Attention to the Unseen

Live Science reports: Jupiter glows with polar lights and shimmering clouds in new imagery from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). NASA released the sharp new pictures Monday (Aug. 22). The images are composites from several different wavelengths of light. In some of the new images, two of the planet’s moons, Amalthea and Adrastea, sparkle in the gas giant’s orbit, and Jupiter’s faint rings glow like a halo. At the planet’s North and South poles, the northern and southern lights…

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Rebecca Boyle writes: Start at the center, with the sun. Our middle-aged star may be more placid than most, but it is otherwise unremarkable. Its planets, however, are another story. First, Mercury: More charred innards than fully fledged planet, it probably lost its outer layers in a traumatic collision long ago. Next come Venus and Earth, twins in some respects, though oddly only one is fertile. Then there’s Mars, another wee world, one that, unlike Mercury, never lost layers; it…

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Motherboard reports: An object from another star system crashed into Earth in 2014, the United States Space Command (USSC) confirmed in a newly-released memo. The meteor ignited in a fireball in the skies near Papua New Guinea, the memo states, and scientists believe it possibly sprinkled interstellar debris into the South Pacific Ocean. The confirmation backs up the breakthrough discovery of the first interstellar meteor—and, retroactively, the first known interstellar object of any kind to reach our solar system—which was…

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Science Alert reports: From billions of light-years across the vast gulf of space-time, from the very dawn of the Universe, astronomers have detected the light of a single star. Its discoverers have nicknamed it Earendel, from the Anglo-Saxon word meaning “morning star”; to date, it is the most distant object of its kind ever detected, dating to just 900 million years after the Big Bang. Because Earendel’s light has traveled so far to reach us, its properties are difficult to…

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Rivka Galchen writes: Imagine if you could look at a snowflake at the South Pole and determine the size and the climate of all of Antarctica. Or study a randomly selected tree in the Amazon rain forest and, from that one tree—be it rare or common, narrow or wide, young or old—deduce characteristics of the forest as a whole. Or, what if, by looking at one galaxy among the hundred billion or so in the observable universe, one could say…

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Marina Koren writes: The Webb telescope, named after a former NASA administrator, left Earth in a thundering launch from a rain-forest-ringed spaceport. The mood in town in the days before launch was cheery optimism, with an undercurrent of low-grade panic. When I asked the engineers and scientists there about the launch, they would make a bit of a nervous face before returning to a confident expression. The launch wasn’t the scary bit; Webb was riding on one of the most…

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Marina Koren writes: In the beginning, the universe was dark. The Big Bang had electrified the cosmos into existence, and the new landscape buzzed with particles, chaotic and hot, before cooling off into a calm expanse of hydrogen and helium. Then something began to happen in the fog. Gravity drove pockets of gas to collapse in on themselves and ignite, creating the first stars. The radiant orbs began to cluster, forming the first galaxies: messy, misshapen things, not as polished…

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