Quantcore is a spin-out from the University of Glasgow and is based at the university’s Advanced Research Centre.
Quantcore builds the superconducting processors, resonators and sensors used in quantum computers and certain sensing systems. The firm uses niobium-based components, which can operate at higher temperatures than materials currently used in quantum computers. The firm recently received £2.5m in seed funding from several backers.
The qBIG award, now in its fourth year, is sponsored by the UK-based venture capital firm Quantum Exponential and includes a £10,000 cash prize as well as mentoring from Quantum Exponential and business support from the IOP. The award was presented yesterday in London at the Economist Commercialising Quantum 2026 event.
Accepting the prize on behalf of the company, Quantcore chief executive officer Jack Brennan says he is “delighted” to win the award.
“The previous winners are a great example of up-and-coming quantum companies, and it’s a privilege to be part of that list,” he says. “A huge thanks to the qBIG group for choosing Quantcore, and a huge thanks to my fantastic team for working so hard to build the company.”
Two runners up were commended by the IOP. One is Mater-AI, which develops thermoelectric materials for energy conversion and cooling. The other is Skydiamond, which produces lab-grown diamonds that can be used in quantum computing as a material for creating qubits.
“The UK quantum industry is going from strength to strength – and is becoming a major growth engine,” says Louis Barson, IOP’s director of science, business & education. “The qBIG prize is all about celebrating the strong pipeline of new physics-powered quantum innovators like Quantcore coming through – and giving them a platform to help accelerate that growth.”
Photos of research facilities in the former Soviet Union and its satellite nations might not seem the most promising subject matter for a coffee-table book. But French photographer Eric Lusito has done just that with Soviet Scientific Institutes, which contains more than 150 pictures from his travels across the former Soviet bloc. Unable to travel to Russia, Azerbaijan and Belarus, images from what Lusito calls the “authoritarian remnants” of the Soviet Union are absent. However, his photos across eight other countries depict the downfall of many once vibrant labs, from a rusty cosmic-ray telescope in Armenia to a defunct nuclear reactor in Georgia. The grim reality stands in contrast to the colourful 1970s mosaics in a Ukrainian cybernetics institute that seemed to herald a utopian future. Matin Durrani
Meet the Neighbours: Life on Mars and How to Find It By Steven A Benner
In 1976 Viking 1 achieved two remarkable things: it performed the first successful landing on Mars and it sent home evidence for life on the red planet. Yet shortly after, Mars was again declared dead and for decades any scientist who suggested otherwise was ostracized. What happened? This is the story that astrobiochemist Steven Benner traces in his book Meet the Neighbours. He clearly explains the science and history, but most of all the machinations and philosophy of how science works. The work is a little polemical and very US-focused, but also extremely enlightening. Kate Gardner
2026 Allen Lane
Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact By Keith Cooper
Fans of the British TV show Doctor Who might recall the 10th Doctor visiting the stunning and terrifying planet “Midnight” – a diamond-encrusted place, bathed in extreme radiation, replete with a “sapphire waterfall”. While some aspects of this fictional world will remain in the realms of fantasy, as of 2011 astronomers believe that the supermassive exoplanet 55 Cancri Ae orbits so close to its parent star that it is indeed bathed in extreme radiation. And it is mainly made up of carbon, in the form of diamond and graphite. This is a perfect example of the symbiotic relationship that science fiction and fact can have with one another, as Keith Cooper outlines in his fascinating book Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact. From the many “strange new worlds” of Star Trek to the Dyson spheres of Ringworld and beyond, this book is a must for “hard sci-fi” aficionados and astronomers alike. Tushna Commissariat
An Anthology of Stargazing: a Collection of Constellations and Other Wonders in the Sky By Abigail Beall, illustrated by Angela Rizza and Dilbag Singh
While the target audience of children will likely be immediately attracted to its beautiful cover and gold-edged pages, what makes An Anthology of Stargazing special is journalist Abigail Beall’s clear explanations alongside the artistic talents of Angela Rizza and Dilbag Singh. Despite covering everything from the history of stargazing and careers in the field, to the life of a star and the celestial sphere, Beall manages to tread that fine line of being informative while not losing the attention of young readers. There is a page devoted to each of the 88 recognized constellations, providing details on when and where you can see them, and a diagram of their configurations. These are accompanied by illustrations of the animals, people and objects astronomers saw in the patterns, and snippets of their myths and legends, helping the next generation of stargazers see the stories in the sky. Sarah Tesh
2025 DK Children
Hum
By Helen Phillips
A mother loses her job to AI, so to make some cash she agrees to have her appearance altered to fool face-recognition technology. With this money she takes her family on a trip of a lifetime to the Botanical Garden – the only place to glimpse nature in their arid, dirty city. A treat only for the well-off, the children are amazed to see trees, swim in waterfalls and encounter wildlife. Hum by Helen Phillips has just won the Climate Fiction Prize 2026 for its view of a harsh world where nature is something you have to pay to see – but perhaps its real power is in Phillips’ portrayal of the future of day-to-day technology. This fabulous book will leave you with a lot to think about. It will likely make you put down your phone, too. Kyla Rushman
Spain’s transition to a low‑carbon economy requires expanding renewable technologies such as wind, solar, and electric vehicles. These technologies depend on specific materials, and demand for materials, such as cobalt, lithium, and nickel, already represents a significant share of Spain’s total use.
The researchers analysed how much materials Spain would need up to 2050 under different decarbonisation pathways. They enhanced the MEDEAS‑Spain model by adding sector‑specific material intensities, improving the tracking of material stocks and flows, and expanding coverage to more than forty materials, a comprehensive assessment of the material requirements of decarbonisation.
They evaluated three scenarios: Spain’s official energy and climate plan (PNIEC‑LTDS), a scenario where economic demand stops growing after 2025 (CappedEcon), and a Sufficiency scenario where consumption is reduced in a sectorally explicit manner to levels consistent with decent living standards.
While low-carbon technologies require large quantities of materials, most material demand comes from wider (unrelated to decarbonisation) economic activities. As a result, and as shown in the figure below, the PNIEC-LTDS, which features a high level of economic growth, increases the material footprint by 51% between 2025 and 2050. In contrast, the Sufficiency scenario reduces the material footprint by over 50% while reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 93%.
The study concludes that a rapid expansion of renewable energy is only environmentally sustainable if overall material and energy demand is reduced. Green‑growth pathways sharply increase material use, whereas sufficiency‑based post‑growth approaches enable deep decarbonisation with far lower resource pressure. Ultimately, consumption levels determine the sustainability of the transition.
Light normally spreads out and escapes from optical devices, so it is not obvious how photons can ever behave like the atoms in a Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC). Yet experiments have shown that, under the right conditions, photons trapped in microscopic semiconductor cavities can collect into a single quantum state, even at room temperature. What has been missing is a clear explanation of how this happens in real semiconductor materials.
New research provides that explanation. The authors develop a detailed theory that tracks how photons interact with the electrons and holes inside a semiconductor while the system is continuously pumped with energy. Unlike earlier models that treated the semiconductor as a simple thermal background, this theory follows how all parts of the system evolve together, including particle collisions, energy losses and heat exchange with the surrounding material.
The key finding is that collisions between charge carriers (Coulomb scattering) allow the photons to share energy and effectively cool down. At high particle densities, this process is strong enough to make photons behave as if they were in thermal equilibrium, enabling them to form a condensate. This mechanism is very different from that in dye‑based photon condensates, where vibrations of molecules do most of the thermalising.
The theory also predicts several distinct regimes: ordinary thermal light, single‑mode and multimode photon condensation, and standard laser behaviour. Importantly, experiments can move between these regimes by adjusting parameters such as the cavity design and the pumping strength.
By explaining how quantum states of light can emerge in compact, room‑temperature semiconductor devices, this work could enable new quantum photonic technologies, including advanced light sources for communications, sensing and information processing.
Physics ideas often travel far from their origins, but few make the leap from the Standard Model of particle physics to a circuit board. A surprising new experiment shows that custodial symmetry, best known for stabilising fundamental particle masses, can also emerge in an entirely classical electrical system built from off‑the‑shelf components.
Symmetry plays a central role across physics. As formalised by Noether’s theorem, every continuous symmetry is linked to a conserved quantity. This principle underpins everything from energy conservation to modern field theory. In particle physics, custodial symmetry acts as a safeguard, suppressing large corrections and keeping key quantities stable even when other symmetries are broken. A classical analogue of this idea was theoretically proposed several years ago, but its experimental realisation had remained elusive until now.
A team of researchers from China have now brought this concept to the laboratory using a topolectrical circuit — an electrical analogue of a topological lattice. Their system is based on the Su–Schrieffer–Heeger (SSH) model, a one‑dimensional chain known for hosting edge states that remain pinned to a boundary as long as a certain symmetry is present. The researchers deliberately disrupted that symmetry by introducing memristors: circuit elements whose resistance changes depending on how they have been used in the past.
Surprisingly, the edge states do not simply vanish. Instead, the team finds that a weaker form of protection remains. By measuring how the circuit’s behaviour changes, they identified a correction that shrinks smoothly as the memristive effect is reduced. This closely mirrors how custodial symmetry suppresses mass‑like corrections in quantum field theory.
The novel work shows how tabletop circuits can serve as accessible testbeds for ideas drawn from fundamental physics, opening new ways to explore symmetry, topology and memory using electronics rather than particles.
The trap lobes of the Venus flytrap – a carnivorous plant – snap shut by the rapid softening of their outer walls. This discovery by researchers in France is at odds with previous hypotheses that the mechanism involves water transport through the lobes.
The Venus flytrap is native to temperate and subtropical wetlands in the eastern US. These habitats are very poor in nutrients, so the plants capture insects and spiders to obtain nitrogen. “[Charles Darwin] was completely amazed by the motion, and he thought that if the plant was moving that fast it was because the plant had muscle,“ says biophysicist Yoël Forterre of Aix-Marseille University. “He thought, ‘OK, if the plant has muscle then it must also have nerves’.” Darwin asked his colleagues, who had recently discovered electrophysiological signals in animals like frogs, to measure the plants, and was proved partially correct: ionic signalling in plant cells was first detected in the Venus flytrap. Nonetheless, plants have no muscles or nerves.
In 2005, Forterre and colleagues in the UK and US discovered that the trap’s rapid closure is amplified by a “snap-buckling instability”. In the trap’s open state, the two lobes adopt buckled, convex shapes that resist closure. These store elastic energy until a potential barrier is overcome. They then release the energy, suddenly becoming concave and snapping the trap shut in around 0.2 s. The underlying driving force has remained mysterious, however, and the instability makes measurement difficult.
“Many biological and chemical tools are kind of invasive and trigger the plant,” explains Forterre; “It’s not easy to probe the state of the plant before, after and most importantly during the motion.”
Poroelastic limit
One hypothesis is that osmosis causes water to diffuse from one side of the lobe to the other, causing bending. This is the most common driver of motion in plants, but its speed limit can be calculated theoretically from the permeability and elasticity of the host material. To work out whether or not the intrinsic speed of the trap exceeded this “poroelastic limit”, the researchers had to remove the amplificatory effect of the snap-buckling instability.
They devised two ways to do this. First, they cut the trap in several places, allowing it to open and close without storing elastic energy. Second, they clamped traps open between two fixed walls, one equipped with a force sensor. In both cases, they found that the closure timescale – inferred in the case of the trap that did not actually close – was around 4 s. Though much longer than in a trap with a snap-buckling instability, this time would have required water to cross the lobes more than an order of magnitude faster than the porolastic limit. This suggested osmosis could not be responsible.
Another popular hypothesis, first advanced in 1981, is that enlargement and softening of the outer walls drives the lobes into the concave shape. The researchers triggered the trap and probed the pressure of the outer surface with a nano-indenter, confirming that it did indeed decrease. However, this did not affirmatively prove that the material had become more flexible, because an osmotic pressure drop would also cause softening.
Forterre and colleagues used dental impression paste to make moulds of the topography of the cell walls before and after the trap was triggered. “If a balloon becomes softer because you have decreased the pressure, that means it has deflated,” explains Forterre; “If you keep the pressure inside the balloon constant but make the material softer, it will inflate.” The researchers confirmed using microscopy that the cells bulged more after the trap was triggered, showing that the driving force was cell-wall softening, not water movement.
Biologist Anja Geitmann of McGill University in Canada describes the new work as “paradigm changing”. “Usually we always talk about changes in turgor pressure that induce movement,” she says; “Here they show that it’s not a change in turgor pressure but a very rapid change in the mechanics of the primary cell wall. That’s completely new: I know of no other system where this happens on this kind of timescale, and they prove it in very smart and clever ways.”
Plant biologist Daniel Cosgrove of Pennsylvania State University in the US, whose group discovered the proteins that allow cell walls to expand and soften, agrees that the research proves conclusively that osmosis is not the cause of the trap’s closure. “What will complete the story is when there’s a paper out explaining the molecular mechanism of how that cell wall gets softened or loosened in a couple of seconds,” he says.
Experimental setup Neutron dose measurement points within the treatment room, showing gantry angles, measurement lines (φ) and distances from the isocentre. (Courtesy: Phys. Med. Biol. 10.1088/1361-6560/ae72e7)
Proton therapy plays an increasingly important role in cancer treatments, targeting tumours with high precision while sparing nearby healthy tissues. Proton irradiation can, however, also produce secondary neutrons due to nuclear interactions of the therapeutic beam. In modern pencil-beam scanning proton therapy, neutrons generated inside the patient are the main source of out-of-field dose – unwanted radiation that could potentially contribute to secondary cancer risks.
A research team headed up at Clínica Universidad de Navarra in Spain has experimentally characterized the neutron field in a proton therapy treatment room using a range of different detectors. They used their findings to create a practical Python-based calculation tool to estimate neutron dose for arbitrary irradiations.
“The tool provides a fast first-order estimate of neutron doses anywhere in the treatment room using information from the treatment plan,” explains medical physicist Verónica Morán. “It could support radiation protection studies, workplace dose assessments, research projects, and the evaluation of neutron exposure in situations where direct measurements are not available.”
Neutron field characterization
For their study, reported in Physics in Medicine & Biology, Morán and colleagues employed a Hitachi PROBEAT-CR proton therapy system with pencil-beam scanning. They measured neutron dose using a range of devices, including two ambient detectors and four types of personal dosimeter: thermoluminescent dosimeters (TLDs); track-etch detectors; bubble detectors (BDs); and electronic personal dosimeters (EPDs).
Using up to 21 measurement points within the treatment room, the team examined the dependence of out-of-field neutron dose on various beam and room parameters, including gantry angle, field size, proton energy and distance to isocentre.
At each measurement point, they assessed the neutron ambient dose equivalent, which is used to characterize the radiation field at a specific location, plus the personal dose equivalent, which estimates the dose that a person may receive while occupying that location. The ambient detectors performed the best, working as expected in a synchrotron-based facility, while the personal dosimeters exhibited clear variations in response.
To determine whether neutron doses measured on one side of the treatment room can predict doses at equivalent locations on the opposite side, the team investigated room symmetry. Measurements with the ambient detectors indicated that the treatment room was symmetric for the 270°–90° gantry pair, while for the 0°–180° pair, doses at 0° were on average 8% lower than at 180°.
Corresponding author Medical physicist Verónica Morán. (Courtesy: Clínica Universidad de Navarra)
“We found that the room was largely symmetric for certain gantry orientations,” notes Morán. “This reduces the number of measurements needed and helps extend the applicability of the dose calculation model.”
The measurements also showed that neutron doses created by a single spot field and a 10×10 cm field were similar (and can be regarded as interchangeable). The 20×20 and 30×30 cm fields differed by up to 22% relative to the single spot. Neutron dose dependence on proton energy followed the expected power law, with best fits for the ambient detectors, followed by the BDs and TLDs.
The researchers also delivered a clinical proton treatment comprising 27 energy layers (from 121.6 to 173.1 MeV) to a scattering phantom. They examined whether the total neutron dose from such an irradiation can be expressed as a weighted sum of contributions from the individual energy layers. If this assumption holds, the total neutron dose for an arbitrary plan could be reconstructed from measurements at discrete proton energies. Comparing calculated and measured neutron doses revealed that this linear superposition approach worked with the ambient detectors and the BDs, but not the EPDs.
A practical tool
The team then developed a Python-based tool to estimate neutron dose at any point in the treatment room for arbitrary irradiations and detectors (including ambient detectors, BDs and EPDs). As inputs, the tool requires the radiotherapy plan, detector data and calculation parameters including the gantry angle, and measurement distance and angle. It then outputs neutron dose estimates along with associated uncertainties.
The researchers verified the tool by assessing additional measurement points that weren’t used in its development. Comparisons of experimental and calculated dose values showed that the tool provided reliable and useful estimates for the ambient detectors and BDs, even at points where no prior measurements existed.
For the EPDs, however, the calculated intervals were often broad and the researchers suggest that EPD results should be interpreted with caution. They point out that such detectors were retained in the tool because “not all proton therapy centres have access to the same detector types, and approximate detector-specific estimates may still be of practical interest in such settings”.
The tool is thought to be the first to estimate out-of-field neutron dose based on treatment room measurements, and should also work at other clinical centres. “Because modern pencil-beam scanning proton therapy systems have been shown to generate similar neutron fields across different facilities, we believe the methodology behind the tool may be transferable to other centres using comparable technology,” says Morán.
The researchers are now extending the tool to include paediatric cases, and different proton energies, patient sizes and treatment configurations. “We are also investigating how these methods could be applied to estimate neutron doses received by patients, with the long-term goal of improving the characterization of out-of-field radiation exposure in proton therapy,” Morán tells Physics World.
Big science is all about big-money bets. What’s more, payback on those research investments – sometimes running to billions of euros in capital spend – will usually only be realized decades down the line. With the stakes so high, funding agencies and governments are understandably keen to shorten the odds in their favour and ensure every bet’s a winner.
Take the long-running debate within the international particle-physics community regarding a “next energy frontier” particle collider. The end-game: to build on the fundamental physics discoveries made by CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the anticipated breakthroughs resulting from its imminent upgrade – the High-Luminosity LHC – which is due to enter operation in 2030.
The collective conversation here is a case study in consensus meets divergence. On the one hand, there’s general agreement that any post-LHC big-science facility should be an electron–positron “Higgs factory”, in which electrons and positrons are smashed together at high energies to deepen our understanding of the Higgs boson. Discovered in 2012, the Higgs boson is the newest addition to the family of elementary particles that make up the Standard Model of particle physics.
“It’s widely accepted that an electron–positron Higgs factory, with its ‘exceptionally clean’ experimental conditions, will reveal the new physics that we know must exist beyond the Standard Model,” explains Richard D’Arcy, associate professor of particle-accelerator physics in the John Adams Institute at the University of Oxford, UK.
All these proposals exploit existing accelerator technologies based on superconducting and/or normal-conducting RF cavities (metallic chambers in which charged particles injected into an electromagnetic field receive an electrical impulse to accelerate them).
However, each blueprint comes with downsides, whether that’s prohibitive construction costs, sprawling land use and facility footprint, or eye-watering operational costs and energy budgets (or a combination thereof).
Opportunity knocks, it seems, for disruptive accelerator innovation that could unlock the door to a cut-price Higgs factory. One candidate technology that has seen significant advances over the past decade is plasma-wakefield acceleration (PWFA), which exploits laser- or particle-beam-driven intense “plasma waves” as the accelerating medium, yielding electric fields up to three orders of magnitude greater than in classical accelerators. Those ultra-high accelerating gradients, in turn, promise a significant reduction in the size, cost and carbon footprint of next-generation accelerator facilities.
Their concept is now taking form. Earlier in the spring, the HALHF project notched up a significant experimental milestone with the introduction of PWFA infrastructure into a test facility called CLARA (Compact Linear Accelerator for Research and Applications) at STFC Daresbury Laboratory in the UK. For context, CLARA hosts one of the world’s brightest medium-energy electron beams and is designed specifically to support the development of next-generation accelerator technologies.
Richard D’Arcy: “We have established a solid platform on which to build the next level of HALHF@CLARA experiments.” (Courtesy: Worcester College, Oxford)
Initial HALHF@CLARA experiments were carried out over a five-week period by a team of scientists from the universities of Oxford, Oslo and Manchester working with colleagues from the German accelerator laboratory DESY and Daresbury’s Accelerator Science and Technology Centre (ASTeC). Along the way, the researchers successfully integrated PWFA modules into CLARA and subsequently used them to drive plasma wakes with >GV/m gradients and then focus CLARA electron beams with >100 T/m fields.
“These results are foundational for future HALHF@CLARA experiments,” claims D’Arcy, who also leads the PWFA group at Oxford and is one of the principal investigators on the HALHF project. “They are also impressive in their own right, representing the first time beam-driven plasma acceleration has taken place in the UK.”
During this Phase 0 experimental run at CLARA, the HALHF team prioritized three key performance metrics: very high field strengths (orders of magnitude higher than what is possible with traditional accelerator technology); maintaining beam quality as the electrons pass through those very high field gradients; and, finally, minimizing (or even reducing) the energy spread of the electron bunches (which also maintains beam quality and ensures the PWFA set-up remains super-compact).
“By ticking off those three boxes,” says D’Arcy, “we have established a solid platform on which to build the next level of experiments. That’s when things will start to get really exciting.”
Progressions of power
Follow-on experimental runs, which are scheduled to get under way at CLARA later this year, will inevitably begin to tackle two outstanding challenges in plasma acceleration: pushing on to very high energies (which require the staging of PWFA modules in series) and attaining competitive luminosity (by operating the plasma modules thousands of times per second). “CLARA offers a unique opportunity to make substantial advances in both areas owing to its novel architecture and modular environment,” D’Arcy adds.
In the meantime, the HALHF collaboration has submitted its contribution to the European Particle Physics Strategy Update 2026 – part of a concerted push to raise the profile of the research community working on plasma acceleration. The priorities for that community are clear: to increase resources and funding, coordinate development activity on an international level, and take the next steps to further the PWFA concept towards practical and at-scale realization.
“We want to show particle physicists that PWFA isn’t some flash in the pan,” concludes D’Arcy. “This is an enabling technology that really has legs.”
Black carbon particles released by rocket launches remain in the upper atmosphere for much longer than sooty particles produced by sources on the ground. This finding, which comes from a study led by researchers at University College London (UCL), UK, suggests that the soot created in deploying “megaconstellations” containing hundreds or thousands of satellites could have poorly understood and potentially serious consequences for the Earth’s climate.
“Rocket launches are a unique source of pollution, injecting harmful chemicals directly into the upper layers of the atmosphere and contaminating Earth’s last remaining relatively pristine environment,” says the study’s lead author, UCL atmospheric chemist Connor Barker.
The number of rockets being launched into space has increased dramatically since 2019, and the trend shows few signs of stopping. This year has already seen more launches than the whole of 2020, and space industry experts believe the eventual total could surpass 2025’s figure of 329. The increase has primarily been driven by the Falcon 9 rockets launched by the US firm SpaceX, though China also logged a record 92 launch attempts in 2025.
“An unregulated geoengineering experiment”
In the new work, Barker and colleagues analysed data from rocket launches and satellite re-entries from 2020 to 2022. Their results, which they detail in Earth’s Future, show that the soot particles lingering in the upper atmosphere are 540 times more effective at altering climate than ground-based soot emissions from sources such as cars and power plants.
“Space industry pollution is like an unregulated geoengineering experiment,” says Barker. Soot particles from burning kerosene in rocket fuel absorb sunlight, he explains, which prevents it from reaching the Earth’s surface. The result is a small cooling effect, which might sound like a good thing in the context of rising global temperatures. However, Barker stresses that this cooling is minimal compared to the global warming caused by other human-generated emissions, while the particles themselves could have “many other serious unintended consequences”.
Predictions likely to underestimate future impact
As well as quantifying recent space industry emissions, the researchers make predictions about future ones. According to their calculations, by 2029 the space industry will be releasing about 870 tonnes of soot into the atmosphere each year. By way of comparison, Baker notes that according to the latest UK government figures, the annual emissions of the country’s entire passenger car fleet amounted to just 728 tonnes.
The team based its predictions on projections of data from 2020-2022, which is considered the beginning of the megaconstellation satellite era. Because of this, Barker cautions that they are likely to be underestimates, making the problem even more urgent. “It is critical that we understand the environmental impacts of satellite megaconstellations now while their impact is small, before any unforeseen consequences are difficult to reverse or repair,” he tells Physics World.
While scientists have made great progress in the last few years, Baker says that are still large uncertainties in our emission estimates for the industry and our understanding of how they affect the atmosphere. “We hope that this work spurs further research to measure space industry emissions and highlights the need to regulate the geoengineering impacts of the space industry,” he says.
Team leader Eloise Marais, a professor of atmospheric chemistry and air quality at UCL, echoes this sentiment. “So far, there has been limited effort to effectively regulate this type of pollution,” she says.
The researchers are now working on an emissions tracker to visualize these emissions across the entire space age. “We are also using satellite imagery to remotely detect and quantify rocket launch emissions,” Barker reveals.
Thanks to new “transit” observations of the hot Jupiter exoplanet WASP-94A b using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), researchers at Johns Hopkins University in the US have discovered a striking weather pattern on this distant world. Their work could help provide a clearer picture of the atmospheres on exoplanets, which has been very limited until now.
When an exoplanet passes in front of (or transits) its host star, some of the light from that star passes through the planet’s atmosphere. By detecting this light using telescopes, either ground-based or in space, astronomers are able to obtain the exoplanet’s atmospheric light spectrum.
A team led by Sagnick Mukherjee and David Sing has now analysed data on WASP-94A b from the space-based JWST and have found that the mornings on this exoplanet are extremely cloudy – with water absorption features in the spectrum – while its evenings are very clear. Clouds likely form on the planet’s colder, permanent nightside where temperatures are low enough for minerals to condense. Winds then carry those clouds towards the morning limb (the leading edge of the atmosphere), explains Mukherjee.
“As these cloud particles are dragged farther toward the hotter dayside, the clouds evaporate or sink deeper, leaving the evening side much clearer,” he says. “This is a clear discovery of a planet-wide cloud cycle in action on a distant exoplanet.”
Part of a broader survey
The researchers, who detail their findings in Science, decided to study WASP-94A b as part of a broader survey of exoplanet atmospheres with the JWST called the “Grand Tour Program”. The goal of this project, says Mukherjee, is to better understand the composition of these exoplanets and the physical processes at play in their atmospheres.
One of the main difficulties encountered during such observations is how small the signals that we are trying to look at are, he explains. However, in this case, the asymmetry between the morning and evening side of the planet was rather dramatic, which made it possible to separately probe the two.
Until now, researchers only had access to a single averaged spectrum of WASP-94A b – and indeed most other exoplanets studied over the last decade –from observations made by the Hubble telescope, for example. The chemical composition of the exoplanet’s atmosphere was therefore highly biased, says Mukherjee, and it was thought that the levels of oxygen and carbon there were hundreds of times higher than on the Sun. “This finding baffled us because this result could not be explained by planet formation theories. The new data show that WASP-94A b only contains only about five times as much oxygen and carbon.”
“Being able to resolve the cloudy morning and clear evening separately therefore gives us a much cleaner view of what the atmosphere is actually made of,” Mukherjee tells Physics World. “And this is not just relevant to hot-Jupiters like WASP-94A b, but might be extended to all exoplanet atmospheres that we are trying to understand using the transit method.”
“One of the most exciting aspects”
For Mukherjee, this is one of the most exciting aspects of the JWST era. “We are taking a step beyond simply detecting the atmospheres of distant planets and are now beginning to map their weather, chemistry, and three-dimensional structure in extraordinary detail.”
Indeed, using WASP-94A b as a benchmark, the Johns Hopkins team has already studied eight other hot gas giants and discovered the same distinctive cloud cycle on two other worlds: WASP-39 b and WASP-17 b. “Inspired by these observations, our collaboration, co-led by David Sing, myself and our colleague Guangwei Fu, is about to receive more than 180 hours of new JWST data to understand weather on diverse exoplanets and measure how their weather and cloud-coverage vary with planet temperature and gravity,” reveals Mukherjee.
