Members Can Post Anonymously On This Site
-
Similar Topics
-
By NASA
6 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
This artist’s concept shows a brown dwarf — an object larger than a planet but not massive enough to kickstart fusion in its core like a star. Brown dwarfs are hot when they form and may glow like this one, but over time they get closer in temperature to gas giant planets like Jupiter. NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/R. Proctor An unusual cosmic object is helping scientists better understand the chemistry hidden deep in Jupiter and Saturn’s atmospheres — and potentially those of exoplanets.
Why has silicon, one of the most common elements in the universe, gone largely undetected in the atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, and gas planets like them orbiting other stars? A new study using observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope sheds light on this question by focusing on a peculiar object that astronomers discovered by chance in 2020 and called “The Accident.”
The results were published on Sept. 4 in the journal Nature.
As shown in this graphic, brown dwarfs can be far more massive than even large gas planets like Jupiter and Saturn. However, they tend to lack the mass that kickstarts nuclear fusion in the cores of stars, causing them to shine. NASA/JPL-Caltech The Accident is a brown dwarf, a ball of gas that’s not quite a planet and not quite a star. Even among its already hard-to-classify peers, The Accident has a perplexing mix of physical features, some of which have been previously seen in only young brown dwarfs and others seen only in ancient ones. Because of those features, it slipped past typical detection methods before being discovered five years ago by a citizen scientist participating in Backyard Worlds: Planet 9. The program lets people around the globe look for new discoveries in data from NASA’s now-retired NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer), which was managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
The brown dwarf nicknamed “The Accident” can be seen moving in the bottom left corner of this video, which shows data from NASA’s now-retired NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer), launched in 2009 with the moniker WISE. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Dan Caselden The Accident is so faint and odd that researchers needed NASA’s most powerful space observatory, Webb, to study its atmosphere. Among several surprises, they found evidence of a molecule they couldn’t initially identify. It turned out to be a simple silicon molecule called silane (SiH4). Researchers have long expected — but been unable — to find silane not only in our solar system’s gas giants, but also in the thousands of atmospheres belonging to brown dwarfs and to the gas giants orbiting other stars. The Accident is the first such object where this molecule has been identified.
Scientists are fairly confident that silicon exists in Jupiter and Saturn’s atmospheres but that it is hidden. Bound to oxygen, silicon forms oxides such as quartz that can seed clouds on hot gas giants, bearing a resemblance to dust storms on Earth. On cooler gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn, these types of clouds would sink far beneath lighter layers of water vapor and ammonia clouds, until any silicon-containing molecules are deep in the atmosphere, invisible even to the spacecraft that have studied those two planets up close.
Some researchers have also posited that lighter molecules of silicon, like silane, should be found higher up in these atmospheric layers, left behind like traces of flour on a baker’s table. That such molecules haven’t appeared anywhere except in a single, peculiar brown dwarf suggests something about the chemistry occurring in these environments.
“Sometimes it’s the extreme objects that help us understand what’s happening in the average ones,” said Faherty, a researcher at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and lead author on the new study.
Happy accident
Located about 50 light-years from Earth, The Accident likely formed 10 billion to 12 billion years ago, making it one of the oldest brown dwarfs ever discovered. The universe is about 14 billion years old, and at the time that The Accident developed, the cosmos contained mostly hydrogen and helium, with trace amounts of other elements, including silicon. Over eons, elements like carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen forged in the cores of stars, so planets and stars that formed more recently possess more of those elements.
Webb’s observations of The Accident confirm that silane can form in brown dwarf and planetary atmospheres. The fact that silane seems to be missing in other brown dwarfs and gas giant planets suggests that when oxygen is available, it bonds with silicon at such a high rate and so easily, virtually no silicon is left over to bond with hydrogen and form silane.
So why is silane in The Accident? The study authors surmise it is because far less oxygen was present in the universe when the ancient brown dwarf formed, resulting in less oxygen in its atmosphere to gobble up all the silicon. The available silicon would have bonded with hydrogen instead, resulting in silane.
“We weren’t looking to solve a mystery about Jupiter and Saturn with these observations,” said JPL’s Peter Eisenhardt, project scientist for the WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) mission, which was later repurposed as NEOWISE. “A brown dwarf is a ball of gas like a star, but without an internal fusion reactor, it gets cooler and cooler, with an atmosphere like that of gas giant planets. We wanted to see why this brown dwarf is so odd, but we weren’t expecting silane. The universe continues to surprise us.”
Brown dwarfs are often easier to study than gas giant exoplanets because the light from a faraway planet is typically drowned out by the star it orbits, while brown dwarfs generally fly solo. And the lessons learned from these objects extend to all kinds of planets, including ones outside our solar system that might feature potential signs of habitability.
“To be clear, we’re not finding life on brown dwarfs,” said Faherty. “But at a high level, by studying all of this variety and complexity in planetary atmospheres, we’re setting up the scientists who are one day going to have to do this kind of chemical analysis for rocky, potentially Earth-like planets. It might not specifically involve silicon, but they’re going to get data that is complicated and confusing and doesn’t fit their models, just like we are. They’ll have to parse all those complexities if they want to answer those big questions.”
More about WISE, Webb
A division of Caltech, JPL managed and operated WISE for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. The mission was selected competitively under NASA’s Explorers Program managed by the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The NEOWISE mission was a project of JPL and the University of Arizona in Tucson, supported by NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office.
For more information about WISE, go to:
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/main/index.html
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory, and an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
To learn more about Webb, visit:
https://science.nasa.gov/webb
News Media Contacts
Calla Cofield
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
626-808-2469
calla.e.cofield@jpl.nasa.gov
Christine Pulliam
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
cpulliam@stsci.edi
2025-113
Share
Details
Last Updated Sep 09, 2025 Related Terms
James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Brown Dwarfs Exoplanets The Search for Life Explore More
6 min read NASA Webb Looks at Earth-Sized, Habitable-Zone Exoplanet TRAPPIST-1 e
Scientists are in the midst of observing the exoplanet TRAPPIST-1 e with NASA’s James Webb…
Article 1 day ago 5 min read Glittering Glimpse of Star Birth From NASA’s Webb Telescope
This is a sparkling scene of star birth captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.…
Article 5 days ago 5 min read Astronomers Map Stellar ‘Polka Dots’ Using NASA’s TESS, Kepler
Scientists have devised a new method for mapping the spottiness of distant stars by using…
Article 2 weeks ago Keep Exploring Discover Related Topics
Missions
Humans in Space
Climate Change
Solar System
View the full article
-
By NASA
Explore This Section Science Uncategorized NASA eClips STEM Student… Overview Learning Resources Science Activation Teams SME Map Opportunities More Science Activation Stories Citizen Science 3 min read
NASA eClips STEM Student Ambassadors Light Up CNU’s 2025 STEM Community Day
More than 2,000 curious visitors from Newport News and the surrounding Hampton Roads region of Virginia flocked to Christopher Newport University (CNU) on May 31, 2025 for their annual STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, & Mathematics) Community Day, and the NASA eClips team from the National Institute of Aerospace’s Center for Integrative STEM Education (NIA-CISE) made sure every one of them left with their eyes—and imaginations—fixed on the Sun.
At the heart of the NASA eClips exhibit were NIA’s STEM Student Ambassadors—a team of carefully selected high school students from the Tidewater region of Virginia who underwent extensive training with NASA eClips educators during the summer of 2024. These bright, enthusiastic young leaders are passionate about communicating about and advocating for STEM. The STEM Student Ambassador program is made possible through a Coastal Virginia STEM Hub grant from the Virginia General Assembly and is already having an impact.
Throughout the day, the Ambassadors engaged learners of all ages with two creative, hands-on experiences that connected STEM and the arts:
Chalk Corona – Using black construction paper and vibrant chalk, participants recreated the Sun’s corona—the super-hot, gaseous “crown” that’s visible during a total solar eclipse. While they shaded and smudged, the Ambassadors explained why the corona is so important to solar research and handed out certified solar viewers for safe Sun-watching back home. Pastel Auroras – Visitors also discovered how solar wind, storms, and coronal mass ejections (aka Sun “sneezes”) spark Earth’s dazzling auroras. Guided by the Ambassadors, budding artists layered pastels to capture swirling curtains of light, tying recent mid-Atlantic aurora sightings to real-time space weather. Throughout the day, the Ambassadors’ energy was contagious, turning complex heliophysics into hands-on fun and opening eyes to the opportunities and careers that await in STEM. Judging by the smiles—and the dusting of chalk and pastels—NASA eClips’ presence was, quite literally, the “crowning” touch on an unforgettable community celebration of STEM.
The NASA eClips project provides educators with standards-based videos, activities, and lessons to increase STEM literacy through the lens of NASA. It is supported by NASA under cooperative agreement award number NNX16AB91A and is part of NASA’s Science Activation Portfolio. Learn more about how Science Activation connects NASA science experts, real content, and experiences with community leaders to do science in ways that activate minds and promote deeper understanding of our world and beyond: https://science.nasa.gov/learn
Two STEM Student Ambassadors engage a young girl while she creates her own Pastel Aurora artwork. Share
Details
Last Updated Jul 22, 2025 Editor NASA Science Editorial Team Related Terms
Opportunities For Students to Get Involved Science Activation The Sun Explore More
2 min read GLOBE-Trotting Science Lands in Chesapeake with NASA eClips
Article
1 day ago
6 min read NASA’s TRACERS Studies Explosive Process in Earth’s Magnetic Shield
Article
6 days ago
3 min read NASA Citizen Science and Your Career: Stories of Exoplanet Watch Volunteers
Doing NASA Science brings many rewards. But can taking part in NASA citizen science help…
Article
6 days ago
Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From NASA
James Webb Space Telescope
Webb is the premier observatory of the next decade, serving thousands of astronomers worldwide. It studies every phase in the…
Perseverance Rover
This rover and its aerial sidekick were assigned to study the geology of Mars and seek signs of ancient microbial…
Parker Solar Probe
On a mission to “touch the Sun,” NASA’s Parker Solar Probe became the first spacecraft to fly through the corona…
Juno
NASA’s Juno spacecraft entered orbit around Jupiter in 2016, the first explorer to peer below the planet’s dense clouds to…
View the full article
-
By USH
An Alberta couple captured something extraordinary on camera during the evening of July 2, 2025. Just after a powerful lightning strike near their home in Rich Valley, Alberta, they saw what they described as a ball of fire hovering roughly 20 feet above the ground.
“It just appeared out of nowhere,” one of them recalled. “A big, glowing sphere hanging in the air — and then, just like that, it vanished.”
The main stream media are trying to blame this on the weather speculating the glowing orb could be ball lightning, an elusive and still-unexplained weather phenomenon reported for centuries. Often described as floating spheres of light, ball lightning has defied scientific consensus.
But could it be more than just an atmospheric anomaly?
A similar sighting occurred in 2016 in Russia’s Novosibirsk Region, where a massive, luminous sphere was seen drifting silently across a field before vanishing into nearby woods. That object, see image below, too, appeared after intense lightning activity and left experts just as baffled.
Is this truly a rare natural phenomenon? Or are we witnessing something beyond the scope of conventional science, a window into technology or intelligence we don’t yet understand?
View the full article
-
By USH
On the night of Friday, May 16, something extraordinary lit up the skies over the American Southwest. A brilliant, fast-moving streak of light that captivated onlookers from Arizona to Colorado.
Witnesses in towns such as Safford, Fountain Hills, and Payson, as well as regions of New Mexico and Colorado, were left asking the same question: What exactly did we just see?
Speculation spread rapidly. Some suggested a Chinese rocket launch earlier that day could be responsible, possibly placing satellites into orbit. Others floated more exotic theories: perhaps STEVE, a rare atmospheric light phenomenon similar to the aurora borealis, or even a “light pillar,” formed when light reflects off high-altitude ice crystals.
Attempts to reach officials at Luke Air Force Base near Phoenix, Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in southern Arizona, and Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque have so far yielded no response.
What if it wasn’t a rocket plume from a Chinese launch at all? What if something entirely different passed near our planet, like a comet or UFO, or perhaps it was a test of a space-based weapon or a directed-energy system?
Whatever it may have been, it remains a strange phenomenon, leaving many to wonder what truly streaked across the sky.
View the full article
-
By NASA
6 min read
NASA Observes First Visible-light Auroras at Mars
On March 15, 2024, near the peak of the current solar cycle, the Sun produced a solar flare and an accompanying coronal mass ejection (CME), a massive explosion of gas and magnetic energy that carries with it large amounts of solar energetic particles. This solar activity led to stunning auroras across the solar system, including at Mars, where NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover made history by detecting them for the first time from the surface of another planet.
The first visible-light image of green aurora on Mars (left), taken by the Mastcam-Z instrument on NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover. On the right is a comparison image of the night sky of Mars without aurora but featuring the Martian moon Deimos. The moonlit Martian night sky, lit up mostly by Mars’ nearer and larger moon Phobos (outside the frame) has a reddish-brown hue due to the dust in the atmosphere, so when green auroral light is added, the sky takes on a green-yellow tone, as seen in the left image. NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS/SSI “This exciting discovery opens up new possibilities for auroral research and confirms that auroras could be visible to future astronauts on Mars’ surface.” said Elise Knutsen, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oslo in Norway and lead author of the Science Advances study, which reported the detection.
Picking the right aurora
On Earth, auroras form when solar particles interact with the global magnetic field, funneling them to the poles where they collide with atmospheric gases and emit light. The most common color, green, is caused by excited oxygen atoms emitting light at a wavelength of 557.7 nanometers. For years, scientists have theorized that green light auroras could also exist on Mars but suggested they would be much fainter and harder to capture than the green auroras we see on Earth.
Due to the Red Planet’s lack of a global magnetic field, Mars has different types of auroras than those we have on Earth. One of these is solar energetic particle (SEP) auroras, which NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) mission discovered in 2014. These occur when super-energetic particles from the Sun hit the Martian atmosphere, causing a reaction that makes the atmosphere glow across the whole night sky.
While MAVEN had observed SEP auroras in ultraviolet light from orbit, this phenomenon had never been observed in visible light from the ground. Since SEPs typically occur during solar storms, which increase during solar maximum, Knutsen and her team set their sights on capturing visible images and spectra of SEP aurora from Mars’ surface at the peak of the Sun’s current solar cycle.
Coordinating the picture-perfect moment
Through modeling, Knutsen and her team determined the optimal angle for the Perseverance rover’s SuperCam spectrometer and Mastcam-Z camera to successfully observe the SEP aurora in visible light. With this observation strategy in place, it all came down to the timing and understanding of CMEs.
“The trick was to pick a good CME, one that would accelerate and inject many charged particles into Mars’ atmosphere,” said Knutsen.
That is where the teams at NASA’s Moon to Mars (M2M) Space Weather Analysis Office and the Community Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC), both located at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, came in. The M2M team provides real-time analysis of solar eruptions to the CCMC for initiating simulations of CMEs to determine if they might impact current NASA missions. When the simulations suggest potential impacts, the team sends out an alert.
At the University of California, Berkeley, space physicist Christina Lee received an alert from the M2M office about the March 15, 2024, CME. Lee, a member of the MAVEN mission team who serves as the space weather lead, determined there was a notable solar storm heading toward the Red Planet,which could arrive in a few days. She immediately issued the Mars Space Weather Alert Notification to currently operating Mars missions.
“This allows the science teams of Perseverance and MAVEN to anticipate impacts of interplanetary CMEs and the associated SEPs,” said Lee.
“When we saw the strength of this one,” Knutsen said, “we estimated it could trigger aurora bright enough for our instruments to detect.”
A few days later, the CME impacted Mars, providing a lightshow for the rover to capture, showing the aurora to be nearly uniform across the sky at an emission wavelength of exactly 557.7 nm. To confirm the presence of SEPs during the aurora observation, the team looked to MAVEN’s SEP instrument, which was additionally corroborated by data from ESA’s (European Space Agency) Mars Express mission. Data from both missions confirmed that the rover team had managed to successfully catch a glimpse of the phenomenon in the very narrow time window available.
“This was a fantastic example of cross-mission coordination. We all worked together quickly to facilitate this observation and are thrilled to have finally gotten a sneak peek of what astronauts will be able to see there some day,” said Shannon Curry, MAVEN principal investigator and research scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder).
The future of aurora on Mars
By coordinating the Perseverance observations with measurements from MAVEN’s SEP instrument, the teams could help each other determine that the observed 557.7 nm emission came from solar energetic particles. Since this is the same emission line as the green aurora on Earth, it is likely that future Martian astronauts would be able to see this type of aurora.
“Perseverance’s observations of the visible-light aurora confirm a new way to study these phenomena that’s complementary to what we can observe with our Mars orbiters,” said Katie Stack Morgan, acting project scientist for Perseverance at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “A better understanding of auroras and the conditions around Mars that lead to their formation are especially important as we prepare to send human explorers there safely.”
On September 21, 2014, NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) spacecraft entered orbit around Mars. The mission has produced a wealth of data about how Mars’ atmosphere responds to the Sun and solar wind NASA/JPL-Caltech More About Perseverance and MAVEN
The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program portfolio and NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed for the agency by Caltech, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.
The MAVEN mission, also part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program portfolio, is led by LASP at CU Boulder. It’s managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and was built and operated by Lockheed Martin Space, with navigation and network support from NASA’s JPL.
—
By Willow Reed
Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP), University of Colorado Boulder
Media Contact:
Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov
Nancy N. Jones
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
DC Agle
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-9011
agle@jpl.nasa.gov
Share
Details
Last Updated May 14, 2025 Related Terms
Mars Goddard Space Flight Center MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) View the full article
-
-
Check out these Videos
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.