The place that humans know most intimately in all the universe is a rocky planet called Earth. It makes sense, then, that humans are existentially driven to imagine what other such celestial bodies may be like. The scientific curiosity about what planets exist beyond the sun’s neighborhood is supported by several missions, like NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and its Kepler spacecraft.
The study of exoplanets, or planets beyond our solar system, helps address questions about our place in the solar system and in the universe. For example, learning about massive gas giants can boost our understanding about how Jupiter, one of Earth’s major shields from cosmic strikes, got to be where it is now located. Searching for rocky planets in habitable zones around their distinct parent stars highlights the rarity and preciousness of our planet. And discovering what is possible out there certainly inspires our imaginations.
These are some of the top exoplanet discoveries made in 2021.
Researchers spotted this exoplanet candidate in the Whirlpool Galaxy (Messier 51), which is located 28 million light-years away from Earth.
One typically-used technique to detect exoplanets is the transit method, in which scientists look for dips in a star’s optical brightness. The faint periods often indicate that a planet is passing in front of the star’s face, at least from our perspective on Earth. Astronomers use spacecraft like TESS to find alien worlds this way.
But astronomers put a twist to this method to find the potentially-supergalactic world. This exoplanet candidate, called M51-ULS-1b, was spotted by scientists who were looking for dips of X-ray brightness instead of changes in optical light. X-ray observations allowed the researchers to see the objects transiting stars farther away in space.
The team used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton space telescope to scan several spots across multiple galaxies, all in a quest to locate a planet outside the Milky Way. In the Whirlpool galaxy alone, they looked at 55 different star systems.
It was there that they found M51-ULS-1b, a potentially Saturn-sized exoplanet that orbits its parent star and an incredibly dense object (like a neutron star or black hole) at about twice the distance at which Saturn orbits the sun.
2) Astronomers capture a planetary baby photo
A direct image captured by the Subaru Telescope of the newfound exoplanet 2M0437b, a gas giant that circles a star 417 light-years from Earth. The extremely bright host star has been mostly removed by image-processing techniques; the four “spikes” are artifacts produced by the telescope’s optics. (Image credit: Subaru Telescope)
The amazing photo is not a common occurrence. The planet featured in this view is close enough to Earth that the Subaru Telescope at the summit of Hawaii’s Mauna Kea volcano was able to photograph it.
Exoplanet 2M0437b is a fascinating world. In addition to its proximity to Earth — a short 417 light-years away — this place is also one of the youngest exoplanets ever found. It is much younger than the planets in the solar system, for instance. Its juvenile age of just a few million years means that the world is newly formed and therefore its surface is incredibly hot, perhaps as scorching as lava.
The planet was first spotted in 2018, but it took scientists three years to confirm 2M0437b’s existence since its parent star moves very slowly across Earth’s sky.
3) Rogue planets could be bending light and be revealing themselves
An artist’s depiction of a rogue planet. (Image credit: Wikimedia Commons reproduced under a Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0)
These Earth-sized worlds are floating freely in space and aren’t bound to a star, like ours is to the sun.
Astronomers published their findings in July 2021, but future observations will be needed to confirm the existence of these planetary travelers. Since the planets are not orbiting stars at regular intervals, optical light observations that measure stellar brightness or dimming cannot be used to spot the wayward celestial bodies.
Instead, astronomers looked at data obtained by NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler space telescope during two months in 2016 to detect signs of rare gravitational microlensing events. These light-warping moments occur when the gravity of a massive foreground object (like a rogue planet) bends the light of a more-distant star or quasar.
Future observations from missions such as NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and the European Space Agency’s Euclid mission could help astronomers confirm these findings.
4) A planet-making ring outside our solar system
The PDS 70 system captured by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) (Image credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/Benisty et al.)
If the photo of a baby exoplanet wasn’t cute enough, astronomers caught another alien world in an even younger developmental stage. This year, researchers discovered the first known moon-forming disk around a planet outside the solar system.
The primordial ring of material swims in the space around a Jupiter-like exoplanet called PDS 70c. Along with a companion fetal planet, PDS 70c, are still in the early stages of formation. The definitive detection of this system is a big win for astronomers seeking knowledge about how protoplanetary disks shape planets and moons in a system’s infancy.
The circumplanetary disk of this system is located about 400 light-years away and it is about 500 times larger than Saturn’s rings. Scientists think this ring of cosmic material is enough to form three bodies about the size of Earth’s moon.
Scientists think this may have happened with GJ 1132 b, a world located 41 light-years away that circles its parent red dwarf star every 1.5 Earth days. Astronomers looked at observations of this exoplanet by the Hubble Space Telescope and found possible signs that the atmosphere currently shrouding the planet was not there when the world formed. One possibility is that the strange new atmosphere could have been created by gases released from molten rock in the planet.
Hubble’s successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, launched on Dec. 25, 2021. Once it is up and running, the instruments aboard this next-generation observatory could help scientists get a better look at what’s going on with GJ 1132 b.
6) Possible water clouds in a Neptune-like exoplanet
An artist’s depiction of a Neptune-like exoplanet. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
The high atmosphere of one exoplanet may contain clouds of water, according to research published this year.
TOI-1231 b is located just 90 light-years from Earth, takes just 24 days to orbit its tiny parent M dwarf star and is slightly smaller than Neptune. While the findings published this spring about its atmosphere are exciting, more observations will be needed to confirm that water clouds are indeed floating in this world’s atmosphere.
TOI-1231 b is a temperate world with a relatively cool atmosphere when compared to other similar planets. This gaseous planet, which is approximately 3.5 times larger than Earth, may have a dense water-vapor atmosphere like the preliminary research suggests. If further observations from telescopes like JWST show that this isn’t the case, the planet’s atmosphere may more closely resemble Neptune’s hydrogen-helium composition.
7) Exoplanet with shortest-known orbit is detected
An artist’s depiction of a hot Jupiter orbiting its star. (Image credit: NASA, ESA and G. Bacon)
Astronomers utilizing NASA’s TESS mission discovered an exoplanet that takes just 16 hours to circle its star. This world, called TOI-2109b, is also getting closer to its star at the fastest rate ever observed.
TOI-2109b is a kind of “hot Jupiter,” which is a gas giant that orbits close to its parent star. Thus far, astronomers have identified about 400 of these planets. This particular world is unique: It is about five times as massive as Jupiter, about twice the mass of our sun and it is the second-hottest exoplanet ever known. The heat, which reaches nearly 6,000 degrees Fahrenheit (3,300 degrees Celsius), could be caused by the planet’s proximity to its parent star and the fact that its tidally-locked dayside never turns to face away from the star.
TOI-2109b is located in the constellation Hercules, and its star is approximately 855 light-years away from Earth. The paper detailing TOI-2109b was published on Nov. 23, 2021.
8) Nearby star Alpha Centauri A may host a Neptune-sized exoplanet
This wide-field view of the sky around the bright star system Alpha Centauri was created from photographic images forming part of the Digitized Sky Survey 2. (Image credit: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2 Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin)
A $3 million project called Near Earths in the Alpha Cen Region (NEAR) has been searching for planets in the habitable zones of the stars of the Alpha Centauri system. These stars are located a stone’s throw away from Earth, at a distance of a little more than 4 light-years.
This year, the project discovered evidence that suggests a previously-unknown planet exists in this system. In 2016 astronomers found an Earth-sized world in Alpha Centauri, called Proxima b, that dwells at a distance from its star that could support the existence of liquid water. This region is called a habitable zone, and the 2021 exoplanet finding also orbits its parent star from such a range.
The new planet candidate orbits Alpha Centauri A, a sunlike star that makes up a binary pair with Alpha Centauri B. The study authors published their findings in February 2021 and hope that the new work inspires other astronomers to peer into this nearby stellar system to find more exoplanets there.
9) GOT ‘EM-1b takes more than 200 days to orbit its star
An artist’s rendering of a 10-million-year-old star system with a gas-giant planet like Jupiter. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle)
An exoplanet with the funny unofficial name “GOT ‘EM-1b” has an unusually long 218-day orbit around its parent star.
Astronomers hope that this world, which is located about 1,300 light-years away from Earth, can help improve scientific understanding about planetary populations and their migrations.
Gas giants like those in our solar system orbit their star at a hefty distance. However, there are several hundred known “hot Jupiters,” which are gaseous planets that orbit incredibly close to their stars. Only a few dozen of the thousands of exoplanets Kepler discovered had orbits longer than 200 days.
GOT ‘EM-1b — otherwise called Kepler-1514b, after its parent star Kepler-1514 — is an anomaly. It is about five times the mass of Jupiter and falls into the gas giant category. But its exceptionally-long trip around its star resembles just a few dozen other known “hot Jupiters.”
10) TESS spots one of the oldest-known rocky exoplanets
Artist’s rendition of TOI-561, one of the oldest, most metal-poor planetary systems discovered yet in the Milky Way galaxy. (Image credit: W. M. Keck Observatory/Adam Makarenko)
One of the oldest stars in Earth’s home galaxy might be hosting a hot, rocky planet, according to a paper published In January 2021.
TOI-561b has an average surface temperature of over 3,140 degrees F (1,726 degrees C). That’s because this exoplanet, which is roughly three times more massive than Earth, orbits its star closely. It takes less than 12 hours to travel once around its parent star.
The planet itself is also quite old. Using data from NASA’s TESS mission and the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, astronomers determined a rough estimate for the exoplanet’s age. They think it is about 10 billion years old based on its density. This makes TOI-561b one of the oldest rocky planets yet discovered, and shows that the universe has been forming rocky planets almost since its inception (which was about 14 billion years ago).
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More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast United States in the last week from Hurricane Helene and a run-of-the-mill rainstorm that sloshed in ahead of it — an unheard of amount of water that has stunned experts.
That’s enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or Lake Tahoe just once. If it was concentrated just on the state of North Carolina that much water would be 3.5 feet deep (more than 1 meter). It’s enough to fill more than 60 million Olympic-size swimming pools.
“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.”
The flood damage from the rain is apocalyptic, meteorologists said. More than 100 people are dead, according to officials.
Private meteorologist Ryan Maue, a former NOAA chief scientist, calculated the amount of rain, using precipitation measurements made in 2.5-mile-by-2.5 mile grids as measured by satellites and ground observations. He came up with 40 trillion gallons through Sunday for the eastern United States, with 20 trillion gallons of that hitting just Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and Florida from Hurricane Helene.
Clark did the calculations independently and said the 40 trillion gallon figure (151 trillion liters) is about right and, if anything, conservative. Maue said maybe 1 to 2 trillion more gallons of rain had fallen, much if it in Virginia, since his calculations.
Clark, who spends much of his work on issues of shrinking western water supplies, said to put the amount of rain in perspective, it’s more than twice the combined amount of water stored by two key Colorado River basin reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
Several meteorologists said this was a combination of two, maybe three storm systems. Before Helene struck, rain had fallen heavily for days because a low pressure system had “cut off” from the jet stream — which moves weather systems along west to east — and stalled over the Southeast. That funneled plenty of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico. And a storm that fell just short of named status parked along North Carolina’s Atlantic coast, dumping as much as 20 inches of rain, said North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello.
Then add Helene, one of the largest storms in the last couple decades and one that held plenty of rain because it was young and moved fast before it hit the Appalachians, said University of Albany hurricane expert Kristen Corbosiero.
“It was not just a perfect storm, but it was a combination of multiple storms that that led to the enormous amount of rain,” Maue said. “That collected at high elevation, we’re talking 3,000 to 6000 feet. And when you drop trillions of gallons on a mountain, that has to go down.”
The fact that these storms hit the mountains made everything worse, and not just because of runoff. The interaction between the mountains and the storm systems wrings more moisture out of the air, Clark, Maue and Corbosiero said.
North Carolina weather officials said their top measurement total was 31.33 inches in the tiny town of Busick. Mount Mitchell also got more than 2 feet of rainfall.
Before 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, “I said to our colleagues, you know, I never thought in my career that we would measure rainfall in feet,” Clark said. “And after Harvey, Florence, the more isolated events in eastern Kentucky, portions of South Dakota. We’re seeing events year in and year out where we are measuring rainfall in feet.”
Storms are getting wetter as the climate change s, said Corbosiero and Dello. A basic law of physics says the air holds nearly 4% more moisture for every degree Fahrenheit warmer (7% for every degree Celsius) and the world has warmed more than 2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) since pre-industrial times.
Corbosiero said meteorologists are vigorously debating how much of Helene is due to worsening climate change and how much is random.
For Dello, the “fingerprints of climate change” were clear.
“We’ve seen tropical storm impacts in western North Carolina. But these storms are wetter and these storms are warmer. And there would have been a time when a tropical storm would have been heading toward North Carolina and would have caused some rain and some damage, but not apocalyptic destruction. ”
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It’s a dinosaur that roamed Alberta’s badlands more than 70 million years ago, sporting a big, bumpy, bony head the size of a baby elephant.
On Wednesday, paleontologists near Grande Prairie pulled its 272-kilogram skull from the ground.
They call it “Big Sam.”
The adult Pachyrhinosaurus is the second plant-eating dinosaur to be unearthed from a dense bonebed belonging to a herd that died together on the edge of a valley that now sits 450 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.
It didn’t die alone.
“We have hundreds of juvenile bones in the bonebed, so we know that there are many babies and some adults among all of the big adults,” Emily Bamforth, a paleontologist with the nearby Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, said in an interview on the way to the dig site.
She described the horned Pachyrhinosaurus as “the smaller, older cousin of the triceratops.”
“This species of dinosaur is endemic to the Grand Prairie area, so it’s found here and nowhere else in the world. They are … kind of about the size of an Indian elephant and a rhino,” she added.
The head alone, she said, is about the size of a baby elephant.
The discovery was a long time coming.
The bonebed was first discovered by a high school teacher out for a walk about 50 years ago. It took the teacher a decade to get anyone from southern Alberta to come to take a look.
“At the time, sort of in the ’70s and ’80s, paleontology in northern Alberta was virtually unknown,” said Bamforth.
When paleontogists eventually got to the site, Bamforth said, they learned “it’s actually one of the densest dinosaur bonebeds in North America.”
“It contains about 100 to 300 bones per square metre,” she said.
Paleontologists have been at the site sporadically ever since, combing through bones belonging to turtles, dinosaurs and lizards. Sixteen years ago, they discovered a large skull of an approximately 30-year-old Pachyrhinosaurus, which is now at the museum.
About a year ago, they found the second adult: Big Sam.
Bamforth said both dinosaurs are believed to have been the elders in the herd.
“Their distinguishing feature is that, instead of having a horn on their nose like a triceratops, they had this big, bony bump called a boss. And they have big, bony bumps over their eyes as well,” she said.
“It makes them look a little strange. It’s the one dinosaur that if you find it, it’s the only possible thing it can be.”
The genders of the two adults are unknown.
Bamforth said the extraction was difficult because Big Sam was intertwined in a cluster of about 300 other bones.
The skull was found upside down, “as if the animal was lying on its back,” but was well preserved, she said.
She said the excavation process involved putting plaster on the skull and wooden planks around if for stability. From there, it was lifted out — very carefully — with a crane, and was to be shipped on a trolley to the museum for study.
“I have extracted skulls in the past. This is probably the biggest one I’ve ever done though,” said Bamforth.
“It’s pretty exciting.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 25, 2024.
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.
Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.
Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.
The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.
The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.
It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.
Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.
Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.
Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.
Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.
Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.
The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”
