Rainbow-like "Glory Effect" Seen On Distant Planet For The First Time

Glory have been seen on a planet outside the solar system for the first time, but what are they and why do they occur?

This 'glory effect' occurs only under certain conditions – when light is reflected off clouds consisting of a perfectly uniform, but currently unknown, substance. The effect forms when light passes a narrow opening, between water droplets in clouds of fog, for example, causing the light to diffract or bend , and create ring-like patterns.

Astronomers believe the phenomenon originates in the atmosphere of the ultra-hot gas giant WASP-76b, which sits around 637 light years away. The ultra-hot Jupiter-like planet has less mass than Jupiter, but is almost double its size as it is " puffed up" by intense radiation .

Observations taken by European Space Agency 's Characterising Exoplanet Satellite (CHEOPS) suggests that the 'glory' may occur between the extreme heat and light of the exoplanet's sunlit face, and the infinite night of its dark side .

The 'glory effect' occurs often on Earth, but has only ever been seen once on another planet – Venus; if confirmed, it would reveal more about the nature of this mysterious planet.

"There's a reason no glory has been seen before outside our solar system – it requires very peculiar conditions ," said lead author Olivier Demangeon from the Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences , Portugal . "First, you need atmospheric particles that are close-to-perfectly spherical , completely uniform and stable enough to be observed over a long time. The planet's nearby star needs to shine directly at it , with the observer at just the right orientation."

WASP-76b, fist discovered in 2013, as a uniquely 'hellish environment' . One side of the planet constantly faces the sun and reaches a temperature of 2,400°C – which would melt and evaporate any elements that would form rocks on Earth. The other side is cooler and perpetually dark ; here these elements would condense, creating iron clouds that drip molten iron rain.

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Watch An Exclusive Clip From The CNN' 'Space Shuttle Columbia: The Final Flight' Finale (Video)

Our exclusive clip above features interviews with former NASA Photo Analysis Manager Bob Page, Wayne Hale, former NASA Manager, Shuttle Program and CNN Analyst Miles O'Brien regarding the past ongoing issues at NASA where people were afraid to speak up and offer dissenting opinions in a bureaucratic system ill-equipped for good communication across all integrated departments.

CNN's "Space Shuttle Columbia: The Final Flight" premiered Sunday, April 7 at 9 p.m. ET/PT with its first two installments. The docuseries' final two episodes both air Sunday, April 14 at 9 p.m. ET/PT. Its executive produced by Emma Tutty and Emma Whitehead for Mindhouse, and Amy Entelis and Lyle Gamm for CNN Original Series.

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Blue Origin Set To Fly Its Next Crewed Mission

Blue Origin is preparing its next crewed mission this month, its first with a crew in a year and a half.

This will be the first crewed mission since and second overall launch since a nozzle failure caused the flight termination system to trigger during a launch in September 2022. The mission will launch from the company⁘s West Texas launch site.

The company returned to flight over a year later after taking corrective actions with a successful sub-orbital flight that hosted 33 various science payloads.

The last crewed flight took place in August 2022, and all crewed flights have used the crew capsule RSS First Step, which has flown 8 times in total.

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NASA Is Set To Launch Its Next-Gen Solar Sail Into Deep Space

Everyone knows that solar energy is free and almost limitless here on Earth. The same is true for spacecraft operating in the inner Solar System. But in space, the Sun can do more than provide electrical energy; it also emits an unending stream of solar wind.

Solar sails can harness that wind and provide propulsion for spacecraft. NASA is about to test a new solar sail design that can make solar sails even more effective.

Solar pressure pervades the entire Solar System. It weakens with distance, but it's present. It affects all spacecraft, including satellites. It affects longer-duration space flights dramatically.

The most recent solar sail spacecraft is the Planetary Society's LightSail 2 , launched in 2019. LightSail 2 was a successful mission that lasted over three years.

Though solar sails are much lighter than other spacecraft, the weight of the booms is still a hindrance.

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Car-sized Asteroid Gives Earth A Super-close Shave With Flyby Closer Than Some Satellites

Editor's note: This story was updated to correct the flyby distance of asteroid 2024 GJ2 via NASA's JPL Asteroid Watch tracker. It is 11,600 miles (18,700 kilometers).

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Josh Dinner is Space.com's Content Manager. He is a writer and photographer with a passion for science and space exploration, and has been working the space beat since 2016. Josh has covered the evolution of NASA's commercial spaceflight partnerships, from early Dragon and Cygnus cargo missions to the ongoing development and launches of crewed missions from the Space Coast, as well as NASA science missions and more. He also enjoys building 1:144 scale models of rockets and human-flown spacecraft. Find some of Josh's launch photography on Instagram and his website , and follow him on Twitter , where he mostly posts in haiku.

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How Do You Grow Plants In Space? Lower Brule, Chester Teachers Selected For NASA Liftoff Summer...

Apr. 11—Two South Dakota teachers have been selected to participate in a NASA Liftoff Summer Institute program.

Bree Oatman, a high school science teacher at Lower Brule High School, along with Mike O⁘Connell, a middle school science teacher at Chester Area School, were chosen to attend this nationally competitive program sponsored by NASA⁘s Texas Space Grant Consortium and the University of Texas Center for Space Research. There were about 60 educators selected nationwide. In addition to winning a spot at the institute, Oatman was also recently named a recipient of a $5,000 grant, the Kelly Lane Earth and Space Science Grant. The grant is awarded by the South Dakota Space Consortium to math and science teachers in South Dakota to enhance professional development.

The workshop, held from June 24-28, is a professional development training course for teachers. It emphasizes science, technology, engineering and mathematics learning experiences by incorporating a space science theme supported by NASA Missions. The training takes place in Houston, Texas.

The theme for this year⁘s workshop is Growing on Earth for Space Exploration. Teacher participants will be provided with information and experiences through speakers, hands-on activities and field investigations that promote space science and enrichment activities for themselves and for others.

According to the program⁘s website, participants will increase their understanding of specialized environments for growth and development, on Earth, in microgravity, and beyond.

Oatman specifically is excited because the theme ties in well with units she planned to teach on, such as microgravity, how plants grow when there is less gravity and pollination without insects.

"I⁘m very excited that this year⁘s focus is on plants," Oatman said. "I⁘m an uber nerd and it all sounds like so much fun."

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A NASA Spacecraft Spotted Something Weird Orbiting The Moon. It Was Just A Lunar Neighbor.

"The LRO operations team at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, needed exquisite timing in pointing LROC to the right place at the right time to catch a glimpse of Danuri," NASA officials said in the statement.

For the second image, LRO was closer to Danuri, about 2.5 miles (4 km), and oriented 25 degrees toward it. Then, on the last flyby, LRO was reoriented by 60 degrees to catch a final glimpse of Danuri as it flew 5 miles (8 km) below.

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community@space.com.

Samantha Mathewson joined Space.com as an intern in the summer of 2016. She received a B.A. in Journalism and Environmental Science at the University of New Haven, in Connecticut. Previously, her work has been published in Nature World News. When not writing or reading about science, Samantha enjoys traveling to new places and taking photos! You can follow her on Twitter @Sam_Ashley13.

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Watch Mini Humanoid Robots Showing Off Their Football Skills

Guy Lever at Google DeepMind and his colleagues put battery-powered Robotis OP3 robots , which are about 50 centimetres tall and have 20 joints, through 240 hours of deep reinforcement learning.

This technique combines two key tenets of AI training: reinforcement learning sees agents gaining skills through trial and error, with a target of being rewarded for choosing correctly more often than choosing wrongly, while deep learning uses layers of neural networks – attempts to mimic the human brain – to analyse patterns within the data the AI is shown.

"The aim of this work isn’t to produce humanoid robots playing in the Premier League any time soon," says Aitken, "but rather to understand how we can build complex robot skills quickly, using synthetic training methodologies to build skills that can be rapidly, and more importantly robustly, transferred to real work applications."

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Study Sheds Light On The White Dwarf Star, Likely Destroyer Of Our Solar System | Space | The...

Huge gravity of these dense stars, which have burned all their own fuel, rips apart smaller planetary bodies

When asteroids, moons and planets get close to a white dwarf, the latter's huge gravity rips them into smaller and smaller pieces, which continue to collide, eventually being ground to dust.

While the researchers said Earth would probably be swallowed by our host star, the sun, before it becomes a white dwarf, the rest of our solar system, including asteroids between Mars and Jupiter, as well as moons of Jupiter, ultimately may be shredded by the sun in a white star form.

Collisions between these pieces eventually grind them into dust, which finally falls into the white dwarf, enabling researchers to determine what type of material the original planetary bodies were made from.

"While we think we are on the right path in our studies, the fate of these systems is far more complex than we could have ever imagined."

For the new research, scientists investigated changes in brightness of stars for 17 years, shedding light on how these bodies are disrupted. They focused on three different white dwarfs, which all behaved very differently.

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Study Confirms Super-Earth Really Is A Bizarre 'Eyeball' Planet

A nearby alien world is finally confirmed to have one side locked in permanent darkness and the other in endless sunshine.

It's the first compelling evidence that planets outside our Solar System can become 'tidally locked' to their host stars, with an orbital period exactly the same as its rotational one. The result of this is that one side of the exoplanet always faces the star, with no respite from the scorching heat; and the other side experiences perpetual night.

"This thing that has been theoretical now feels real," astronomer Nicolas Cowan of McGill University in Canada told Nature . "This is actually what these planets look like."

As the two bodies orbit, the gravitational force between them exerts a pull that causes each to distort and bulge towards another slightly. The distorted shapes affect their rotations in such a way that each object synchronizes with its orbit. Being smaller, our Moon's rotation has already fallen into sync with its monthly lap around our planet, though Earth's rotation is also slowing by milliseconds every century thanks to its satellite's firm tug.

Exoplanets that are close to their stars are thought to be the most likely to be affected , since they're subjected to a stronger gravitational pull. But exoplanets are pretty hard to observe directly. We can discern some of their properties indirectly, such as their size, mass, and density, but we've never actually seen most of them directly; and those that we have, we can't see in detail.

One property we can calculate using light intensity data, however, is temperature, and this is what gave the researchers their entry into determining the rotation of Kua'kua, which has an orbital period of just 11.1 hours.

Previous research has revealed that the exoplanet – orbiting its star 48 light-years away – is 1.3 times the radius and 2.25 times the mass of Earth. This is consistent with a density of 5.646 grams per centimeter cubed – just a little higher than the density of Earth , suggesting a rocky composition. Research also suggests that Kua'kua doesn't have an atmosphere , meaning that any temperature readings are directly related to its surface.

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Harvard Professor Suggests UFOs Use 'Extra Dimensions' For Travel

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Official Says Commercial Space Strategy Is Driven By Imperative To Maintain Warfighting Edge > U.S.

"It is very clear, not just in the department but across, possibly, the country and the globe in the wake of the Ukraine invasion, how essential space is to warfighting," Plumb told reporters during a meeting of the Defense Writers Group in Washington.

Defense officials consistently note the extent to which warfighters depend on space for a variety of functions, which range from position, navigation and timing to targeting and surveillance of potential threats.

Officials have also warned that U.S. competitors have rapidly developed capabilities to deny the use of space and erode America's advantage in the domain.

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Could A Self-sustaining Starship Carry Humanity To Distant Worlds?

Such a grand mission would need to overcome many enormous challenges, the first and perhaps most obvious being distance. Not including the sun, the closest known star to Earth (Proxima Centauri) is 4.24 light-years, or roughly 25 trillion miles, away. Although 4.24 light-years is a mere hop on the cosmic scale, it would take quite some time to get there with our current technology.

The Parker solar probe, launched by NASA in 2018, is the fastest-moving object ever made by humans, clocking in at 430,000 miles per hour. But even at this speed, it would take 6,617 years to reach Proxima Centauri. Or, put another way, it would take roughly 220 human generations to make the trip.

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‘Space Shuttle Columbia: The Final Flight’ Documentary: How To Watch And Stream Online For Free...

FILE- This undated file photo released by NASA shows space shuttle Columbia STS-107 crew members from left to right, front row, commander Rick Husband, mission specialist Kalpana Chawla, pilot William McCool, back row, mission specialist David Brown, mission specialist Laurel Clark, payload commander Michael Anderson and payload specialist Ilan Ramon of Israel. Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated over Texas on Feb. 1, 2003. Tune in to see "Space Shuttle Columbia: The Final Flight" a CNN documentary set to air Sunday, April 7 at 9 p.m. ET/PT.(AP Photo/NASA, File) AP

The in depth feature will focus on details never before revealed, as well as on exclusive interviews and intricate broadcast footage that examines the 2003 Space Shuttle disaster that will run throughout four episodes.

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Blue Origin To Resume Human Flights; Progress For Polaris Dawn

Welcome to Edition 6.38 of the Rocket Report! Ed Dwight was close to joining NASA's astronaut corps more than 60 years ago. With an aeronautical engineering degree and experience as an Air Force test pilot, Dwight met the qualifications to become an astronaut. He was one of 26 test pilots the Air Force recommended to NASA for the third class of astronauts in 1963, but he wasn't selected. Now, the man who would have become the first Black astronaut will finally get a chance to fly to space.

Ed Dwight named to Blue Origin's next human flight. Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos' space company, announced Thursday that 90-year-old Ed Dwight , who almost became the first Black astronaut in 1963, will be one of six people to fly to suborbital space on the company's next New Shepard flight. Dwight, a retired Air Force captain, piloted military fighter jets and graduated test pilot school, following a familiar career track as many of the early astronauts. He was on a short list of astronaut candidates the Air Force provided NASA, but the space agency didn't include him.

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SpaceX Falcon 9 To Launch Sunday Night, Producing Brevard Sonic Booms

The Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to lift off at 7:16 p.m. EDT Sunday from pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. The Falcon 9 will soar skyward on a northeasterly trajectory, a Space Launch Delta 45 nautical advisory indicates.

Following stage separation, the first-stage booster will target landing at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station — generating sonic booms that may be audible across Central Florida, depending on atmospheric conditions.

SpaceX announced Sunday's rocket will carry 11 spacecraft, including KOREA's 425Sat, HawkEye 360's Clusters 8 & 9, Tyvak International's CENTAURI-6, iQPS's QPS-SAR-7 TSUKUYOMI-II, Capella Space's Capella-14, and Tata Advanced Systems Limited's TSAT-1A.

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Asteroid Heist Of The Century: NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Mission Awarded Collier Trophy

A top-down view of the OSIRIS-REx Touch-and-Go-Sample-Acquisition-Mechanism (TAGSAM) head with the lid removed, revealing the remainder of the asteroid sample inside. Erika Blumenfeld, creative lead for the Advanced Imaging and Visualization of Astromaterials (AIVA) and Joe Aebersold, project management lead, captured this picture using manual high-resolution precision photography and a semi-automated focus stacking procedure. The result is an image that can be zoomed in on to show extreme detail of the sample. The remaining sample material includes dust and rocks up to about .4 in (one cm) in ...

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TJC Earth And Space Science Center Director Explains How Total Eclipses Differ From Partial

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Stars Orbiting Sagittarius A* Appear 'Rejuvenated' • Earth.Com

Our galaxy ‘s core is a place of immense activity. A supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), resides at its center, surrounded by a dense cluster of stars. The black hole’s intense gravitational pull accelerates nearby stars to astonishing speeds. In this crowded and chaotic environment, stellar collisions are a common occurrence.

“The region around the central black hole is dense with stars moving at extremely high speeds,” explains Sanaea C. Rose, an astrophysicist at Northwestern University who led this study. This unique environment sets the stage for frequent interactions between stars.

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