Astronomers report the first radio waves seen coming from a planet outside our solar system, a faint signal that hints at auroras in another star system. The detection gives researchers a new way to study the magnetic fields of distant worlds.
A faint signal from a distant world
Magnetic fields shield planets from stellar wind and help determine whether an atmosphere survives. Until now they could only be inferred indirectly. The new observations point to a planet interacting with its star in a way that accelerates particles and produces radio emission, similar to the auroras seen around Jupiter and Earth. More detailed studies are planned to confirm the result and to search for similar targets.
Clocks, dark energy and the Higgs
In a separate advance, physicists used radioactive lutetium to build what they describe as the most accurate atomic clock ever, keeping time to 19 decimal places, precise enough to measure tiny changes in gravity. Canada's CHIME telescope produced a long-awaited measurement of dark energy from data gathered in 2019. At CERN, the ATLAS collaboration found evidence of the Higgs boson decaying into a virtual photon and a real photon, a pathway that occurs in roughly one in 10,000 decays.
Life at the limits
Biologists described a "fire amoeba" that reproduces at 145 degrees Fahrenheit and keeps moving until 147, a record for complex life. In mice, a human gut bacterium called Clostridium immunis secretes a sugar molecule that shrinks visceral fat and limits weight gain, a finding published in Cell Host & Microbe. Researchers also reported that transplanted hearts adjust their biological age to match their host, and that newly found transitional organisms are filling gaps in the story of how complex cells first appeared.