Five years ago, NASA’s infrared Spitzer Space Telescope helped discover a family of seven rocky exoplanets orbiting the same star, known as TRAPPIST-1. Now, NASA’s new infrared powerhouse — the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) — measured the temperature of one of those worlds, TRAPPIST-1b, in new research published in the journal Nature (opens in new tab) .
The bad news: The Earth-like planet is almost certainly uninhabitable.
Astronomers used JWST’s mid-infrared camera, called MIRI, to look for the planet’s thermal emission — think heat-sensing “Terminator” vision. They found that TRAPPIST-1b is scorching — about 450 degrees Fahrenheit (232 degrees Celsius), about the temperature of an oven — and that it likely lacks an atmosphere.
The discovery is another record-breaking first for the JWST, which has been steadily producing newsworthy results since its launch.
Related: 25 jaw-dropping James Webb Space Telescope images
“This is the first detection of any form of light emitted by an exoplanet as small and as cool as the rocky planets in our own solar system,” NASA officials said in a statement (opens in new tab) .
“No previous telescopes have had the sensitivity to measure such dim mid-infrared light,” Thomas Greene (opens in new tab) , a NASA astrophysicist and lead author of the new work, said in the statement.
The initial discovery of the seven TRAPPIST-1 exoplanets spurred great excitement in the astronomical community, since all of the distant worlds are about the size of Earth and are located in their star’s habitable zone, the region that’s just the right distance from a star for liquid water to exist on a planet’s surface. This system is “a great laboratory” and “the best targets we have for looking at the atmospheres of rocky planets,” study co-author Elsa Ducrot (opens in new tab) , an astronomer with the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), said in the statement.
Don’t get too excited about a new world for humans yet, though — the TRAPPIST-1 planets are out of our current reach, at a whopping 235 trillion miles (378 trillion kilometers) away. They’re also orbiting a star much smaller and redder than our sun, known as an M dwarf star.
“There are ten times as many of these stars in the Milky Way as there are stars like the sun, and they are twice as likely to have rocky planets as stars like the sun,” Greene said.
These abundant M dwarfs are obvious targets for astronomers seeking habitable planets, and it’s conveniently easier to observe rocky planets around these smaller stars. There’s one catch, though: M dwarfs are much more active than our sun, often flaring and spewing high-energy rays that could be damaging to budding extraterrestrial life or to a planet’s atmosphere.related stories—Monster black hole may have killed this galaxy’s star-forming power, James Webb Telescope reveals
—The James Webb Telescope detected the coldest ice in the known universe – and it contains the building blocks of life
—James Webb Space Telescope captures star going supernova in a dazzling cloud of dust
Previous observations of TRAPPIST-1b weren’t sensitive enough to determine if it had an atmosphere after all, or if it was a barren rock. The planet is tidally locked to its star, meaning one side always faces its star and the other is stuck in perpetual night. Simulations suggest that if this world had an atmosphere, the planet’s temperature would be lower, as the air would redistribute the heat around both sides. The JWST recorded a significantly hotter temperature, though — indicating no atmosphere and knocking one more planet off humanity’s list of possibly habitable worlds.
The real excitement here, however, isn’t really the specifics of TRAPPIST-1b. Instead, the crucial takeaway is that the JWST is capable of these kinds of measurements and will continue to make more of them, exploring the atmospheres and temperatures of many other worlds.
“There was one target that I dreamed of having, and it was this one,” study co-author Pierre-Olivier Lagage (opens in new tab) , also with CEA, said in the statement. Lagage is one of the developers of MIRI, the instrument that made these observations. “This is the first time we can detect the emission from a rocky, temperate planet. It’s a really important step in the story of discovering exoplanets.”
Alibaba announced plans to release a pair of smart glasses powered by its AI models. The Quark AI Glasses are Alibaba’s first foray into the smart glasses product category.
Alibaba
Alibaba on Monday unveiled a pair of smart glasses powered by its artificial intelligence models, marking the Chinese firm’s first foray into the product category.
The e-commerce giant said the Quark AI Glasses will be launched in China by the end of 2025 with hardware powered by the firm’s Qwen large language model and its advanced AI assistant called Quark.
The Hangzhou, headquartered company is one of the leaders in China’s AI space, aggressively launching new models with capabilities that compete with Western counterparts like OpenAI.
Many tech companies see wearables, specifically glasses, as the next frontier in computing alongside the smartphone. Quark, which was updated this year, is currently available as an app in China. Alibaba is stepping into the hardware game as a way to distribute the app more widely.
The Quark AI Glasses are Alibaba’s answer to Meta’s smart glasses that were designed in collaboration with Ray-Ban. The Chinese tech giant will also now compete with Chinese consumer electronics player Xiaomi who this year released its own AI glasses.
Alibaba said its glasses will support hands-free calling, music streaming, real-time language translation, and meeting transcription. The glasses also feature a built-in camera.
Alibaba owns a range of different services in China from mapping to an online travel agent. Its affiliate company Ant Group also runs the widely-used Alipay mobile service. Alibaba said users will be able to use a navigation service via the glasses, pay with Alipay and compare prices on Taobao, its China e-commerce platform.
The firm has yet to release other details such as the price and technical specifications.
Tesla will use Samsung for as a supplier for its self-driving computer’s next-gen hardware in a $16.5 billion deal, according to Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
But despite planning two generations ahead, the company still doesn’t have a solution to bring the promised full autonomy to hardware that it’s been promising that capability to since 2016.
Earlier today, Samsung announced a 22.8 trillion won ($16.5 billion) deal that would run through 2033. In that filing, Samsung did not name the customer, only that it is a “large global company”. Later, Bloomberg reported that the customer is Tesla, and Musk confirmed this on twitter. Then in his usual bravado, he stated that the deal is “likely much more than that.”
Samsung makes the chips for the self-driving computers in Tesla’s current vehicles, but the next generation will be made by TSMC, first in Taiwan and then later in Arizona. Then the next-next generation will be covered by this new Samsung deal.
The new deal is significant due to TSMC’s global dominance of chipmaking. Samsung has had significant unused capacity, so the Tesla deal is a big boost for the company’s chip foundry business.
Tesla has gone through several generations of chips, previous referred to as “HW,” standing for “hardware,” with a number indicating their generation. More recently, Tesla started referring to its chips with “AI” instead of “HW,” in order to incorporate the tech buzzword du jour.
Currently Tesla is on HW4/AI4, and TSMC will make HW5, then Samsung will make HW6 again.
These generations of hardware each get successively more capable, and can handle more data and thus theoretically become better at self-driving tasks.
Current Tesla HW4 vehicles cannot drive themselves, and are only capable of SAE level 2 operation, which requires an attentive driver behind the steering wheel (though Tesla’s solution does work better than most others). Tesla’s ‘Robotaxi’ system is currently operating in Austin without anyone in the driver’s seat, but has a “safety rider” who can take control of the vehicle, blurring the line somewhat on which SAE level it is operating at.
But what about HW3?
There’s a problem with the differentiation between these generations of hardware: ever since 2016, when Tesla was on version 2 of its hardware, it has promised full self-driving capability on all of its vehicles.
Tesla stated, at the time, that every single Tesla vehicle produced after that date had the hardware that would allow for full self-driving.
It eventually became apparent that HW2 would not be capable of full self-driving tasks, and Tesla upgraded to HW3, promising all HW2 customers that they would get a free upgrade to HW3 if they bought Tesla’s Full Self-Driving system, which has varied in price over time but once cost $15,000.
Now, with the change from HW3 to HW4, we’re seeing indications of a similar run-around.
We’ve already seen differing FSD software versions based on which hardware level vehicles have, with HW3 vehicles getting updates later than HW4 vehicles do. On last week’s Q2 earnings call, Tesla CFO Vaibhav Taneja said:
What we want to do is get unsupervised done on hardware four first. Once it’s done, then we’ll go back and look at what we need to do with the hardware three cars. Like I said, the focus is first to get unsupervised out and then we’ll go back and see what more work we need to do.
“Unsupervised” is Tesla’s new name for actual full self-driving, which would allow a vehicle to drive without the supervision of someone in the driver’s seat. This as opposed to “supervised FSD,” a phrase Tesla started using after about a decade of promising full self-driving without delivering it.
Here, Taneja said that HW3 cars will eventually get FSD, but Tesla hasn’t really figured out the path to that, and it’s focusing on new cars first, then will go back around to see what needs to happen.
Previously, Musk had stated that Tesla “will have to upgrade people’s hardware 3 computer,” but more recently it has become apparent that Tesla really doesn’t have a plan for that upgrade. And Taneja’s comments suggest that Tesla will still try to wedge FSD onto HW3, despite previously admitting that the system is not capable of it.
The existence of future HW5 and even HW6 chips also suggest that current systems are not capable of full self-driving. If HW4 is FSD-capable, then why would Tesla need two more generations of chip in the next two years in order to do the tasks that it promised all of its cars could do a full decade prior?
So, much more than having no solution for HW3 cars (or even HW2 cars, some of which have gotten free upgrades, but others who have been charged $1,000 to upgrade to a computer they already paid for), does this mean that Tesla is going to kick the can further down the road, and eventually have no solution for HW4 and HW5 either?
And, when will we know about these solutions? Tesla has sold millions of vehicles with the promise of self-driving which will seemingly need an upgrade at some point. And many of those vehicles are old enough, at this point, to be retired, despite spending up to $15,000 on a piece of software that has never been delivered to them.
An HW6/AI6 computer will surely have all sorts of new whizbang capabilities, but we were promised those capabilities years ago, and they’re still not delivered yet.
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A group of Senate Democrats has probed Federal Housing Finance Agency director William Pulte over his order to propose how to consider crypto in mortgage applications.