Latest news with #exoplanets
Sustainability Times
16 hours ago
- Science
- Sustainability Times
'100x More Precise': New NASA Probe Promises Unmatched Exoplanet Scans in Deep-Space Exploration Revolution
IN A NUTSHELL 🚀 NASA's GIRO aims to map exoplanets' interiors using gravity fields and radio signals. aims to map exoplanets' interiors using gravity fields and radio signals. 🌌 The probe operates by detecting subtle changes in gravitational pull through the Doppler effect . . 🛰️ Cost-effective and high precision , GIRO offers 10 to 100 times better accuracy than traditional methods. , GIRO offers 10 to 100 times better accuracy than traditional methods. 🔍 Strategic planning is crucial for GIRO missions, with a focus on precise orbits and planetary protection. The exploration of distant worlds has long been a dream of humanity, and NASA's proposed Gravity Imaging Radio Observer (GIRO) is set to revolutionize our approach. This innovative probe promises to map the interiors of exoplanets and celestial bodies without the need for physical contact. By using gravity fields and radio signals, GIRO aims to uncover the secrets hidden beneath alien surfaces. This low-cost, battery-powered probe represents a significant leap forward in space exploration technology, potentially providing unprecedented insights into the composition and activity of distant planets. Listening to the Universe: How GIRO Works The Gravity Imaging Radio Observer (GIRO) operates by flying in tandem with a host spacecraft near a target celestial body. As the spacecraft and GIRO orbit or fly by a planet or moon, they encounter subtle changes in gravitational pull. These changes, caused by variations in mass within the body, alter their paths slightly. By utilizing the Doppler effect in radio signals, GIRO can detect these changes, effectively 'listening' to the gravity fields. This method allows the probe to map the interior structures of the target, identifying features such as metallic cores, layered rock formations, or even potential volcanic activity. As Ryan Park, principal engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, explains, GIRO acts as a small radio probe reflecting signals sent from the host spacecraft, making it an efficient tool for space exploration. 'Space Needs Nuclear Now': This New Global Race to Harness Atomic Power Beyond Earth Is Accelerating Faster Than Expected A Versatile Tool for Challenging Missions GIRO's design makes it particularly valuable for missions in extreme or hard-to-access environments. Its low-mass, high-accuracy profile allows it to collect detailed data even when time or safety constraints limit mission duration. For instance, GIRO could enable close passes by Uranus' rings or brief flybys of small asteroids. The probe is especially useful when missions can only conduct a limited number of orbits or flybys, making it a flexible addition to broader exploration missions. Park emphasizes that GIRO can be integrated into existing missions, eliminating the need for dedicated gravity-mapping spacecraft. This approach not only saves resources but also enhances the scientific value of exploration missions by adding a gravity science component. 'Nasa Confirms the Unthinkable': China's Giant Water Diversion Project Will Slow Earth's Rotation and Disrupt Global Timekeeping Precision Mapping at an Affordable Cost One of GIRO's most compelling features is its ability to deliver high precision without the high costs typically associated with space missions. According to Park, GIRO can achieve an accuracy that is 10 to 100 times better than traditional ground-based tracking methods. By leveraging lightweight, low-power radio components, GIRO matches the capabilities of previous gravity missions like GRAIL, but at a fraction of the cost and complexity. The probe's spin-stabilized, battery-powered design allows for the deployment of multiple units simultaneously, enhancing data reliability and coverage. This efficiency makes GIRO an attractive option for future missions, providing high-quality data without the need for extensive financial investment. 'It's Growing': NASA Detects Massive Earth Anomaly Expanding Rapidly and Threatening the Entire Continental United States Challenges in Planning and Execution Despite its promising capabilities, missions utilizing GIRO require meticulous planning. Probes must be released into precise orbits to ensure accurate readings and maintain reliable radio contact. Each GIRO unit has a limited battery life, typically around 10 days for missions to outer planets, though solar recharging is possible for inner solar system deployments. Additionally, compliance with planetary protection rules is crucial, as the probes must not risk contaminating celestial bodies with potential for life. The integration of GIRO into a mission could occur within one to three years, but the timeline is subject to factors such as funding, political considerations, and necessary testing. The ongoing development of GIRO underscores the importance of strategic planning and international cooperation in space exploration. As NASA continues to push the boundaries of what is possible in space exploration, the Gravity Imaging Radio Observer stands as a testament to human ingenuity and ambition. By offering a novel approach to mapping distant worlds, GIRO has the potential to transform our understanding of the universe. The probe's development raises intriguing questions about the future of space exploration: How might GIRO's technology be applied to other areas of scientific inquiry, and what new discoveries await us in the cosmos? Our author used artificial intelligence to enhance this article. Did you like it? 4.5/5 (23)
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Space photo of the day for June 17, 2025
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Big telescopes feature some of the finest and most precise mirrors in the world. So when one gets dirty, what happens? The European Southern Observatory (ESO) operates some of the most powerful telescopes in the world. Established in 1962 by 16 countries across the globe, the ESO is a hub for astronomers looking to uncover the mysteries of our universe. The observatory hosts four extremely powerful telescopes, which are used to survey the farthest corners of our galaxy, studying a variety of space structures and phenomena, from black holes to stars to asteroids. While ESO's headquarters are in Garching, Germany, its four telescopes all sit in the Atacama Desert in Chile (hence the "Southern" part of ESO name). This photo was taken at the La Silla Observatory in Chile. ESO hosts four different telescopes in Chile: the Very Large Telescope (VLT), the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT, which is currently being built), and La Silla, the subject of this photo. While all four facilities focus on solving the mysteries of space, La Silla is centered specifically on finding exoplanets. Its two telescopes, the 11.5-foot (3.5 meters) New Technology Telescope (NTT) and the 11.8-foot (3.6 m) telescope both use ultraprecise mirrors to bounce images back from space for analysis. In this photo, staff at La Silla work to clean the 11.8-foot telescope's primary mirror. As the mirror was made with fused silica, it takes a delicate process to restore it to a clean, ultraprecise state. Staff have to chemically strip the mirror's old aluminum coating before rinsing it with demineralized water. The mirror then goes into a special vacuum chamber, where aluminum is deposited in a new layer thinner than the width of a human hair. If the aluminum layer were too thick or uneven, the mirror would lose its precision and with it, data from space. You can read more about ESO's many telescopes and their work looking at exoplanets and other structures within our universe.
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Webb telescope took a direct image of two exoplanets. See it now.
Scientists have scored a pristine view of a pair of exotic worlds orbiting a star more than 300 light-years away — one with sand-like clouds and another surrounded in space by moon-making material. The discoveries come from YSES-1, a star system in the deep southern sky. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, a collaboration of NASA and its European and Canadian counterparts, a team of astronomers saw so-called "silicate clouds" directly for the first time on an exoplanet, a world far beyond our own solar system. The team's detection of a dusty disk around the sibling planet is also rare, perhaps just the third time scientists have seen one so clearly. Webb usually observes exoplanets through indirect methods, such as transmission spectroscopy, a technique for studying a planet's atmosphere by analyzing how starlight filters through it. What distinguishes this new research is that the two worlds — YSES-1b and YSES-1c — were directly imaged, meaning the telescope captured light from the planets themselves. Sitting far from their host star, these young planets glow from the leftover heat of their formation. Thanks to their temperature, size, and distance, the result is a clean picture of the exoplanets in thermal infrared, allowing scientists to get much more data. "What's really cool about this system is that unlike most planets, we can actually take a picture of them!" said Evert Nasedkin in a post on the social media platform Bluesky. You can see the image further down in this story. SEE ALSO: A tiny star gave birth to an absolute giant. Scientists are puzzled. The idea for this groundbreaking project began long before Webb was even open for business, said Kielan Hoch, lead author of the research recently published in the journal Nature. Scientists hypothesized the telescope could get both worlds in a single shot, "essentially giving us two for the price of one," Hoch said in a statement. These two gas giant planets weigh five to 15 times the mass of Jupiter and orbit far from their host, a star similar to the sun. What's different is that it's only about 16.7 million years old, a mere whippersnapper compared to our middle-aged, 4.6 billion year-old sun. The planets are also in extremely distant orbits. YSES-1b, the innermost of the two, is still perhaps four times farther from its star than Pluto is from the sun. But given only a handful of known exoplanets can be directly imaged, the study has offered scientists a unique opportunity to see an early stage of a developing star system. From these observations of the YSES-1 system — the letters in its name stand for Young Suns Exoplanet Survey — astronomers can gain insight into how planets and moons form and evolve. SEE ALSO: Webb discovers a distant moon has an intriguing similarity to Earth Few distant worlds meet the criteria for direct imaging because planets are often millions of times fainter than the stars they circle. And if they are orbiting close by, their own light usually gets swamped. The James Webb Space telescope captures a direct image of exoplanets YSES-1b and YSES-1c with its Near-Infrared Spectrograph instrument. Credit: NASA/ ESA / CSA / Hoch et al. / Nature But scientists want these images because there is so much to learn from them. Molecules within a planet's atmosphere absorb certain colors of light, so when astronomers study a planet's spectrum, they can look for what's missing from the rainbow to determine which gases — like water, methane, and carbon dioxide — are present in the planet's air. For the YSES-1 system, scientists not only saw molecules in the direct imaging but detected cloud particles and a dust disk. On YSES-1c, rather than water vapor, the clouds are made of hot, ultra-fine rock grains. While Earth's clouds are often white and pillowy, these are probably hazy and dark, filling the sky with something akin to a glass powder. You can think of these silicate clouds sort of like the plumes of mineral ash that vent out of volcanoes. YSES-1b is even "weirder," said Nasedkin, one of the coauthors. Around it is a so-called circumplanetary dust disk that could serve as a birthplace for moons, similar to those seen around Jupiter. Scientists used computer models to figure out that the dust is hot — about 400 to 600 degrees Fahrenheit. Because this particular disk is much older than two previously found around other unrelated exoplanets, what is creating or sustaining it is a mystery. The original disk of planet-building material around the star is long gone, so the researchers have ruled that out as the source. "It's possible that we're seeing the dust emitted by collisions of moons and other small, rocky bodies left over from the planet's formation!" Nasedkin said.
Forbes
12-06-2025
- Science
- Forbes
AI Will Provide Much Needed Shortcut In Finding Earthlike Exoplanets
In the search for earthlike planets, AI is playing more and more of a role. But first one must define what is meant by earthlike. That's not an easy definition and is the cause of much confusion in the mainstream media. When planetary scientists say that a planet is earthlike, they really mean it's an earth mass planet that lies in the so-called habitable zone of any given extrasolar planetary system. That's loosely defined as the zone in which a given planet can harbor liquid water at its surface. But there's no guarantee that it has oceans, beaches, fauna, flora, or anything approaching life. Yet Jeanne Davoult, a French astrophysicist at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Berlin, is at the vanguard of using artificial intelligence to speed up the process of finding earthlike planets using AI modeling and algorithms that would boggle the minds of mere mortals. In a recent paper, appearing in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, Davoult, the paper's lead author writes that the aim is to use AI to predict which stars are most likely to host an earthlike planet. The goal is use AI to avoid blind searches, minimize detection times, and thus maximize the number of detections, she and colleagues at the University of Bern write. Using a previous study on correlations between the presence of an earthlike planet and the properties of its system, we trained an AI Random Forest, a machine learning algorithm, to recognize and classify systems as 'hosting an earthlike planet' or 'not hosting an earthlike planet,' the authors write. For planetary detection, we try to identify patterns in data sets, and patterns which correspond to planets, Davoult tells me via telephone. Understanding and anticipating where earthlike planets form first, and thus targeting observations to avoid blind searches, minimizes the average observation time for detecting an earthlike planets and maximizes the number of detections, the authors write. But among the estimated 6000 exoplanets thus detected in the last 30 years, only some 20 systems with at least one earthlike planet have been found, says Davoult. In fact, stars smaller than the Sun --- such as K-spectral type dwarfs as well as the ubiquitous red dwarf M-spectral type stars which make up most of the stars in the cosmos, all have longer lifetimes than our own G-spectral type star. Thus, because of their long stellar lifetimes, it's probably more likely for intelligent life to develop around these K and M types of stars, says Davoult. We are also focusing a lot on M dwarfs because it's easier to detect an earthlike planet around the stars than around sun like stars, because the habitable zone is closer to the stars, so the orbital period is shorter, she says. The three populations of synthetic systems used in this study differ only in the mass of the central star, the authors write. This single difference directly influences the mass of the protoplanetary disk and thus the amount of material available for planet formation, note the authors. As a result, the three populations exhibit different occurrences and properties for the same type of planet, highlighting the importance of studying various types of stars, they write. We have developed a model using a Random Forest Classifier to predict which known planetary systems are most likely to host an earthlike planet, the authors write. It's hard to really compare synthetic planetary populations and real planetary populations, because we know that our model is not perfect, says Davoult. But if you just take the big pattern at the system level, then I'm convinced it's a very powerful tool, she says. If we observe a planet within a given solar system, it doesn't mean that we've detected all the planets in this planetary system, says Davoult. That's because an earthlike planet might be a bit too far away from the star, or too small to detect, she says. In contrast, my model takes what we already know about planetary system and tells us if there is a possibility for an undetected earthlike planet to exist in the same planetary system, says Davoult. Davoult is specifically looking for terrestrial planets in the habitable zone of their parent stars. The very first step is just to detect them and create a database of earthlike planets, even if we have no clue about the composition of their atmospheres, says Davoult.
Reuters
12-06-2025
- Science
- Reuters
Webb telescope spots infant planets in different stages of development
WASHINGTON, June 12 (Reuters) - The James Webb Space Telescope has observed two large planets at different stages of infancy - one with an atmosphere brimming with dusty clouds and the other encircled by a disk of material - orbiting a young sun-like star in a discovery that illustrates the complex nature of how planetary systems develop. The two gas giant planets, both more massive than our solar system's largest planet Jupiter, were directly imaged by Webb in a planetary system located in the Milky Way galaxy about 310 light years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Musca. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km). Astronomers have detected more than 5,900 planets beyond our solar system - called exoplanets - since the 1990s, with less than 2% of these directly imaged like these two. It is rare to find exoplanets in their early developmental stages. The birth of a planetary system begins with a large cloud of gas and dust - called a molecular cloud - that collapses under its own gravity to form a central star. Leftover material spinning around the star in what is called a protoplanetary disk forms planets. This planetary system was observed by Webb very early in its developmental history. The star, named YSES-1, is about the same mass as the sun. The two planets orbit a long distance from the star, each probably needing thousands of years to complete a single orbit. While the sun is roughly 4.5 billion years old, this star is approximately 16 million years old, a veritable newborn. The researchers were surprised to find that the two neonatal planets observed by Webb appeared to be at different stages of development. The innermost of the two has a mass about 14 times greater than Jupiter and orbits the star at a distance 160 times greater than Earth orbits the sun and more than five times as far as our solar system's outermost planet Neptune. The planet is surrounded by a disk of small-grained dust, a state one might expect in a very early stage of formation when it is still coalescing, or perhaps if there has been a collision of some kind or a moon is in the process of taking shape. Webb spotted water and carbon monoxide in its atmosphere. The outermost planet has a mass about six times greater than that of Jupiter and orbits the star at 320 times the distance of Earth to the sun. Its atmosphere is loaded with silicate clouds, differing from our solar system's gas giants. Webb also detected methane, water, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It has no disk of material around it. The puzzling combination of traits presented by these two planets in the same system illustrates "the complex landscape that is planet formation and shows how much we truly don't know about how planetary systems came to be, including our own," said astrophysicist Kielan Hoch of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, who led the study published this week in the journal Nature, opens new tab. "Theoretically, the planets should be forming around the same time, as planet formation happens fairly quickly, within about one million years," Hoch said. A real mystery is the location where the planets formed, Hoch added, noting that their orbital distance from the host star is greater than would be expected if they formed in the protoplanetary disk. "Furthermore, why one planet still retains material around it and one has distinct silicate clouds remains a big question. Do we expect all giant planets to form the same way and look the same if they formed in the same environment? These are questions we have been investigating for ages to place the formation of our own solar system into context," Hoch said. In addition to amassing a trove of discoveries about the early universe since becoming operational in 2022, Webb has made a major contribution to the study of exoplanets with its observations at near- and mid-infrared wavelengths. "Webb is revealing all sorts of atmospheric physics and chemistry happening in exoplanets that we didn't know before, and is currently challenging every atmospheric model we used pre-Webb," Hoch said.
