dusty disk around its young host star, WISPIT 2. The image offers…
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Baby Exoplanet WISPIT 2b Revealed Forming Inside Disk Ring
New View of Planet Formation Unveiled A remarkable glimpse into how planets come to life has emerged from a pair of premier telescopes: the Magellan Telescope in Chile and the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) in Arizona. Scientists have captured the baby exoplanet WISPIT 2b nestling itself inside a ring-shaped gap in the dusty disk around…
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Baby Exoplanet Born in Ring Gap: Direct View of Planet Formation
Overview: A New Window into Planet Formation A remarkable image from two of the world’s leading telescopes offers a rare snapshot of planet formation in progress. A young gas giant named WISPIT 2b has been captured nestled within a gap of the dusty protoplanetary disk that surrounds its parent star, WISPIT 2. The newborn planet…
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Beyond Our Orbit: The Strangest Planets We Have Uncovered
Beyond Our Orbit: A tour of the cosmos’ most perplexing planets Planet hunting has yielded a catalog bursting with surprises. From pressure-made ice to diamond cores, the universe keeps offering worlds that defy our Earth-centric intuition. Below is a curated look at some of the strangest planets we have uncovered so far, each illuminating a…
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Beyond our orbit: The strangest planets we have uncovered so far
Introduction: A catalog of worlds beyond our solar system As astronomers push the boundaries of discovery, the catalog of exoplanets—and the strange physics they reveal—grows ever longer. From planets with pressure-stabilized “ice” to worlds that look like candy and others that resemble crowns of glass, these distant bodies challenge our intuition about what a planet…