Space News & Blog Articles

Researchers have discovered that in the exotic conditions of the early universe, waves of gravity may have shaken space-time so hard that they spontaneously created radiation.

The physical concept of resonance surrounds us in everyday life. When you’re sitting on a swing and want to go higher, you naturally start pumping your legs back and forth. You very quickly find the exact right rhythm to make the swing go higher. If you go off rhythm then the swing stops going higher. This particular kind of phenomenon is known in physics as a parametric resonance.

Your legs act as an external pumping mechanism. When they match the resonant frequency of the system, in this case your body sitting on a swing, they are able to transfer energy to the system making the swing go higher.

These kinds of resonances happen all over the place, and a team of researchers have discovered that an exotic form of parametric resonance may have even occurred in the extremely early universe.

Perhaps the most dramatic event to occur in the entire history of the universe was inflation. This is a hypothetical event that took place when our universe was less than a second old. During inflation our cosmos swelled to dramatic proportions, becoming many orders of magnitude larger than it was before. The end of inflation was a very messy business, as gravitational waves sloshed back and forth throughout the cosmos.

There’s an interesting problem in exoplanet studies: how to tell if a planet has a magnetosphere. It’s not like we can visibly see it unless we find a different way of looking. A pair of scientists may have found one. They used radio telescopes to track emissions given off by magnetic star-planet interactions. These happen when a planet with a magnetic field plows through star stuff caught its star’s magnetic field.

Sebastian Pineda (the University of Colorado Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics) and Jackie Villadsen (Bucknell University) used the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array to search for those emissions at a star called YZ Ceti and its planet, YZ Ceti b. Over the course of several observation runs, they found a repeating radio signal from the star. It was a first.

“I’m seeing this thing that no one has seen happen before,” said Villadsen, describing the moment she first isolated the radio signal while pouring over data at her home on a weekend.

“We saw the initial burst and it looked beautiful,” said Pineda. “When we saw it again, it was very indicative that, OK, maybe we really have something here.”

That something looks like proof of a magnetosphere (the region around a planet dominated by the planet’s magnetic field) around YZ Ceti b. The search method could give astronomers another way to confirm the existence of exoplanetary magnetic fields. And, finding one at this planet has interesting implications in the search for habitable worlds.

The James Webb Space Telescope has taken a stunning new image of the ice giant world Uranus. But what stands out most is the dramatic new view of the planet’s rings, which show up as never before with JWST’s infrared eyes.

Instead of being faint and wispy, the rings show up brilliantly. Additionally, bright, luminous features in the planet’s atmosphere show how an extensive storm system at the north pole of this planet getting larger and brighter.

But you’ll also want to see the full-frame image view, which also shows the six largest of Uranus’ 27 known moons. And, as we’ve become accustomed to seeing in JWST images, several distant background galaxies. Yes, every JWST image is a Deep Field!

This is JWST’s first detailed look at Uranus, and it demonstrates the observatory’s unprecedented sensitivity. Uranus’ faint dusty rings have only ever been imaged by two other facilities: the Voyager 2 spacecraft as it flew past the planet in 1986, and the Keck Observatory with advanced adaptive optics in 2007. Unlike the rings of Saturn, which are very bright and composed of water ice, the rings of Uranus are relatively dark – even though they show up brightly in this new infrared image. Instead of containing dust, the rings seem to be made up of larger chunks, measuring 0.2 to 20 meters across.

Uranus has 13 known rings and 11 of them are visible here. NASA says that some of these rings are so bright in this new image that they appear to merge into a larger ring. Nine are classed as the main rings of the planet, and two are the fainter dusty rings (such as the diffuse zeta ring closest to the planet) that weren’t discovered until Voyager 2’s visit. Scientists expect that future Webb images of Uranus will reveal the two faint outer rings that were discovered with Hubble during the 2007 ring-plane crossing.