How Earth and the Solar System were formed, is an age-old question of humankind. By studying the present state of our planet, scientists were able to trace back our planetary history to the very beginning. Now we know that Earth formed from the dust which encircled the newborn Sun 4.5 billion years ago.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope observed the exoplanet WASP-80 b as it passed in front of and behind its host star, revealing spectra indicative of an atmosphere containing methane gas and water vapor. While water vapor has been detected in over a dozen planets to date, until recently methane – a molecule found in abundance in the atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune within our solar system – has remained elusive in the atmospheres of transiting exoplanets when studied with space-based spectroscopy. Taylor Bell from the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute (BAERI), working at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, and Luis Welbanks from Arizona State University tell us more about the significance of discovering methane in exoplanet atmospheres and discuss how Webb observations facilitated the identification of this long-sought-after molecule. These findings were recently published in the scientific journal Nature. Vivien Parmentier, researcher at Côte d'Azur Observatory, participated in the analysis and interpretation of the data. Now that this first overview of the data has been published, he and phd Nishil Mehta at Côte d'Azur Observatory will study the interaction between chemistry and atmospheric circulation using complex three-dimensional models.
On Tuesday 10 October 2023, an intermediate version of the Gaia data will be published between DR3 (June 2022) and DR4 (end 2025). This has kept the researchers and engineers in the Gaia team in Nice busy! To explain the properties and main results of this data, five research articles will be published at the same time (see link below). For three of them, researchers from the Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur were among the main authors. They cover a wide range of subjects, from the solar system to distant quasars.
The study, led by Dr. Siemen Burssens of KU Leuven, Belgium and published in Nature Astronomy, applied the technique of asteroseismology to study the variability of a newly discovered pulsating star known as HD 192575.