photo #8901120

Soul of the UniverseAstronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have revealed a wild, stormy atmosphere and powerful auroras on SIMP-0136, a nearby free-floating planet that roams space without a parent star. At temperatures above 1,500 °C, this rogue world out-bakes most known exoplanets while hosting shimmering light displays reminiscent of Earth’s auroras and Jupiter’s intense polar storms.​The team at Trinity College Dublin used JWST’s ultra-precise infrared instruments to track tiny changes in the planet’s brightness as it rotates, detecting temperature variations of less than 5 °C across its atmosphere. These subtle shifts are linked to changes in chemical composition, hinting at long-lived storms similar to Jupiter’s Great Red Spot slowly rotating into and out of view.​Surprisingly, SIMP-0136’s cloud cover appears static, rather than patchy like Earth’s. At such high temperatures, its clouds are made not of water but of silicate grains—essentially, fine sand suspended in a broiling atmosphere. The observations also show that auroral processes are actively heating the planet’s upper layers, blurring the line between brown dwarfs, giant planets, and magnetically active worlds.​By combining spectroscopic “weather maps” with cutting-edge atmospheric models, researchers are beginning to read the climates of isolated worlds in unprecedented detail—paving the way for future facilities like the Extremely Large Telescope and the Habitable Worlds Observatory to probe the atmospheric dynamics of everything from hot Jupiters to temperate rocky exoplanets.​📄 RESEARCH PAPER📌 Evert Nasedkin et al., “The JWST weather report: Retrieving temperature variations, auroral heating, and static cloud coverage on SIMP-0136”, Astronomy & Astrophysics (2025)