NASA’s Webb Detects Thick Atmosphere Around Broiling Lava World - UNIVERSE

Researchers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have detected the strongest evidence yet for an atmosphere on a rocky planet outside our solar system, as NASA leads the world in exploring the universe from the Moon to Mars and beyond. Observations of the ultra-hot super-Earth TOI-561 b suggest that the exoplanet is surrounded by a thick blanket of gases above a global magma ocean. The results help explain the planet’s unusually low density and challenge the prevailing wisdom that relatively small planets so close to their stars are not able to sustain atmospheres.  

Image A: Super-Earth Exoplanet TOI-561 b and Its Star (Artist's Concept)

This artist’s concept shows what the hot super-Earth exoplanet TOI-561 b and its star could look like based on observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and other observatories. Webb data suggests that the planet is surrounded by a thick atmosphere above a magma ocean.

Illustration: NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford (STScI)

With a radius roughly 1.4 times Earth’s, and an orbital period less than 11 hours, TOI-561 b falls into a rare class of objects known as ultra-short period exoplanets. Although its host star is only slightly smaller and cooler than the Sun, TOI-561 b orbits so close to the star — less than one million miles (one-fortieth the distance between Mercury and the Sun) — that it must be tidally locked, with the temperature of its permanent dayside far exceeding the melting temperature of typical rock.

“What really sets this planet apart is its anomalously low density,” said  Johanna Teske, staff scientist at Carnegie Science Earth and Planets Laboratory and lead author on a paper published Thursday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. “It’s not a super-puff, but it is less dense than you would expect if it had an Earth-like composition.”

Image B: Super-Earth Exoplanet TOI-561 b (Artist's Concept)

An artist’s concept shows what a thick atmosphere above a vast magma ocean on exoplanet TOI-561 b could look like. Measurements captured by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope suggest that in spite of the intense radiation it receives from its star, TOI-561 b is not a bare rock.

Illustration: NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford (STScI)

One explanation the team considered for the planet’s low density was that it could have a relatively small iron core and a mantle made of rock that is not as dense as rock within Earth. Teske notes that this could make sense: “TOI-561 b is distinct among ultra-short period planets in that it orbits a very old (twice as old as the Sun), iron-poor star in a region of the Milky Way known as the thick disk. It must have formed in a very different chemical environment from the planets in our own solar system.” The planet's composition could be representative of planets that formed when the universe was relatively young. 

But an exotic composition can’t explain everything. The team also suspected that TOI-561 b might be surrounded by a thick atmosphere that makes it look larger than it actually is. Although small planets that have spent billions of years baking in blazing stellar radiation are not expected to have atmospheres, some show signs that they are not just bare rock or lava. 

To test the hypothesis that TOI-561 b has an atmosphere, the team used Webb’s NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) to measure the planet’s dayside temperature based on its near-infrared brightness. The technique, which involves measuring the decrease in brightness of the star-planet system as the planet moves behind the star, is similar to that used to search for atmospheres in the TRAPPIST-1 system and on other rocky worlds. 

If TOI-561 b is a bare rock with no atmosphere to carry heat around to the nightside, its dayside temperature should be approaching 4,900 degrees Fahrenheit (2,700 degrees Celsius). But the NIRSpec observations show that the planet’s dayside appears to be closer to 3,200 degrees Fahrenheit (1,800 degrees Celsius) — still extremely hot, but far cooler than expected. 

Image C: Super-Earth Exoplanet TOI-561 b (NIRSpec Emission Spectrum)

An emission spectrum captured by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope in May 2024 shows the brightness of different wavelengths of near-infrared light emitted by exoplanet TOI-561 b. Comparing the data to models suggests that the planet is surrounded by a volatile-rich atmosphere.

Illustration: NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford (STScI); Science: Johanna Teske (Carnegie Science Earth and Planets Laboratory), Anjali Piette (University of Birmingham), Tim Lichtenberg (Groningen), Nicole Wallack (Carnegie Science Earth and Planets Laboratory)

To explain the results, the team considered a few different scenarios. The magma ocean could circulate some heat, but without an atmosphere, the nightside would probably be solid, limiting flow away from the dayside. A thin layer of rock vapor on the surface of the magma ocean is also possible, but on its own would likely have a much smaller cooling effect than observed. 

“We really need a thick volatile-rich atmosphere to explain all the observations,” said Anjali Piette, coauthor from the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. 

“Strong winds would cool the dayside by transporting heat over to the nightside. Gases like water vapor would absorb some wavelengths of near-infrared light emitted by the surface before they make it all the way up through the atmosphere. (The planet would look colder because the telescope detects less light.) It’s also possible that there are bright silicate clouds that cool the atmosphere by reflecting starlight.”

While the Webb observations provide compelling evidence for such an atmosphere, the question remains: How can a small planet exposed to such intense radiation can hold on to any atmosphere at all, let alone one so substantial? Some gases must be escaping to space, but perhaps not as efficiently as expected. 

“We think there is an equilibrium between the magma ocean and the atmosphere. At the same time that gases are coming out of the planet to feed the atmosphere, the magma ocean is sucking them back into the interior,” said co-author Tim Lichtenberg from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. “This planet must be much, much more volatile-rich than Earth to explain the observations. It's really like a wet lava ball.”

These are the first results from Webb’s General Observers Program 3860, which involved observing the system continuously for more than 37 hours while TOI-561 b completed nearly four full orbits of the star. The team is currently analyzing the full data set to map the temperature all the way around the planet and narrow down the composition of the atmosphere.  

“What’s really exciting is that this new data set is opening up even more questions than it’s answering,” said Teske. 

The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is 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 

Source: NASA’s Webb Detects Thick Atmosphere Around Broiling Lava World  - NASA Science

Aerial microrobot can fly as fast as a bumblebee - Robotics - Engineering

Chen’s group has been building robotic insects for more than five years. Credit: MIT Soft and Micro Robotics Laboratory

In the future, tiny flying robots could be deployed to aid in the search for survivors trapped beneath the rubble after a devastating earthquake. Like real insects, these robots could flit through tight spaces larger robots can't reach, while simultaneously dodging stationary obstacles and pieces of falling rubble.

So far, aerial microrobots have only been able to fly slowly along smooth trajectories, far from the swift, agile flight of real insects—until now.

MIT researchers have demonstrated aerial microrobots that can fly with speed and agility that is comparable to their biological counterparts. A collaborative team designed a new AI-based controller for the robotic bug that enabled it to follow gymnastic flight paths, such as executing continuous body flips.

With a two-part control scheme that combines high performance with computational efficiency, the robot's speed and acceleration increased by about 450% and 250%, respectively, compared to the researchers' best previous demonstrations.

The speedy robot was agile enough to complete 10 consecutive somersaults in 11 seconds, even when wind disturbances threatened to push it off course. 

Credit: Science Advances (2025). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aea8716

"We want to be able to use these robots in scenarios that more traditional quad copter robots would have trouble flying into, but that insects could navigate. Now, with our bioinspired control framework, the flight performance of our robot is comparable to insects in terms of speed, acceleration, and the pitching angle. This is quite an exciting step toward that future goal," says Kevin Chen, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), head of the Soft and Micro Robotics Laboratory within the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), and co-senior author of a paper on the robot.

The study is published in the journal Science Advances.

Chen is joined on the paper by co-lead authors Yi-Hsuan Hsiao, an EECS MIT graduate student; Andrea Tagliabue, Ph.D.; and Owen Matteson, a graduate student in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro); as well as EECS graduate student Suhan Kim; Tong Zhao; and co-senior author Jonathan P. How, the Ford Professor of Engineering in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a principal investigator in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS).

An AI controller

Chen's group has been building robotic insects for more than five years.

They recently developed a more durable version of their tiny robot, a microcassette-sized device that weighs less than a paperclip. The new version utilizes larger, flapping wings that enable more agile movements. They are powered by a set of squishy artificial muscles that flap the wings at an extremely fast rate.

But the controller—the "brain" of the robot that determines its position and tells it where to fly—was hand-tuned by a human, limiting the robot's performance.

A time-lapse photo shows a flying microrobot performing a flip. Credit: MIT Soft and Micro Robotics Laboratory

For the robot to fly quickly and aggressively like a real insect, it needed a more robust controller that could account for uncertainty and perform complex optimizations quickly.

Such a controller would be too computationally intensive to be deployed in real time, especially with the complicated aerodynamics of the lightweight robot.

To overcome this challenge, Chen's group joined forces with How's team, and together, they crafted a two-step, AI-driven control scheme that provides the robustness necessary for complex, rapid maneuvers, and the computational efficiency needed for real-time deployment.

"The hardware advances pushed the controller so there was more we could do on the software side, but at the same time, as the controller developed, there was more they could do with the hardware. As Kevin's team demonstrates new capabilities, we demonstrate that we can utilize them," How says.

For the first step, the team built what is known as a model-predictive controller. This type of powerful controller uses a dynamic, mathematical model to predict the behavior of the robot and plan the optimal series of actions to safely follow a trajectory.

Credit: MIT Soft and Micro Robotics Laboratory

While computationally intensive, it can plan challenging maneuvers like aerial somersaults, rapid turns, and aggressive body tilting. This high-performance planner is also designed to consider constraints on the force and torque the robot could apply, which is essential for avoiding collisions.

For instance, to perform multiple flips in a row, the robot would need to decelerate in such a way that its initial conditions are exactly right for doing the flip again.

"If small errors creep in, and you try to repeat that flip 10 times with those small errors, the robot will just crash. We need to have robust flight control," How says.

They use this expert planner to train a "policy" based on a deep-learning model, to control the robot in real time, through a process called imitation learning. A policy is the robot's decision-making engine, which tells the robot where and how to fly.

Essentially, the imitation-learning process compresses the powerful controller into a computationally efficient AI model that can run very fast.

The key was having a smart way to create just enough training data, which would teach the policy everything it needs to know for aggressive maneuvers.

"The robust training method is the secret sauce of this technique," How explains.

The AI-driven policy takes robot positions as inputs and outputs control commands in real time, such as thrust force and torques.

Insect-like performance

In their experiments, this two-step approach enabled the insect-scale robot to fly 447% faster while exhibiting a 255% increase in acceleration. The robot was able to complete 10 somersaults in 11 seconds, and the tiny robot never strayed more than 4 or 5 centimeters off its planned trajectory.

"This work demonstrates that soft and microrobots, traditionally limited in speed, can now leverage advanced control algorithms to achieve agility approaching that of natural insects and larger robots, opening up new opportunities for multimodal locomotion," says Hsiao.

The researchers were also able to demonstrate saccade movement, which occurs when insects pitch very aggressively, fly rapidly to a certain position, and then pitch the other way to stop. This rapid acceleration and deceleration help insects localize themselves and see clearly.

"This bio-mimicking flight behavior could help us in the future when we start putting cameras and sensors on board the robot," Chen says.

Adding sensors and cameras so the microrobots can fly outdoors, without being attached to a complex motion capture system, will be a major area of future work.

The researchers also want to study how onboard sensors could help the robots avoid colliding with one another or coordinate navigation.

"For the micro-robotics community, I hope this paper signals a paradigm shift by showing that we can develop a new control architecture that is high-performing and efficient at the same time," says Chen.

Even when wind disturbances threatened to push it off course, a speedy robot was agile enough to complete 10 consecutive somersaults in 11 seconds. Credit: MIT Soft and Micro Robotics Laboratory

"This work is especially impressive because these robots still perform precise flips and fast turns despite the large uncertainties that come from relatively large fabrication tolerances in small-scale manufacturing, wind gusts of more than 1 meter per second, and even its power tether wrapping around the robot as it performs repeated flips," says Sarah Bergbreiter, a professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, who was not involved with this work.

"Although the controller currently runs on an external computer rather than onboard the robot, the authors demonstrate that similar, but less precise, control policies may be feasible even with the more limited computation available on an insect-scale robot. This is exciting because it points toward future insect-scale robots with agility approaching that of their biological counterparts," she adds. 

Provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology  

by Adam Zewe, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

edited by Stephanie Baum, reviewed by Robert Egan 

Source: Aerial microrobot can fly as fast as a bumblebee  

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Satellites Detect Seasonal Pulses in Earth’s Glaciers - EARTH

Malaspina Glacier in southeastern Alaska is the planet’s largest piedmont glacier, with ice that spills from the Saint Elias Mountains’ higher elevations and spreads out like pancake batter onto the coastal plain. Though it might appear static, the glacier is “alive” with movement throughout the year, typically speeding up in spring and slowing to a crawl by winter. A new analysis by NASA scientists shows that glaciers around the world display all kinds of patterns in seasonal movement—some similar to Malaspina and some vastly different.

For decades, researchers have documented seasonal speedups and slowdowns in glacier flow, typically focusing on individual glaciers or specific regions. By analyzing millions of optical and radar satellite images collected between 2014 and 2022, glaciologists Chad Greene and Alex Gardner at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have mapped this variability on a global scale. The new perspective reveals how glaciers in different regions respond to seasonal warming and may help identify which ones are most vulnerable to a warming climate. Their analysis was published in November 2025 in Science.  

Glacier speed is measured by tracking the motion of deep cracks called crevasses and surface debris in sequences of satellite images collected over time. Crevasse fields and other surface patterns provide unique glacial "fingerprints" that scientists track using an algorithm developed at JPL as part of the ITS_LIVE project. The team used this technique to map glacier flow at high resolution globally, then analyzed subtle changes in glacier speed to understand how glaciers respond to warming that occurs between winter and summer.

“Earth has over 200,000 glaciers, and we’re watching all of them closely,” said Gardner, the study’s coauthor. “It’s no surprise that with this much data, a pattern started to emerge.” 

The timing of glacier speedups is driven by the onset of the melt season and by processes at the glacier bed that reduce friction with the underlying ground. “Glaciers are like rivers of ice that flow down mountains toward the sea,” said Greene, the study's lead author. “When warm air melts the upper surface of a glacier, all that meltwater can make its way down to the base of the ice and act like a lubricant, causing the glacier to speed up.”

The researchers observed the strongest seasonal accelerations at high northern latitudes: in Alaska, glaciers moved fastest in spring, whereas in Arctic regions of Europe and Russia, they typically reached their top speeds in summer or early fall.

The animation above shows parts of Malaspina (also called Sit' Tlein) beginning to pick up speed in early spring, when the first meltwater starts draining through cracks in the ice and down to the glacier’s base. At this point, conduits that form in the base are still small, so the meltwater can build up pressure and reduce friction, allowing the glacier to slide more easily over uneven ground. Through late summer, as the seasonal surge of meltwater carves larger and deeper channels under the glacier, the pressure drops and friction increases, causing the glacier to slow down.

Other glaciers display different patterns. One example is the Barnes Ice Cap on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic—a remnant of the Laurentide Ice Sheet that once covered much of North America. This glacier is a classic example of summer acceleration, producing little meltwater for most of the year, then speeding up when meltwater finally arrives. In contrast, seasonal changes unfold more gradually at Baltoro Glacier in the Karakoram range of Pakistan. There, the speedup begins high on the glacier and slowly propagates downward as the melting season progresses.

Understanding glacier responses to seasonal warming allows researchers to better anticipate how glaciers will respond to climate change. The team found that glacier flow accelerates with every degree of warming and that seasonal flow patterns are linked to longer-term glacier change, meaning spring and summer speedups can serve as a vital sign that indicates a glacier’s resilience to prolonged warming.

“We wanted to check the health of Earth’s glaciers, so we measured their pulse,” Greene said. “Now we just need to keep an eye on their temperature.”

Maps courtesy of Chad Greene and Alex Gardner, NASA/JPL, using data from the NASA MEaSUREs project ITS_LIVE. Story by Kathryn Hansen. 

Source: Satellites Detect Seasonal Pulses in Earth’s Glaciers - NASA Science    

Probing the quantum nature of black holes through entropy - Physics & General Physics - Quantum Physics - UNIVERSE

An artist's concept of two merging galaxies with active black holes at their center. Credit: NASA, ESA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI). science.nasa.gov/asset/hubble/a-pair-of-merging-black-holes-artists-concept/.

In a study published in Physical Review Letters, physicists have demonstrated that black holes satisfy the third law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy remains positive and vanishes at extremely low temperatures, just like ordinary quantum systems. The finding provides strong evidence that black holes possess isolated ground states, a hallmark of quantum mechanical behavior.

Understanding gravity's quantum behavior is among the biggest open questions facing modern physics. Black holes are used as laboratories for investigating quantum gravity, particularly at low temperatures where quantum effects become visible.

Prior calculations showed that black hole entropy might become negative at low temperatures, a result that appeared physically puzzling. In this work, researchers addressed the paradox by incorporating wormhole effects in the two-dimensional Jackiw-Teitelboim (JT) gravity model.

Phys.org spoke to the authors of the study, Stefano Antonini, Prof. Luca Victor Iliesiu, Pratik Rath, and Patrick Duy Tran, to gain insight into their work.

"By describing black holes at extremely low temperatures, and understanding whether they have an isolated ground state just like most conventional quantum systems, we hope to unveil quantum properties of gravity," the researchers explain.

The entropy problem

In quantum systems, entropy measures the number of possible microscopic configurations. If a system has an isolated ground state—a unique lowest energy configuration—its entropy should vanish as temperature approaches absolute zero.

However, entropy calculations in gravitational theories always involve an average over an ensemble of possible configurations, making them tricky.

Two different averaging procedures, called annealed and quenched entropy, can give different answers. Annealed entropy calculates the average first and then the entropy, while quenched entropy calculates the entropy first for each configuration and then averages.

"The necessity boils down to an order of operations issue," the researchers explain. "Suppose you are given an assortment of quantum systems and tasked to calculate the average entropy. Ideally, you would calculate the entropy of each system and then average over these entropies. This is called the quenched entropy."

"Instead, it is often easier for physicists to calculate the annealed entropy, which takes averages first and then calculates entropy—a wrong order of operations."

At high temperatures, these two methods agree. But at low temperatures, they diverge dramatically: the quenched entropy approaches zero, reflecting an isolated ground state, while the annealed entropy goes negative. This result is nonsensical because the third law of thermodynamics dictates that entropy must be non-negative and vanish as temperature approaches absolute zero.

Introducing a new quantity

While the quenched entropy offers the correct conceptual way to calculate entropy, it is often very difficult to compute precisely in gravitational systems. This difficulty arises because it requires detailed knowledge of the full distribution of quantum states and fluctuations within the ensemble, which is mathematically and numerically challenging.

To address this, the researchers introduced a new intermediate quantity called semiquenched entropy.

"We had to introduce semiquenched entropy, which is simpler to compute than quenched entropy," the team said. "Nevertheless, this quantity still captures similar properties to the quenched entropy: for instance, proving that either quantity is positive at low temperatures implies that the ground states of the assortment of quantum systems are all isolated."

The key advantage is that proving the semiquenched entropy remains positive across all temperatures is sufficient to show that black holes have isolated ground states—and by extension, that the quenched entropy also stays positive.

This is because semiquenched entropy, despite being easier to calculate, is similar to the quenched entropy in the sense that it shares the same qualitative behavior and probes the same physical properties of the ground state. Positivity and vanishing of semiquenched entropy at zero temperature therefore confirm that black holes behave like conventional quantum systems with unique lowest energy states.

Airy tail and wormholes

The Airy edge is a mathematical concept from random matrix theory describing a universal pattern in how eigenvalues are distributed near the boundary of their spectrum. This pattern shows up in many complex systems across physics and mathematics.

In the context of JT gravity, the black hole energy spectrum is mathematically equivalent to the spectrum of eigenvalues of an ensemble of random matrices. This equivalence allows physicists to apply the Airy edge statistics to understand subtle quantum behaviors of black holes at very low temperatures.

"By going to low temperatures, we begin to probe the edge statistics in the black hole spectrum and see that it shares the same universal statistics as in matrix integrals," the researchers explain.

The team performed their calculations using two complementary approaches. The first involved summing over wormhole contributions—geometric structures that connect different regions of spacetime—in the gravitational path integral.

The second used random matrix theory techniques to show that the dual matrix integral is dominated by a new configuration, a one-eigenvalue instanton. Remarkably, both approaches agreed on their common regime of validity, providing a powerful consistency check.

"This agreement seems to tell us a strange and surprising result: that these one-eigenvalue instantons correspond to not just a single wormhole, but a resummation of an infinite number of wormholes," the team noted.

"If we were to instead sum over a finite number of wormhole corrections, we would not see that the semiquenched entropy is positive. This means that accounting for all wormholes is critical to understand the quantum nature of black holes and get results consistent with a conventional quantum system."

Implications and next steps

Demonstrating that black holes have isolated ground states carries implications for our understanding of quantum gravity.

"By proving an isolated ground state, we show that black holes in JT gravity behave like quantum mechanical systems. In other words, their lowest energy states are quantized," the researchers explain.

"This provides evidence in favor of the microstate interpretation of black hole entropy and advances theoretical probes of the quantum nature of gravity."

The results also highlight the role of wormholes in gravitational physics. Without summing over the full infinite series of wormhole contributions, the calculations would not yield physically sensible, positive entropy.

Looking ahead, the researchers identify intriguing open questions: What is the gravitational interpretation of the one-eigenvalue instantons? Can these methods extend to higher-dimensional black holes? Is semiquenched entropy useful beyond gravity, like in condensed matter or quantum computing?

The team has already taken steps toward answering these questions. They generalize their results in a follow-up paper, released on the preprint server arXiv, to a broader class of black holes with matter excitations, strengthening the case that black holes behave as generic, chaotic quantum systems. 

by Tejasri Gururaj, Phys.org

edited by Sadie Harley, reviewed by Robert Egan 

Source: Probing the quantum nature of black holes through entropy