Mercury has Part-time Radiation Belts
Scientists thought Mercury’s magnetic field was disrupted by the sun too often to trap a radiation belt, but new analysis of MESSENGER data says that’s not always the case.
Tag: planets
A New Look at Voyager 2 Data Explains One of Uranus’s Long-Standing Mysteries
The new analysis of the Voyager 2 data revealed that the odd magnetic field was caused by a rare event. Just before the spacecraft reached Uranus, the planet’s magnetic field had likely been squashed by a jet of unusually dense solar wind, as evidenced by a steady increase in solar wind pressure leading up to Voyager 2’s encounter with Uranus.
JWST Finds First Exotic ‘Steam World’ Shrouded in Water Vapor
Nearly 100 light years away, there’s a planet unlike any we’ve seen before. The planet, known as GJ 9827 d, is roughly twice the size of Earth and has an atmosphere composed almost entirely of water vapor, according to a new study.
“The Seven Most Interesting Discoveries We’ve Made by Exploring Saturn”
Dr. Cheng Li, an assistant professor at U-M Climate and Space, was featured in “The Seven Most Interesting Discoveries We’ve Made by Exploring Saturn” for Smithsonian Magazine. Li unveiled the cause of Saturn’s giant storms that sometimes last for months. | September 16, 2024
In Six New Rogue Worlds, Webb Telescope Finds More Star Birth Clues
An international collaboration that included the University of Michigan has spotted six likely rogue worlds—objects with planetlike masses but untethered from any star’s gravity—using the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST.
The discovery includes the lightest rogue planet candidate ever identified with a dusty disk around it. The elusive objects offer new evidence that the same cosmic processes that give birth to stars may also play a common role in making objects only slightly bigger than Jupiter.
U-M Part of Consortium to Design, Construct Powerful New Instrument to Unlock Universe’s Secrets
The University of Michigan Department of Astronomy is part of an international consortium of institutions that will take part in the design and construction of ANDES, a powerful instrument set to be used on the largest visible-infrared telescope in the world.
The instrument will reveal the nature of atmospheres of planets around nearby stars, rare elements forged in the interiors of stars, the formation of galaxies and even the evolution of the universe itself, according to University of Michigan astronomer Michael Meyer.
U-M Astronomers Conduct First Search for Forming Planets
U-M astronomers are involved in a trio of studies that will use images from the James Webb Space Telescope to try to find early clues about the ways in which planets form, and how these planets influence their natal disk.
An Eye on the Sky: U-M Astronomy Contributes Instrumentation to Extremely Large Telescope
The Extremely Large Telescope could change everything we know about the Universe—including how the first galaxies were created and where life on other planets may exist. And U-M is the only U.S. university involved in helping develop it.
New from JWST: An Exoplanet Atmosphere as Never Seen Before
NASA’s JWST has scored another first in its release of stunning images: a molecular and chemical portrait of a distant world’s skies.