Who knew that magnetic fields could be so useful? Astronomers are able to use magnetic fields to map our environment within the Milky Way using a technique called Faraday rotation.

It works like this. There’s a bunch of dust—literal dust grains—floating within the galaxy.

Well, I say there’s a lot of dust, but it’s at very, very low densities. Thankfully, the volumes within interstellar space are so vast that the total amount of dust can really add up. And all these little dust grains have little magnetic fields associated with them, because all the grains are made of electric charges and they’re spinning around themselves.

Though they don’t orbit around our sun, sub-Neptunes are the most common type of exoplanet, or planet outside our solar system, that have been observed in our galaxy. These small, gassy planets are shrouded in mystery…and often, a lot of haze. Now, by observing exoplanet TOI-421 b, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is helping scientists understand sub-Neptunes in a way that was not possible prior to the telescope’s launch.

“I had been waiting my entire career for Webb so that we could meaningfully characterize the atmospheres of these smaller planets,” said principal investigator Eliza Kempton of the University of Maryland, College Park. “By studying their atmospheres, we’re getting a better understanding of how sub-Neptunes formed and evolved, and part of that is understanding why they don’t exist in our solar system.”

The findings are published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

What can heat distribution within galaxy clusters, which often consist of hundreds to thousands of galaxies, teach astronomers about their formation and ev | Space

The U.S. House space committee moved a lunar time bill to a full House vote.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been giving us a fabulous new view on the Universe since its launch.

This new image of the protostar HH30 is in amazing new detail thanks to the JWST. It was first discovered using the Hubble Space Telescope, but this Herbig-Haro object, which is a dark molecular cloud, is a perfect object for JWST.

The image shows the protoplanetary disk seen edge on, with a conical outflow of gas and dust, with a narrow jet blasting out into space.