All posts tagged: orbiting

JWST finds a heavy atmosphere on a mini-Neptune orbiting a hot Jupiter

JWST finds a heavy atmosphere on a mini-Neptune orbiting a hot Jupiter

Published by Jenni Sidey

A giant planet was supposed to have the place to itself. Instead, in a star system 190 light-years away, a hot Jupiter shares space with a much smaller world, a mini-Neptune tucked even closer to the star. That pairing is rare enough on its own. Now, a fresh look at the smaller planet’s atmosphere is giving astronomers a clue to how both worlds may have ended up there. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, a team led by MIT examined the atmosphere of TOI-1130 b, the inner planet in the unusual two-planet system. What they found was not a light, hydrogen-and-helium envelope of the kind often expected for a close-in planet. Instead, the atmosphere appears rich in heavier molecules, including water vapor, carbon dioxide, and sulfur dioxide, along with a tentative hint of methane. That mix matters because TOI-1130 b now circles very close to its star, completing an orbit in a little more than four days. The outer planet, TOI-1130 c, a hot Jupiter, circles every 8.35 days. The team argues that the smaller …

Why We Need to Stop ‘Orbiting’ People We Date in 2026

Why We Need to Stop ‘Orbiting’ People We Date in 2026

Published by Jenni Sidey

This story is part of our ‘Habits to Embrace—and Ditch—in 2026’ series. Read the whole list here. Chances are that without scanning Reddit or the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, you’ve heard of orbiting. The dating trend occurs when an offending party delivers a steady stream of casual, low-effort pings of attention to one or more romantic interests with the intention of keeping them engaged but at arm’s length. Though not an entirely new phenomenon, orbiting has become more pervasive thanks to swipe culture and social media. Being orbited can feel wildly destabilizing, even to a veteran of the dating scene like me. Last spring, I met Matt, a tattooed art director, at a gallery opening, and we immediately hit it off, texting and meeting up for hours-long conversations about everything from The White Lotus conspiracy theories to our family trauma. After a few weeks of an intense romance, I woke up in his Brooklyn apartment and sensed that something had shifted. And after that morning, our pattern of communication changed: Whereas before …

The first commercial space stations will start orbiting Earth in 2026

The first commercial space stations will start orbiting Earth in 2026

Published by skeptic

A digital rendering of Vast’s Haven-1 space station Vast The space station industry is starting to take off. For decades, if you wanted to send an astronaut or experiment into orbit, the International Space Station (ISS) was the only option. But now, as NASA and its partners prepare to deorbit the ISS at the end of the decade, commercially owned stations are preparing to take over. “These have been in development for a number of years now, mostly in partnership with NASA, and 2026 is really going to be the start of hardware flying,” says Mary Guenther, head of space policy at the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington DC. There have been privately developed modules attached to the ISS before, notably from the now-dissolved firm Bigelow Aerospace, but no stand-alone commercial space stations. In the absence of the ISS, though, such stations will be called upon to fill the gap. “It’s time for NASA to go further and do things that we’ve never done before, while leaving the rest – in this case, space stations …

JWST spots a lemon-shaped exoplanet orbiting a pulsar — rewriting the rules of planet formation

JWST spots a lemon-shaped exoplanet orbiting a pulsar — rewriting the rules of planet formation

Published by Jenni Sidey

Surprised astronomers just discovered a world that blurs the line between planet and stellar remnant, hiding in a system known as a “black widow.” Using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, researchers at the University of Chicago, Stanford University and the Carnegie Earth and Planets Laboratory in Washington studied a Jupiter-mass companion circling a millisecond pulsar, PSR J2322–2650. What they found was a chemical outlier, with an atmosphere dominated by helium and molecular carbon chains that almost never survive in a typical planet’s air. “This was an absolute surprise,” said study co-author Peter Gao of the Carnegie Earth and Planets Laboratory in Washington. “I remember after we got the data down, our collective reaction was ‘What the heck is this?’ It’s extremely different from what we expected.” The results, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, describe PSR J2322–2650b as a world with soot-like clouds and carbon chemistry so extreme that researchers think carbon could condense deep inside and form diamonds. The biggest puzzle is not what Webb saw. It is how this object formed at all. …