Search Publications
A population of red candidate massive galaxies 600 Myr after the Big Bang
Labbé, Ivo; van Dokkum, Pieter; Bezanson, Rachel +8 more
Galaxies with stellar masses as high as roughly 1011 solar masses have been identified1-3 out to redshifts z of roughly 6, around 1 billion years after the Big Bang. It has been difficult to find massive galaxies at even earlier times, as the Balmer break region, which is needed for accurate mass estimates, is redshifted to w…
Early Release Science of the exoplanet WASP-39b with JWST NIRSpec PRISM
Zhang, X.; Heng, K.; May, E. M. +91 more
Transmission spectroscopy1-3 of exoplanets has revealed signatures of water vapour, aerosols and alkali metals in a few dozen exoplanet atmospheres4,5. However, these previous inferences with the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes were hindered by the observations' relatively narrow wavelength range and spectral resolving po…
Photochemically produced SO2 in the atmosphere of WASP-39b
Henning, Thomas; Fortney, Jonathan J.; Carter, Aarynn L. +82 more
Photochemistry is a fundamental process of planetary atmospheres that regulates the atmospheric composition and stability1. However, no unambiguous photochemical products have been detected in exoplanet atmospheres so far. Recent observations from the JWST Transiting Exoplanet Community Early Release Science Program2,3 found …
Early Release Science of the exoplanet WASP-39b with JWST NIRISS
Henning, Thomas; Fortney, Jonathan J.; Carter, Aarynn L. +86 more
The Saturn-mass exoplanet WASP-39b has been the subject of extensive efforts to determine its atmospheric properties using transmission spectroscopy1-4. However, these efforts have been hampered by modelling degeneracies between composition and cloud properties that are caused by limited data quality5-9. Here we present the t…
Early Release Science of the exoplanet WASP-39b with JWST NIRCam
Fortney, Jonathan J.; Carter, Aarynn L.; Gibson, Neale P. +96 more
Measuring the metallicity and carbon-to-oxygen (C/O) ratio in exoplanet atmospheres is a fundamental step towards constraining the dominant chemical processes at work and, if in equilibrium, revealing planet formation histories. Transmission spectroscopy (for example, refs. 1,2) provides the necessary means by constraining the abundance…
Momentum transfer from the DART mission kinetic impact on asteroid Dimorphos
Zinzi, Angelo; Cheng, Andrew F.; Dall'Ora, Massimo +66 more
The NASA Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission performed a kinetic impact on asteroid Dimorphos, the satellite of the binary asteroid (65803) Didymos, at 23:14 UTC on 26 September 2022 as a planetary defence test1. DART was the first hypervelocity impact experiment on an asteroid at size and velocity scales relevant to planeta…
The nature of an ultra-faint galaxy in the cosmic dark ages seen with JWST
Santini, Paola; Castellano, Marco; Fontana, Adriano +44 more
In the first billion years after the Big Bang, sources of ultraviolet (UV) photons are believed to have ionized intergalactic hydrogen, rendering the Universe transparent to UV radiation. Galaxies brighter than the characteristic luminosity L* (refs. 1,2) do not provide enough ionizing photons to drive this cosmic reionization. Fainter …
Ejecta from the DART-produced active asteroid Dimorphos
Granvik, Mikael; Kolokolova, Ludmilla; Weaver, Harold A. +61 more
Some active asteroids have been proposed to be formed as a result of impact events1. Because active asteroids are generally discovered by chance only after their tails have fully formed, the process of how impact ejecta evolve into a tail has, to our knowledge, not been directly observed. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) miss…
Carbonaceous dust grains seen in the first billion years of cosmic time
Chevallard, Jacopo; Carniani, Stefano; D'Eugenio, Francesco +39 more
Large dust reservoirs (up to approximately 108 M⊙) have been detected1-3 in galaxies out to redshift z ≃ 8, when the age of the Universe was only about 600 Myr. Generating substantial amounts of dust within such a short timescale has proven challenging for theories of dust formation4,5 and has prompted t…
Vanadium oxide and a sharp onset of cold-trapping on a giant exoplanet
Kesseli, Aurora Y.; Kasper, David; Bean, Jacob L. +15 more
The abundance of refractory elements in giant planets can provide key insights into their formation histories1. Owing to the low temperatures of the Solar System giants, refractory elements condense below the cloud deck, limiting sensing capabilities to only highly volatile elements2. Recently, ultra-hot giant exoplanets have…