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Methane and carbon dioxide found in atmosphere of habitable-zone exoplanet An international team of astronomers led by the University of Cambridge has used data from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope to discover methane and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of K2-18 b, an exoplanet in the ‘Goldilocks zone’. This...

An array of 350 radio telescopes in the Karoo desert of South Africa is getting closer to detecting “the Epoch of Re-ionization” — the era just after the first stars ignited and galaxies began to bloom . In a paper accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal , the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array ( HERA )...

A team of astronomers have found that planet formation in our young Solar System started much earlier than previously thought, with the building blocks of planets growing at the same time as their parent star. A study of some of the oldest stars in the Universe suggests that the building blocks of planets like Jupiter and...

Known for beaming stunning images back to Earth, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope just scored another first: a molecular and chemical portrait of a distant world’s skies. The telescope’s array of highly sensitive instruments was trained on the atmosphere of a “hot Saturn” – a planet about as massive as Saturn orbiting a...