This distant planet has wild weather and gemstone clouds

For many astronomers and astrophysicists there are two distinct, important periods: before the James Webb Space Telescope – and after. It has powered many scientific discoveries since it came online, including two at the heart of this episode: insights into one of Neptune’s moons and a “hot Jupiter” exoplanet orbiting another star. This exoplanet has a strange weather system with high winds and cloud coverage only on one side of the planet. Fill in some of the scientific gaps about our solar system and the universe beyond with us. Interested in more space science? Email us your question at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave http://plus.npr.org/shortwave. 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

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• 0:00Speaker 00

  This message comes from Avalara Aviator. Aviator is the agent hub for tax and compliance. Purpose-built AI agents work around the clock and across business systems to help execute the work. Visit avalara.com/aviator.

• 0:15Speaker 00

  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 0:21Regina Barber?

  Hey, Short Weavers. Regina Barber here. It's time for my favorite monthly episode, our space news segment, Spacing Out with Gina. We're here today with science correspondent, Kadia Riddle. Hey, Kadia.

• 0:32Speaker 02

  Hey, Gina.

• 0:33Regina Barber?

  I will say you're going to have to learn a secret handshake by the end of the day.

• 0:36Speaker 02

  I'm ready. I'm ready for it.

• 0:37Regina Barber?

  And Space Connoisseur and All Things Considered host, Scott Detrow. Welcome back, Scott.

• 0:43Speaker 03

  I like Space Connoisseur. I'm excited to be here. I'm excited to hear what you will teach us this week.

• 0:47Regina Barber?

  Yes, I actually did use to teach this stuff for like, a dozen years. But, Kadia, you're actually going to start us off, though, with a story about the furthest planet in our solar system.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  Exactly, which, you know, I grew up learning with Pluto. But unfortunately, it's since been kicked out of the Major Planet Guild.

• 1:04Regina Barber?

  There's a lot of beef, a lot of baggage.

• 1:07Speaker 02

  I'll be telling you about Neptune today and how one of its moons could help us fill in the gaps of our solar system's origin story. But I promise it'll still be fun.

• 1:17Speaker 03

  Can I rattle off the slightly dated mnemonic device? That is a hard word to say that I learned to say all the planets.

• 1:23Regina Barber?

  Do it.

• 1:24Speaker 03

  My very educated mother just served us nine pizzas.

• 1:29Regina Barber?

  Just served us nothing.

• 1:31Speaker 03

  Yes, just nothing. Yeah, now it's nothing. Or like noodles. I don't know. Got to update it. But Pluto aside, Neptune's cool, too. That's not the only planet on our agenda today, though, right?

• 1:42Regina Barber?

  Yes, so there's a planet that isn't in our solar system, an exoplanet orbiting another star far, far away.

• 1:48Speaker 02

  And Gina, you're also telling us another reason that the northern lights are awesome.

• 1:52Regina Barber?

  Yes. Have either of you seen the northern lights?

• 1:56Speaker 03

  Honestly, I never have. All the times that it was coming low in recent years, I'd get excited, then I'd be like, oh, wait, I live in a city.

• 2:01Regina Barber?

  Yeah.

• 2:02Speaker 03

  It's not going to happen.

• 2:02Regina Barber?

  I think I kind of did once. It was like a foggy green, but I can't confirm it, right? So let's all pack our bags and let's all go to Alaska together.

• 2:11Speaker 03

  I think so. Take the show on the road.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  I'm there.

• 2:13Regina Barber?

  OK. Today on the show, we're traveling up and out from Earth's northern lights to the edges of our solar system and outside of it. You're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

• 2:34Speaker 00

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• 3:09Regina Barber?

  This election season, let the NPR Politics podcast save your time and your sanity. We'll help you understand key races, which polls you can safely ignore, and what might happen if power shifts in Congress. Our short, daily episodes come out every afternoon, so you can spend less time scrolling through each chaotic news cycle. Make NPR Politics your hub for midterm election coverage. Follow our podcast on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 3:33Speaker 04

  Oh, Kevin, it feels good to be back.

• 3:35Speaker 05

  It sure does, Casey. And what a time. The world is talking about AI and what's going on in Silicon Valley. And we are here with a new show to tell you all about it.

• 3:44Speaker 04

  That's right, Kevin. On our new show, Machine Gods, twice a week, we'll be bringing you the biggest news in tech and bring you unmatched access to the real titans of this industry.

• 3:52Speaker 05

  You can find Machine Gods from NPR on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 3:59Speaker 02

  Okay, Gina, Scott, I'm sure you've heard a lot about Neptune, but I bet you don't know much about its moons. Did you know that it has 16 of them?

• 4:07Speaker 03

  I definitely did not. You probably did.

• 4:08Regina Barber?

  No, I did not. I knew it was a lot, but I didn't know it was like 16.

• 4:12Speaker 03

  Well, now we know.

• 4:12Speaker 02

  There's been questions about one specifically called Nereid for decades. Researchers have been wondering whether this moon was formed right in Neptune's orbit or if it's an interloper from elsewhere.

• 4:24Speaker 03

  What makes them think that could be the case?

• 4:26Speaker 02

  Well, for starters, Nariad has a really unusual orbit. It's stretched into this elongated oval shape. For years, that highly eccentric orbit led researchers to speculate that it was not formed around Neptune. Moons that are born, so to speak, around a planet tend to travel in a kind of regular circular path. But now we're able to look more closely at Nariad's composition and see evidence that despite this weird orbit, it is more consistent with a moon that formed around Neptune than one that was captured from elsewhere.

• 4:58Speaker 03

  What is going on with this smooshed orbit shape, though?

• 5:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. The idea now is that it was shoved into this unusual orbit by another moon called Triton at an earlier point. Triton is big. It's about eight times bigger than Nariad, and it turns out it's kind of a bully.

• 5:14Regina Barber?

  I actually kind of like Triton, but, OK. But when you have 16 moons, things are going to be very competitive.

• 5:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Our moon is lucky. It doesn't have to compete for real estate around Earth. I talked to Matthew Beliakov from the California Institute of Technology. He's the lead researcher on a new paper out about this in the journal Science Advances.

• 5:34Speaker 06

  I think there's a lot of value to having a new understanding of Nariad. It's a time capsule.

• 5:42Regina Barber?

  So what does he mean by time capsule?

• 5:44Speaker 02

  Well, this may be the only intact moon remaining from Neptune's original moons. Matthew says information like this leads to filling in other blanks around the solar system.

• 5:54Speaker 06

  It's pretty important to understand how the early solar system transpired because that tells us something about our formation here on Earth.

• 6:01Speaker 03

  I'm moving past the fact I'm just like really dwelling on 16 moons, jostling for space, and moons swapping in and out.

• 6:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:07Speaker 03

  But I'm going to get past that. Like, I guess my one question here is that this is something scientists have been thinking about studying for a long time. How are we able to get this new information?

• 6:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, it all comes back to the James Webb. Talking to Matthew, he just underscored how much of a game changer this telescope has been. It's such a powerful tool. He says in his line of work, it's really like before the James Webb Space Telescope and after the telescope. It's given us such a richer and more nuanced understanding of the universe.

• 6:37Speaker 03

  Okay, so let's switch gears here. Let's go from a cold planet to a hot planet.

• 6:40Regina Barber?

  Yes.

• 6:41Speaker 03

  And let's go from our solar system to another solar system. Gina, you're going to talk to us about a hot Jupiter-like planet orbiting another star.

• 6:48Regina Barber?

  Yeah, so we're going to talk about an exoplanet. So this is a planet around another star, and we're going to be talking about its weather.

• 6:56Speaker 07

  We can see things like storms in Jupiter, but planets orbiting other stars, what's their weather like?

• 7:05Regina Barber?

  That's Eliza Kempton, an astronomer at the University of Chicago. I talked to her about a new study she didn't work on, but she was excited about. It looks at a specific exoplanet that's a hot gas giant, so like Jupiter, but it's 18 times closer to its star than Earth is to the Sun.

• 7:22Speaker 03

  That is super close.

• 7:23Regina Barber?

  It's so close.

• 7:24Speaker 03

  What else makes this interesting for scientists to study and learn more about?

• 7:28Regina Barber?

  Yeah, so these planets are called hot Jupiters. It's not Jupiter, but it kind of is slightly bigger. It has a permanent day and a permanent night. This planet is always facing its star on one side. It's tidally locked with that star.

• 7:41Speaker 03

  Huh.

• 7:41Regina Barber?

  And that star is about 700 light-years from Earth.

• 7:44Speaker 02

  And that affects the weather.

• 7:45Regina Barber?

  Yes, so astrophysicists at Johns Hopkins University also used the new and very precise James Webb Space Telescope to look at the atmosphere of this exoplanet called WASP-94AB.

• 7:57Speaker 03

  That's a catchy name.

• 7:58Regina Barber?

  Yeah, it is. And researchers looked at the morning part of the planet, at the boundary separating the day and night side, and that's riddled with clouds. But then, if you travel along the sunlit day side, the clouds get burned off, so there are clear skies on the day side of the exoplanet and clouds at the dawn and dusk parts.

• 8:19Speaker 03

  Wow, and then, based on the way that it's tidally locked, does that mean that these are like semi-permanent weather patterns?

• 8:24Regina Barber?

  Yeah, so I talked to Shagnik Mukherjee about all of this. He's the lead author of a new paper about this in the journal Science, and he says having distinct night and day sides means there's also...

• 8:35Speaker 06

  There's this huge temperature difference. What it does is it sets off really fast winds.

• 8:41Speaker 03

  One other thing I want to know, one of my questions I've always had about WASP 94AB.

• 8:46Regina Barber?

  Right, right.

• 8:47Speaker 03

  Going back.

• 8:48Regina Barber?

  Since you've learned about it, yeah.

• 8:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. What are the clouds made of?

• 8:51Regina Barber?

  Scott, I'm so glad you asked that. So the clouds are not made of water, like on Earth.

• 8:56Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 8:56Regina Barber?

  Here's Maria Steinroock of the University of Chicago also. She's an astrophysicist who didn't work on this study, but she says her favorite part of the study, and hot gas giants in general, is...

• 9:07Speaker 07

  These planets are so hot, gemstones are clouds.

• 9:10Regina Barber?

  Yeah, so the clouds are made of dust and bits of rock, and this is possible because it's just so hot.

• 9:15Speaker 03

  Uh, let's close this out by coming back to Earth, the northern lights. This is something we've talked a lot about lately because there's been so much activity. These come from solar storms, right?

• 9:25Regina Barber?

  Yeah, it's more, more space weather, Scott.

• 9:27Speaker 03

  Yes, let's do it.

• 9:28Regina Barber?

  Yep, very true, Kadia. So the sun goes through these cycles, and this year and last, we saw strong auroras in a lot of the US states. There was a big solar storm last fall where people claimed to see the northern lights as south as Atlanta. I don't know if you all remember this.

• 9:43Speaker 03

  And this is, it's, it's fair to say, the bigger the solar storm is, the further south we see the aurora borealis, right?

• 9:48Regina Barber?

  Yeah, I mean, that's, that's a pretty good general rule. Fun fact, this is actually one of my favorite stories. There was a massive solar storm in 1859, and you could see the northern lights as south as Cuba. And it was so bright that campers thought the sun was rising in the middle of the night.

• 10:04Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 10:04Regina Barber?

  Yeah.

• 10:05Speaker 02

  But nothing like that has happened this year or last.

• 10:07Regina Barber?

  No, no, no, thankfully. All of the solar storms NOAA and NASA has tracked lately have been smaller than that famous one. For the most part, people who live on the US-Canada border have like the best chance to see northern lights. But for any curious listeners, you should definitely go to NOAA's website and check out predictions on when and where you're going to see northern lights.

• 10:29Regina Barber?

  Kadia, how would you rate your first time on spacing out with Gina?

• 10:33Speaker 02

  Five out of five stars. I'm game to nerd out anytime on space stuff, guys.

• 10:37Regina Barber?

  Aw, we hope you'll join our nerd club again sometime, only after you learn that handshake.

• 10:42Speaker 02

  I'm ready. I'm ready for it.

• 10:47Regina Barber?

  If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend. It really helps the show. And hey, give us a follow on the NPR app or wherever you're listening from. This way, you'll never miss a new episode. This episode was produced by Arun Nayar and Kai McNamie. It was edited by Christopher Intagliata, Amina Khan, and our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Kadia, myself, and Tyler Jones checked the facts. Jimmy Keely and Ted Meembein were the audio engineers. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR. See you Monday.

• 11:25Speaker 05

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