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11 stories from Planck Standard. Latest: September 2, 2026.
The planet's north pole has worn a hexagon for four decades. The new southern decagon is still strengthening — and two amateur astronomers saw the first hints of it.
Using a ground-based telescope in Chile, scientists spotted helium streaming off the exoplanet LHS 1140 b, the first time an atmosphere has been confirmed around a rocky world in the life-friendly zone of another star.
Astronomers detected sharply different conditions at the dawn and dusk edges of an ultra-hot gas giant, a feat made possible only by the space telescope’s sensitivity.
On the scorching exoplanet WASP-94A b, the James Webb Space Telescope found thick clouds of vaporized rock at dawn that vanish by sunset — a finding that may upend a decade of exoplanet measurements.
Scientists discovered that the planet's northern lights drive powerful atmospheric winds that create electrical currents, solving a decades-old puzzle.
The giant exoplanet WASP-94A b has a bizarre daily weather cycle where mineral clouds appear every morning and disappear by evening, giving scientists unprecedented insights into alien atmospheres.
TOI-5205 b — a Jupiter-sized world orbiting a tiny red dwarf — has an atmosphere poorer in heavy elements than even its own star, with its bulk interior locking away 100 times more metals than reach the observable atmosphere.
Webb's spectroscopic observations of PSR J2322-2650b revealed helium mixed with carbon molecules including C2 and C3 — the same clusters that form diamond precursors — in an atmosphere unlike anything previously observed.
An ancient super-Earth so hot its surface is molten rock turned out to be 1,700°F cooler than expected — evidence of a thick volatile-rich atmosphere defying everything scientists thought they knew about planet evolution.
TOI-561 b was expected to be a bare, airless rock baked by its star — but temperature measurements reveal it is cooler than it should be, pointing to an atmosphere that may be continuously replenished by volcanic outgassing on the 10-billion-year-old world.
A University of Arizona team led by Sukrit Ranjan observed faint methane signatures across four transits of TRAPPIST-1e using Webb's Near-Infrared Spectrograph — results that, if confirmed, would mark the first-ever detection of an atmosphere on a potentially habitable world beyond our solar system.