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    In a first, the Webb telescope found a planet by actually ‘seeing’ it

    For the first time ever, the James Webb Space Telescope has discovered an exoplanet by directly imaging it. The newfound world has a mass roughly similar to Saturn and orbits inside the debris disk surrounding a young star named TWA 7, researchers report June 25 in Nature.

    JWST has previously discovered more than 100 planets, mostly through the transit method, in which the telescope watches an exoplanet pass in front of its parent star, causing a brief dimming in the star’s light. Direct imaging — capturing a photo of a star-orbiting exoplanet — is a far more challenging task. More

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    Venus’ tectonics may be actively reshaping its surface

    Things may be moving on Venus’ surface.

    In 1983, researchers discovered that the planet’s surface was speckled with strange, circular landforms. These rounded mountain belts, known as coronae, have no known Earthly counterparts, and they’ve remained enigmatic for decades. But hot plumes of rock upwelling from Venus’ mantle are shaping the mysterious landforms, a new analysis suggests. If true, that mean that Venus’ surface is tectonically active, and not merely a stagnant layer, researchers report May 14 in Science Advances. More

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    Check out some of the weird rocks that have turned up on Mars

    As the Mars rover Perseverance crested the top of Witch Hazel Hill, its operators back on Earth expected amazing things. This area on the western rim of the Jezero crater, along an ancient river delta that Perseverance has been exploring since it landed in 2021, is thought to contain some of the oldest rocks on the planet’s surface. The light-toned, layered materials promise a record of a wetter time, possibly one that hosted life.

    The team did not expect what they found on March 11: a dark rock resembling a clutch of frog’s eggs. Dubbed St. Paul’s Bay, the rock looks nothing like its neighbors. Where it came from and how it formed are a mystery. More

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    Uranus emits more heat than previously thought

    Uranus emits more energy than it gets from the sun, two new studies report — a discovery that contradicts findings from the venerable Voyager spacecraft.

    When Voyager 2 sped past Uranus on January 24, 1986, the spacecraft detected no significant excess heat from the planet, making it seemingly unique among the sun’s giant worlds. However, new observations from space- and ground-based telescopes reveal that Uranus does in fact radiate more energy than sunlight provides, two research teams report in work submitted to arXiv.org in late February. More

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    Juno reveals dozens of lava lakes on Jupiter’s moon Io

    Jupiter’s moon Io, the most volcanically active body in the solar system, is littered with hundreds of erupting volcanoes. High-resolution images now reveal several dozen lava lakes, researchers report in the February Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets. These lakes are far larger than their analogs on Earth, and their structure sheds light on how magma moves beneath the surface of Io. 

    Io’s volcanism — probably present over the moon’s entire 4.6-billion-year existence — was discovered when the Voyager spacecraft flew by in 1979. The volcanic activity is caused by the intense gravitational pulls of Jupiter and nearby moons, which deform Io by tens of meters. “This squeezing is heating the body,” says Alessandro Mura, a planetary scientist at Italy’s National Institute for Astrophysics in Rome. More