The composition of exoplanet GJ 1214b (illustrated) has vexed astronomers since its 2009 discovery. Using the James Webb Space Telescope to observe the planet could provide answers.
BALTIMORE — When the James Webb Space Telescope was first dreamed up, exoplanets hadn’t even been discovered yet. Now the observatory is showing astronomers what it can learn about planets orbiting other stars — including the small ones.
Since its launch in December 2021, JWST had already “sniffed” the atmospheres of Jupiter-sized planets orbiting searingly close to their stars ( SN: 8/26/22 ). Those intense worlds are interesting, but not the places where astronomers hope to look for signs of life. The telescope is now getting glimpses of atmospheres on known exoplanets of the more terrestrial persuasion, astronomers reported December 13 and 14 at the First Science Results from JWST conference.
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And JWST is starting to find new rocky worlds too.
These early peeks at far-off worlds don’t yet reveal a lot about these remote locales. But researchers are buoyed by what JWST’s sharp vision in infrared wavelengths could eventually unearth about the smaller planets beyond our solar system.
“The main message is, we’re in business,” said University of Montreal astronomer Björn Benneke. “We don’t even have all the observations yet, but they are already quite exciting.”
One of the smaller planets that JWST looked at is GJ 1214b, which has frustrated astronomers since its discovery in 2009 ( SN: 12/16/09 ). The planet is a sub-Neptune, meaning its size is somewhere between that of a rocky world like Earth and a gaseous one like Neptune.
“What the heck are sub-Neptunes?” asked astronomer Eliza Kempton of the University of Maryland in College Park. They could be balls of rock with thick hydrogen and helium atmospheres, or maybe water worlds ( SN: 2/22/12 ). “What we’d like to do with atmospheric characterization is measure their atmospheres and see which is which,” Kempton said.
Previously, astronomers tried to observe the makeup of GJ 1214b’s atmosphere by watching how starlight filtered through it. But the atmosphere is thick and hazy , blocking astronomers’ ability to detect individual molecules in it.
Instead of watching the planet pass in front of its star, Kempton and colleagues used JWST to look for the glow of the planet right before it disappeared behind the star. And it worked: After 38 hours of observing, the researchers detected the planet’s infrared glow, Kempton said in a December 13 presentation.
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There’s more work to do, but the initial data suggest the planet has a lot of chemical components, possibly including water and methane. It’s also enriched in elements heavier than hydrogen and helium.
As for knowing what kind of world GJ 1214b is, “I’d say we’re not quite there yet,” Kempton said. It could be a watery planet, she said, or a gassy planet that has lost a fair amount of its lighter elements.
The telescope also had its first look at the tantalizing TRAPPIST-1 system , Benneke said in a different December 13 presentation ( SN: 12/13/17 ). Discovered in 2017, the system contains seven Earth-sized worlds that are probably rocky. Three of those planets might have the right temperatures for liquid water to exist on their surface, making them particularly interesting targets for JWST and other telescopes to look for signs of life.
But TRAPPIST-1 is a small, red star called an M dwarf, a type of star that is notorious for violent flares and strong radiation. For years, astronomers have debated whether planets around these stars would be hospitable to life , or if the stars would strip their planets’ atmospheres away ( SN: 6/14/17 ).
“If the TRAPPIST planets don’t have atmospheres, then we need to move on” from M dwarfs in the search for extraterrestrial life, says astronomer Mercedes Lόpez-Morales of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., who was not involved in the new JWST observations.
JWST’s first look at one of those potentially habitable worlds, TRAPPIST-1g, did not reveal any clear signs of an atmosphere. But the telescope looked at the planet for only about five hours. With more observations, an atmosphere should be detectable if it’s there, Benneke said.
JWST is getting into the planet-hunting game too, said astronomer Kevin Stevenson on December 14. The telescope double-checked a potentially interesting observation from another telescope and confirmed that it had seen a rocky, Earth-sized world around a nearby M dwarf. This proves that JWST has the precision to find such worlds.
“It is an exciting result, perhaps the first discovery of an exoplanet by JWST,” said Stevenson, of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. The planet orbits its dim star every two days, so it’s probably around 225° Celsius on the surface — likely too hot to be habitable, he says. “It’s more like an exo-Venus than an exo-Earth.”
While it’s still early days, the researchers emphasized, the forecast for planet hunting using JWST is good.
The results are paving the way for future observatories too, said astrophysicist John Mather of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Astronomers’ wish list for future missions includes a telescope that can dig even further into the details of potentially habitable worlds.
“If it’s not impossible,” Mather said, “let’s do it.”
Lisa Grossman is the astronomy writer. She has a degree in astronomy from Cornell University and a graduate certificate in science writing from University of California, Santa Cruz. She lives near Boston.
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A recovery team retrieves Orion after the uncrewed space capsule successfully splashed down into the Pacific Ocean on December 11 after its historic flight around the moon. The red airbags keep Orion upright and floating in the water.
NASA’s Orion passenger space capsule has passed a huge test, splashing down intact in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Mexico on December 11. The successful splashdown caps the complex and delayed Artemis 1 mission, which sent Orion around the moon and back in an early test of bringing humans back to the lunar surface.
Now mission scientists will examine the capsule for damage, paying close attention to how its heat shield performed on its searing reentry into Earth’s atmosphere, as well as spots where a prelaunch hurricane damaged the capsule’s caulking. When it entered Earth’s atmosphere, Orion was traveling some 40,000 kilometers per hour, but atmospheric drag and massive parachutes quickly slowed it. The resulting friction heated the spacecraft to nearly 2700⁰ Celsius, fully testing Orion’s heat shield’s ability to protect what’s inside the spacecraft.
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The team will also analyze data from its faux astronaut pilot, Moonikin Campos , and his female torso passengers Helga and Zohar ( SN: 8/26/22 ). Those data will help to determine things like how much radiation and acceleration the real human astronauts will face, how well their protective gear works and how female bodies will fare during the planned launch of a crewed Orion space capsule. That’s scheduled for 2024, when Artemis II will send a crewed capsule to orbit the moon. NASA then aims to land astronauts on the moon as early as 2025 as part of Artemis III.
Some 140 gigabytes of data were already downloaded during the nearly monthlong flight, “but there’s a lot of data that’s stored on the vehicle, particularly for some of the things that were flying inside the crew cabin,” says NASA’s Debbie Korth, Orion deputy program manager.
To prep for Artemis II, “the next step is adding the crew and adding an environmental control and life support system to the Artemis II spacecraft,” Korth says. Several components of the Space Launch System rocket that will launch that next flight are being constructed, and the next Orion crew and service modules are being tested and completed at Kennedy Space Center.
“This was a challenging mission, and this is what mission success looks like,” said NASA’s Mike Sarafin, the Artemis I mission manager of this test flight during a news conference after the splashdown.
The mission launched with 10 shoebox-sized CubeSats that sat between the rocket’s core stage and the Orion spacecraft. On Day 3, the Artemis I team confirmed that all 10 deployed at their planned times but it appears that about half either didn’t turn on or aren’t operating as expected.
The ones that seem to be working so far include ArgoMoon, the European CubeSat that’s taken photos of the moon and Earth, plus NASA’s BioSentinel experiment, which is testing cosmic radiation’s effect on yeast. NASA’s LunaH-Map CubeSat, which is looking for areas rich in hydrogen and water on the moon’s surface, is functioning, although its propulsion system isn’t working properly.
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The Japanese space agency contributed two CubeSats: EQUULEUS is testing water propulsion in space, and it is working as expected, but the nation’s lunar lander, OMOTENASHI, had been in and out of radio contact and its mission was scrubbed.
Orion also did a bit of self-inspection on Day 3, snapping pics of its exterior to check for damage after the first leg of its flight.
The sun, which is in its active solar cycle, sent out a pretty big flare on November 19. It was the most energetic flare Orion encountered on its trip (though not even in the top 50 most powerful ones of the year) and a good test of how radiation affects the manikin passengers. Once back on Earth, scientists can analyze the thousands of sensors on those manikins to have a better idea how the radiation will affect humans.
Especially interesting will be the differences between Zohar and Helga. While Zohar is wearing a vest to protect its torso from radiation, Helga isn’t.
Mission control temporarily lost communication with the space capsule for 47 minutes on November 23. This happened while Orion was trying to chat with the Deep Space Network, the large radio dishes on Earth that send and receive signals to and from spacecraft.
The team downloaded a bunch of data to try to understand why that happened. They’re trying to figure out if it was a problem on the Orion end or on the Deep Space Network side of things. Other Orion check-ins with the same radio network have worked flawlessly.
After passing by the moon, Orion entered a new orbit following an engine burn to change its direction. This distant retrograde orbit put the capsule more than 65,000 kilometers above the lunar surface.
It was far enough away from the moon that Orion wouldn’t have to use a lot of fuel to stay stable, allowing the mission team to test how this spacecraft functions in a deep space environment. They plan to test its star trackers — what the team uses to orient the capsule in space — and other parts of its guidance and control systems that can’t be tested on Earth.
Orion reached 432,210 kilometers from Earth, giving it an amazing view of both Earth and the moon.
This wasn’t just Orion’s maximum flight distance, but it’s the farthest any spacecraft designed for humans has gone. It beat the record that’s been in place for more than 50 years, set by Apollo 13 ( SN: 7/6/19 ).
In a farewell kiss, Orion swung just 129.7 kilometers above the lunar surface. Its engineers intended for that flyby to use the moon’s gravitational force to alter the direction of its flight.
The spacecraft also burned its main engine for nearly three and a half minutes to boost its speed.
Those actions let Orion break free of the moon’s sphere of influence, where lunar gravity was the main force acting on it, and direct it back to Earth.
Following a harrowing nearly 20-minute descent through Earth’s atmosphere, skipping through the thick gaseous layers, the Orion crew capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean near Guadalupe Island, off the coast of Mexico’s Baja Peninsula.
While it hit the atmosphere at just under 40,000 kilometers per hour, it landed in the water at 32 km/hr, slowed primarily by Orion’s 5-meter diameter heat shield against the atmosphere. Special material that makes up the shield burned off in the atmosphere as friction slowed the craft, carrying some of the intense heat away from the capsule. Then, in the last four minutes of descent, a series of 11 parachutes deployed, helping to plop Orion softly into the ocean.
Mission scientists then checked the temperature in the cabin and outside and took other remote measurements before recovery teams snagged it several hours later and brought it to U.S.S. Portland .
“I don’t think any one of us could have imagined a mission this successful, but we had a very successful flight test,” Sarafin said. “We now have a foundational deep-space transportation system.”
Liz Kruesi is a freelance science journalist who focuses on astronomy. She is based in Colorado.
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This fossilized male katydid from China is one of 24 well-preserved specimens that reveal the earliest known insect ears, dating from around 160 million years ago.
Over 100 million years ago, the chirps of insects known as katydids dominated the sounds of Earth’s nights. Now, fossils reveal what the katydid ears that heard those sounds looked like.
Twenty-four fossils of roughly 160 million-year-old katydids unearthed in China represent the earliest known insect ears , researchers report December 12 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences .
These ancient sensors of sound — identical to the ones found on today’s katydids — may have picked up the first short-range, high-frequency calls of any kind, helping the insects hide from predators.
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Insects were the first land dwellers to send sound waves through the air, allowing the creatures to communicate over longer distances than sight often allows ( SN: 7/15/21 ). While some insects use their antennae to detect vibrations in the air, katydids have mammal-like ears that use an eardrum to hear ( SN: 11/15/12 ). Yet because well-preserved insect eardrums are rare in the fossil record, it’s unclear how katydid ears evolved, say paleontologist Chunpeng Xu of the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology in China and colleagues.
Analyses of the Chinese fossils push the known record of male and female katydid ears’ ability to listen for potential mates or male competitors to the mid-Jurassic, between 157 million and 166 million years ago. The previous record holders for oldest insect ears, katydids and crickets found in Colorado , are around 50 million years old.
What’s more, sound-producing structures on 87 fossilized male katydid wings from China, South Africa and Kyrgyzstan — which date from about 157 million to 242 million years ago — may have generated a variety of chirps, including high-frequency calls up to 16 kilohertz. (Humans, by comparison, can hear frequencies from roughly 20 hertz to 20 kilohertz.)
High-frequency chirps don’t travel far, which would have allowed katydids to communicate over short distances. Such a trait may have been useful because mammal hearing was improving around the same time, Xu says. Limiting the range of some calls could have helped katydids hide from predatory eavesdroppers on the hunt for an insect feast.
Erin I. Garcia de Jesus is a staff writer at Science News . She holds a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of Washington and a master’s in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education (EIN 53-0196483).
In an experiment (illustrated), blasts from 192 powerful lasers at the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, Calif., ignited nuclear fusion in a pellet of fuel that, for the first time, provided more energy out than the lasers put in.
Scientists have finally managed to bottle the sun.
At 1:03 a.m. PST on December 5, researchers with the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, Calif., ignited controlled nuclear fusion that, for the first time, resulted in the net production of energy. A 3-million-joule burst emerged from a peppercorn-sized capsule of fuel when it was heated with a 2-million-joule laser pulse. Details of the long-awaited achievement, which mimics how the sun makes energy, were revealed in a news conference December 13 by U.S. Department of Energy officials.
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“This is a monumental breakthrough,” says physicist Gilbert Collins of the University of Rochester in New York, who is a former NIF collaborator but was not involved with the research leading to the latest advance. “Since I started in this field, fusion was always 50 years away…. With this achievement, the landscape has changed.”
Fusion potentially provides a clean energy source. The fission reactors now used to generate nuclear energy rely on heavy atoms, like uranium, to release energy when they break down into lighter atoms, including some that are radioactive. While it’s comparatively easy to generate energy with fission, it’s an environmental nightmare to deal with the leftover radioactive debris that can remain hazardous for hundreds of millenia.
Controlled nuclear fusion, on the other hand, doesn’t produce such long-lived radioactive waste, but it’s technically much harder to achieve in the first place. In nuclear fusion, light atoms fuse together to create heavier ones. In the sun, that typically occurs when a proton, the nucleus of a hydrogen atom, combines with other protons to form helium.
Getting atoms to fuse requires a combination of high pressure and temperature to squeeze the atoms tightly together. Intense gravity does much of the work in the sun.
At the National Ignition Facility, 192 lasers directed at a small capsule filled with deuterium and tritium, heavy types of hydrogen, provided a blast of energy that did the trick instead. About 4 percent of that fuel was fused in the process. The new result far surpassed the 1.3 million joules of energy produced by an earlier NIF experiment that marked the first time the team managed to ignite nuclear fusion.
“These recent results [at] NIF are the first time in a laboratory anywhere on Earth [that] we were able to demonstrate more energy coming out of a fusion reaction than was put in,” NIF physicist Tammy Ma said at the news conference. She predicted that pilot projects for power plants based on the fusion approach will be built in the “coming decades.”
But this latest fusion burst still didn’t produce enough energy to run the laser power supplies and other systems of the NIF experiment. It took about 300 million joules of energy from the electrical grid to get a hundredth of the energy back in fusion.
“The net energy gain is with respect to the energy in the light that was shined on the target, not with respect to the energy that went into making that light,” says University of Rochester physicist Riccardo Betti, who was also not involved with the research. “Now it’s up to the scientists and engineers to see if we can turn these physics principles into useful energy.”
Despite that, it’s a potential turning point in the technology comparable to the invention of the transistor or the Wright brothers’ first flight, says Collins. “We now have a laboratory system that we can use as a compass for how to make progress very rapidly,” he says.
This story was updated December 13, 2022, with details of the experiment shared during a U.S. Department of Energy news conference. It was also updated to clarify that Tammy Ma meant the technology would be far enough along to build pilot projects rather than full-fledged power plants. This story was updated December 15, 2022, to clarify that the fusion fuel is a mix of deuterium and tritium.
James Riordon is a freelance science writer who covers physics, math, astronomy and occasional lifestyle stories.
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Mary Bassett, New York state’s Commissioner of Health, receives her updated booster in early September, soon after the shot was recommended. The booster was designed to spur an immune response against more versions of the virus.
The third year of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States introduced vaccines for very young children and an updated booster, plus wider availability of an antiviral drug and at-home antigen tests. Here’s what we’ve learned since these achievements first made a splash.
On June 18, the COVID-19 vaccine was recommended for children under 5 , the last group in the United States waiting for the shots ( SN Online: 6/17/22 ). The thumbs-up was supported by immunity and safety data and the clear-and-present health risks of COVID-19 for young kids.
Update: Many young children in the United States are still unvaccinated. Only 11 percent of those 6 months through 4 years old, or 1.8 million children, had received at least one dose as of December 7. A survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor conducted in mid-July explored some reasons for the lackluster response , including concerns that the vaccine hasn’t been tested enough.
There are also barriers to getting the vaccine, with 44 percent of Black parents worried about taking time off from work to vaccinate young kids or take care of them if they have side effects. Among Hispanic parents surveyed, 45 percent are concerned they won’t have the option to vaccinate at a place they trust.
An updated COVID-19 vaccine became available as a booster in the United States in early September for those 12 and older, and for those 5 to 12 years old in mid-October ( SN: 10/8/22 & 10/22/22, p. 7 ). The vaccine, which targets two omicron subvariants as well as the original version of SARS-CoV-2, was designed to spur a broader immune response, protecting against more versions of the virus.
Update: Just 13.5 percent of people in the United States ages 5 and older, or 42 million people, had gotten the updated bivalent booster by December 7. In a survey conducted in September, half of U.S. adults had heard little or nothing about the new booster , underscoring the need for more public outreach. President Joe Biden, who had COVID-19 in July, received his updated vaccine on October 25 and announced new measures to get more boosters into arms . A study of U.S. adults, reported in November, found that the updated booster provided added protection against symptomatic COVID-19 in those who had already gotten at least two doses of the original vaccine.
Update: At-home antigen tests are quick and easy, though the guidance on how to interpret the results has changed. With data that repeat testing improved the chances of detecting a SARS-CoV-2 infection, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration recommended in August that people with and without symptoms who were exposed to the virus and tested negative take additional tests over the next several days .
A drawback to at-home tests is that the results have not been systematically tallied, leading to an undercount of cases. Estimates vary on how many cases have been missed. One research group calculated that in New York City between April 23 and May 8, around 1.5 million adults had COVID-19, nearly 30 times as many as the official case count of 51,218.
The antiviral Paxlovid — authorized at the end of 2021 — became one of a few COVID-19 treatment options in pill form. A study published in April reported that Paxlovid reduced the risk of severe COVID-19 by 89 percent compared with a placebo ( SN Online: 5/11/22 ).
Paxlovid also made news this year when reports popped up of COVID-19 symptoms returning after treatment with the drug ended ( SN Online: 8/12/22 ). It’s not clear how common so-called Paxlovid rebound is. Some research has found the incidence is similar among Paxlovid-treated and placebo-treated patients, while other researchers have reported that rebound occurs more often with Paxlovid than with no treatment.
There’s also early evidence that Paxlovid may reduce the risk of developing long COVID. A preliminary study of U.S. veterans reported in November that treatment with Paxlovid within five days of a positive COVID-19 test was associated with a 26 percent reduction in risk of long COVID compared with a group that did not receive antiviral treatment after an infection.
Aimee Cunningham is the biomedical writer. She has a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University.
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Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education (EIN 53-0196483).
NASA’s Perseverance rover (whose wheel is seen at left) is seen here exploring Mars’ dusty Jezero crater on November 5. In September 2021, the rover made the first-ever audio recording of a Martian dust devil as it swept over the robotic explorer.
Thanks to a bit of good luck, the Mars rover Perseverance has captured the first-ever sound of a Martian dust devil.
The NASA rover has witnessed dusty whirlwinds before. But when this one swept right over Perseverance, the rover’s microphone happened to be turned on. So the first-of-its-kind data include the sounds of dust grains either pinging off the microphone or being transmitted to the mic through the rover’s structure, researchers report December 13 in Nature Communications .
Because the rover’s microphone is turned on only occasionally, the team estimates that such events, when they occur, might be recorded just around 0.5 percent of the time.
Wind speeds in the walls of the dust devil reached nearly 40 kilometers per hour, planetary scientist Naomi Murdoch of the Institut Supérieur de l’Aéronautique et de l’Espace in Toulouse, France, and colleagues report. As with previous whirlwinds detected by other instruments, this late-morning dust devil caused a slight drop in atmospheric pressure and rise in temperature as it swept over the rover on September 27, 2021. It was 25 meters in diameter, at least 118 meters tall and ambled by at about 20 kilometers per hour.
One big surprise, Murdoch says, is that a prodigious amount of dust was airborne in the calm center of the whirlwind as well as in the brisk winds that formed its walls. Data from this event, as well as from other whirlwinds measured by the rover’s instruments, will help researchers better understand how dust gets lifted off the Martian surface ( SN: 10/24/06 ). As of yet, Murdoch says, that remains a mystery to planetary scientists ( SN: 7/14/20 ).
N. Murdoch et al . The sound of a Martian dust devil. Nature Communications. Published online December 13, 2022. doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-35100-z.
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Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education (EIN 53-0196483).
