Astronomers detected radio signals coming from an exoplanet for the first time. Spoiler alert: It's not aliens. - Live Science

Webb observations reveal a hotter, more extended evening edge in the atmosphere of the giant exoplanet WASP-17b. A method called transmission strings maps atmospheric differences around the planet’s apparent outline during transit. The inferred temperature contrast is about 650 kelvin, while water and carbon dioxide abundances remain broadly consistent around the limb. One edge of WASP-17b stretches farther into space than the other. Around this swollen gas giant, intense heating and atmospheric circulation produce differences that disappear when astronomers treat the entire atmosphere as one uniform ring. A new analysis has recovered some of that missing structure from starlight filtered through the planet’s atmosphere. The findings, published in Nature Astronomy, concern a hot Jupiter roughly 1,300 light-years from Earth. A team co-led by Cornell University and the University of Bristol applied a method called transmission strings to James Webb Space Telescope observations. The approach traces atmospheric properties at different positions around the planet’s apparent edge.

Powerful dishes isolate a distant planetary signal A research team led by Kevin N. Ortiz Ceballos analyzed four observing sessions conducted between February 2025 and May 2026. They used the 64-dish MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa to scan the young Beta Pictoris star system.

The dark nebula Barnard 68, a dense cloud of dust that blocks the light of stars behind it, creating the appearance of a hole in space. This is an illustrative image, not the location of the mysterious JWST detection. (ESO) In the southern constellation of Fornax lies a tiny patch of sky just like any other. Your eyes may have brushed past it a hundred times without a thought. Yet this otherwise unremarkable speck of the cosmos is among the most well-cataloged in the sky. The Hubble Space Telescope stared at it for more than 270 hours to obtain its famous Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) – and contained therein are nearly 10,000 galaxies extending billions of light-years into the Universe. When the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) launched, it was only natural that its golden mirrors would turn to the same region of space, using its vastly more sensitive infrared capabilities to find what Hubble may have missed. Now, it has revealed that a patch of space astronomers have been poring over for decades may yet hold some surprises. In a tiny corner of the tiny field, JWST detected a strange signal – not once, but twice, in observations nearly three months apart. There's just one problem.