Salty Clouds aren’t the only strange thing about this object in space

There’s an object in space 25 times the size of Jupiter that’s stumped scientists for years. They haven’t been able to figure out if it’s a planet or a failed star. But scientists are one step closer to an answer thanks to the powerful James Webb Space Telescope. After analyzing data collected by the telescope, astronomers have uncovered unexpected new clues floating light years away from us: Salty clouds sitting in space as hot as some home ovens. And if this mystery isn’t enough, we have more to look forward to in this episode, including insights into the evolution of laughter and the burials of ancient human relatives. Interested in more science in the news? Email us your question at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. It includes perks like bonus episodes, early access, archive access, curated playlists and sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This message comes from NPR sponsor Charles Schwab. Financial decisions can be tricky. Your biases can lead you astray. Financial Decoder, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, can help. Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/financialdecoder. You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 0:22Regina Barber?

  Hey, Short Wavers. Regina Barber here.

• 0:24Speaker 02

  And Angela Zeng.

• 0:25Regina Barber?

  With our biweekly science news roundup, featuring Juana Summers of All Things Considered. You're super fun. I'm glad you're back.

• 0:32Speaker 03

  Glad to be back with y'all.

• 0:33Regina Barber?

  OK, so this week, we've got a few mysteries unraveling. First up, an object in space that might be a planet or might be a failed star, and what new observations about its clouds can reveal about it. Juana? Yes. Angela, if you could have a cloud made of anything, what would it be?

• 0:52Speaker 03

  I mean, I feel like my brain automatically goes to marshmallows, which I feel like might be a cop out, but I'm also really hungry, so that might have something to do with this.

• 0:59Regina Barber?

  Marshmallows will not quench that hunger, though.

• 1:01Speaker 03

  But they taste really good.

• 1:02Regina Barber?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:03Speaker 02

  Oh, man, I had something a little bit more, you wouldn't want to be in it, but I'm kind of tired this morning.

• 1:07Regina Barber?

  Yeah.

• 1:08Speaker 02

  And I was like, some coffee sounds great and a cloud, you know?

• 1:11Regina Barber?

  A coffee cloud. That sounds awesome, actually. And it raining down and just open your mouth?

• 1:18Speaker 02

  Exactly, and then you're carbonated.

• 1:19Speaker 03

  Only if it's iced coffee, otherwise it might be a little painful.

• 1:22Regina Barber?

  It'll be a cold storm. It's fine, a cold front. I personally think instantly, like cotton candy.

• 1:28Speaker 03

  Perfect.

• 1:29Regina Barber?

  Cotton candy is the first thing. But these clouds are none of those things.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, stay tuned. Our second and third topics are a lot closer to home. The exciting possibility of a sex-specific burial site of ancient human relatives, and what great ape's laughter can tell us about the evolution for human communication.

• 1:46Speaker 03

  I don't have a fun question for this, though. And yet, I'm still intrigued.

• 1:50Speaker 02

  We'll laugh a lot, that's all I can say.

• 1:52Regina Barber?

  So today on the show, we've got mysteries across space and time. You're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

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• 3:28Speaker 02

  All right, Gina and Wana, we've got a lot to get into.

• 3:31Speaker 03

  I would love it if we could start in space. Tell me about the weather on another planet.

• 3:35Regina Barber?

  Yeah, this might not even be a planet that we're talking about here. There's a debate over this object, GJ 504b. It's roughly 25 times larger than Jupiter, and astronomers are uncertain how to define it. Is it a planet like Jupiter, or is it a failed star?

• 3:51Speaker 03

  What do you mean by that? Like, they look the same to us from a telescope, but they're actually different things?

• 3:55Regina Barber?

  Yeah, huge Jupiter-like planets and a failed star, they do look super similar, but how they get there is different. Stars need a lot of mass to ignite fusion and turn on, and without enough mass, the star doesn't turn on, basically. It failed.

• 4:09Speaker 02

  And whichever one this object is, we know that it's really dim and couldn't be fully studied from ground telescopes until a study out this month in the Astronomical Journal about GJ 504b. Astronomers were finally able to analyze the light using the James Webb Space Telescope, and they got some information on what chemicals are in its atmosphere.

• 4:29Speaker 03

  So what can scientists say about it?

• 4:31Speaker 02

  They could say something about the kind of clouds that were in the atmosphere. So this maybe, maybe not planet. It's about 550 degrees Fahrenheit. That's probably how hot your oven gets at home. And that might seem hot to us, but that's actually pretty cool for other worlds like this.

• 4:46Regina Barber?

  Yeah, and that temperature affects what kind of weather it has. Like, there are exoplanets that are so hot, the clouds are made up of gemstones. Yeah, and our Jupiter is so cold that the clouds are ammonia ice and beneath that, water vapor.

• 4:59Speaker 03

  So what are these clouds made of? And how does knowing that help our understanding of space?

• 5:04Speaker 02

  So the study modeling and this temperature are all pointed towards, get this, salt clouds. And there actually aren't a lot of objects in space like this one.

• 5:12Regina Barber?

  Yeah, there's still a lot of questions astronomers like the lead author, Anish Babaraj, have, like?

• 5:17Speaker 05

  We still don't know how big planets can get.

• 5:21Regina Barber?

  So uncovering as much as possible can help astronomers make better models for how planets and stars are born.

• 5:27Speaker 03

  All right, up next, we've got a story about ancient human relatives. What did scientists find out that's so interesting?

• 5:33Regina Barber?

  So in 2013, archaeologists discovered more than 1,000 human-like fossils, so like bones and teeth, in the Rising Star Cave system in South Africa. And one big thing jumped out. All the reconstructed skeletons looked oddly the same size, which surprised scientists because in most primate species, there's a clear difference in size between the sexes.

• 5:53Speaker 02

  And this species, called Homo naledi, they lived a few hundred thousand years ago. They walked upright and they had human-like hands and feet, but their brains were much smaller than those of ancient humans.

• 6:05Regina Barber?

  Yeah, and if you look them up, they look very Planet of the Apes-like.

• 6:08Speaker 03

  Okay, okay.

• 6:09Regina Barber?

  Anyway, a study out this week in the journal Cell may have solved the size mystery. An international team of researchers analyzed the teeth of 20 Homo naledi individuals, spanning thousands of years, to determine the sex.

• 6:21Speaker 06

  All of the Homo naledi individuals that we looked at came back missing a male marker.

• 6:28Speaker 02

  That's lead author and molecular scientist, Palessa Madupe. She says the chances are about 1 in a million that all 20 would be female. So the team thinks this could have been an intentional, sex-specific burial practice.

• 6:41Speaker 03

  Oh, interesting. So how big of a deal would that be if it's true?

• 6:44Regina Barber?

  It could be a big deal because Homo naledi isn't in our direct lineage and burial practices are largely ascribed to humans, although other animals do it, like elephants and naked mole rats.

• 6:54Speaker 03

  Huh, interesting. So how are others in the field reacting to these findings?

• 6:58Speaker 02

  They're pretty excited. Researchers have been puzzling over this for more than a decade, actually. We talked to Charles Musiba. He's an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University who wasn't a part of this study, though even with his excitement, he was also a little cautious.

• 7:14Speaker 04

  Could this be intentional sort of disposal of the bodies? The answer probably is yes. I'd like to see a little bit more evidence, but it sort of strongly suggests that way. And the biggest question is, where are the males?

• 7:27Speaker 03

  Where are the males, indeed? Hopefully, we'll have you on later for an answer to this next mystery. So let's move on here. For our last story, let's stay with these distant relatives. There is new research that could tell us more about how humans evolved to communicate. And you said it's from studying primates?

• 7:42Regina Barber?

  Yeah, so how humans evolved to communicate is not totally clear. I mean, we don't have recordings of our hominid ancestors, you know, talking. But we can study some distant relatives, the great apes. There are orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos. And so how they communicate and vocalize could give us clues about our own evolution.

• 8:02Speaker 02

  And what do we have in common? We play and we laugh.

• 8:06Speaker 07

  Many non-human primates love being tickled, especially when they're like babies.

• 8:11Speaker 02

  That's primatologist Chiara de Gregorio from the University of Warwick. Her team measured the tempo of laughter in great apes and human children. And they just published their results in Communications Biology. They found that great apes like us laugh in a steady rhythm, almost like a metronome. And they found that the laughter actually changed over time.

• 8:30Speaker 07

  We go from orangutans that are solitary animals. And then you have gorillas, which have more a family kind of group. Then you have chimpanzees and bonobo, which start to have a really like complex social life.

• 8:51Speaker 07

  Going towards more complex society, then a laughter becomes more variable, more flexible.

• 8:58Speaker 03

  It's so cool hearing all of those together. I mean, you can really hear how the chimpanzees and bonobos, the last two that we heard, do sort of sound like human laughter.

• 9:05Regina Barber?

  Yeah, they basically made us laugh, right? And we're actually more closely related to bonobos and chimpanzees out of all the great apes. And our laughter is the most similar to theirs, like you said. So this study shows us that as a species becomes more social, maybe laughter gradually evolves as well.

• 9:22Speaker 03

  And what can that tell us about humans?

• 9:23Speaker 02

  Well, as you heard, the great apes have a pretty cute laugh.

• 9:26Speaker 03

  They do.

• 9:27Speaker 02

  But it's also pretty regular, like that metronome. And they can't really change it, as you also heard. But humans can. The human children in the study were the only ones who could actually modulate or change how they laughed.

• 9:38Regina Barber?

  And that laughter conveys really important information.

• 9:41Speaker 07

  We can have a polite, small laugh in front of, I don't know, an important person. But then maybe you're at the pub with friends, and we laugh in a totally different way.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  You can totally imagine those scenarios, right?

• 9:54Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, for sure.

• 9:55Speaker 02

  Totally. And laughing like this requires a lot of vocal control, which is also how you learn to speak, which, of course, also sets us apart from the great apes.

• 10:02Regina Barber?

  So, Anna, with all this laughing in mind, we have a joke for you. What is a monkey's favorite month?

• 10:08Speaker 03

  Oh, gosh, I don't know.

• 10:10Speaker 02

  April. Get it?

• 10:13Speaker 03

  How's that for a polite, small laugh, y'all?

• 10:17Regina Barber?

  You're like, uh, uh, yeah, that was rough. I liked it, though.

• 10:22Speaker 03

  Dad jokes abound.

• 10:23Regina Barber?

  Please come back anytime.

• 10:25Speaker 03

  Only if you bring me more jokes.

• 10:27Regina Barber?

  And marshmallows.

• 10:28Speaker 02

  You got it. You can hear more of Anna Summers on Consider This, NPR's afternoon podcast about what the news means for you.

• 10:38Regina Barber?

  And for more science stories just like this one, follow Short Wave on whatever app you're listening to.

• 10:43Speaker 02

  This episode was produced by Burleigh McCoy and Jordan Marie Smith. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Mallory Yu.

• 10:49Regina Barber?

  Josephine Neonai and Jimmy Keely were the audio engineers. I'm Regina Barber.

• 10:54Speaker 02

  And I'm Angela Zhang. Thanks for listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

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