A distant planet’s atmosphere

Estonian athlete Jaan Roose recently completed a jaw-dropping slackline display, performing daredevil tricks 120 metres above the streets of central Seoul, South Korea.This exciting event by a world champion slackliner got the Unexpected Elements team thinking about risk-taking, ...  Show more

This week’s news of an AI agent managing to hack into an Australian government website has the Unexpected Elements team exploring the sneaky science of infiltration.Marnie Chesterton is joined by science journalists Paul Adepoju and Andrada Fiscutean to discover how South African ...  Show more

Nasa's JWST space telescope has unpicked the chemical contents and state of the atmosphere of planet WASP-39b 700 light years away. Astronomer Hannah Wakeford explains. Meteorologist Laura Wilcox warns that atmospheric haze over China and South Asia is masking some of the effects ...  Show more

In the space between stars, dark clouds of gas, dust, and ice mingle in a chemical laboratory unlike any on Earth. Ewine van Dishoeck, an astronomer who studies molecules in space and who helped develop an instrument aboard NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, explains how Webb is ...  Show more

A principal investigator talks about an experiment on board the space station observing the forces that drive space weather. HWHAP Episode 334. 

Some exoplanets—like a gas giant with rain made of glass and 5,000-mile-per-hour winds—sound like worlds dreamed up by a science fiction writer. But they’re real. From light-years away, scientists can uncover details about planets orbiting distant stars and even ask whether some ...  Show more