Okay so I've been smitten with Yang Liping's peacock ballet for days and I literally couldn't sleep until I finished this and HOLY SHIT--

"You can use better words than that."

.... e... elegant...?

".... Alright, sure, we'll go with that."

You have no business being somehow so handsome it's criminal AND so beautiful it hurts.

"That sounds like a personal problem."

....... it very much is

"You aren't functioning right now, are you."

WELL, SOMEONE KEPT ME AWAKE SO--

"Bed."

I--

"Bed."

In a system with two known planets, astronomers spotted something new: A small object transiting across the sun-sized star. This turned out to be another planet, which was extra hot and Earth-sized. The newly spotted planet, called HD 63433 d, is tidally locked, meaning there is a dayside that always faces its star and a side that is constantly in darkness. This exoplanet, or planet outside of our solar system, orbits around the star HD 63433 (TOI 1726) in the HD 63433 planetary system. This scorching world is the smallest confirmed exoplanet younger than 500 million years old. It's also the closest discovered Earth-sized planet this young, at about 400 million years old.

Hot Sub-Neptune Planets

When we look out to the stars and catalogue the planets orbiting them, we regularly bump into a type of planet that our Solar System for whatever reason, didn't create.

Planets close in to the star, a few times more massive than our Earth, but not quite as massive as the outer ice giant planets of Uranus and Neptune, these planets we call Sub Neptune, but not having any example of such a planet in our own system means, they are also the kind of planet we know least about.

Slowly, we are beginning to peel back the fog (quite literally) and find out more information about these planets, thanks to the JWST.

48 light years from Earth, orbiting a red dwarf star every 1.5 days is Gliese 1214 b, a sub Neptune planet that JWST has been watching closely recently, and has found some fascinating things.

Firstly the planet is tidally locked, this means the planet has a fixed side facing the sun, and the other side facing outwards. It would be like having the Atlantic ocean and countries around always in day, while the pacific being always at night.

Secondly, the planet is incredibly reflective, so much so, it had scuppered any previous attempts to derive any details from it, but JWST was up to the task. It looks like the entire planet is covered in a thick reflective cloud system, thought to be water or methane. If that was the case, then the planet almost certainly didn't start life so close to it's parent star, but has instead slowly migrated towards it.

Reflectivity is known as Albedo, above is a diagram of the % of reflectivity of different environments (top 100%, bottom 0%), what's interesting is, Water as a body is one of the lowest, while clouds (still made of water) reflect huge amounts. This is why the scientists assume the water or methane clouds are causing the huge reflectivity of the planet.

Thirdly, because of the way the planet has day/night sides, JWST was able to measure the temperature difference between the part day side, and the part night side as it transited the star.

This was a big surprise, as the temperatures were much lower than expected. 279'c on the day side, and 65'c on the night side.

I'm not sure I personally like the idea of being on a planet with 65'c water vapour flowing around me, never mind 279'c, but this was much lower than had previously been expected, and what led them to understand more about the nature of the materials that make up the atmosphere.

The question had always been, was there hydrogen or something more complex, and the answer is 100% more complex.

I know game-wise it wasn’t an element they wanted to mess with. The heavy timefall and BTs areas were kind of a night-esque feel.

But... IS there a nighttime over America? I toyed with the idea that time was genuinely broken, but consider this: maybe the concept of time was broken by the planet itself no longer spinning?

Earth became tidally locked with the sun. The same side of the planet always faces the sun, thus another explanation of most of the rest of the continents being wiped out.

the torture of small talk with someone you used to love

Ahhhhhhhhhh mah luneeeeeeeeeee <333

Is it self-indulgent to just fill a page with sketches?? Yes?? No???