David Charbonneau

In 1998, the planet's thermometer set a record that still stands. Global temperature spiked and then leveled off, even as CO2 emissions kept rising.

The Paraná River behaves like a seismograph that records not the shaking of the ground but the pulse of the Sun. A century of daily water-level measurements at the gauging station in the city of Corrientes, 900 kilometers from the river's mouth, shows that when the Sun has many sunspots, the river floods more. This connection is neither accidental nor weak.

An interpreter gets distracted by every rustle in the hall, and a one-hour meeting stretches into two. The atmosphere is like such an interpreter: it hears not only the biosphere's words but also its tone. When plants change the pace at which they absorb carbon dioxide, the air responds not to the gas itself but to how quickly and how abruptly its amount changes.

Every night, an invisible sentinel hangs over the Andes. The GOES-12 satellite, and later its successor GOES-13, watches Earth from an altitude of 36,000 kilometers, recording how the mountains breathe clouds. For five straight years, it tracked where the sky stayed clear and where it got wrapped in cotton.

Every clear night, a telescope in the Chilean desert records light from distant stars, and in those recordings, like old ship logs, traces of weather remain. The thin dark bands in the spectrum are imprints of water vapor that hung over the observatory at the moment of observation.

In the mountains of Colorado, snowfall varies from winter to winter, and the reason is not always local weather. Thousands of kilometers away, in the tropical Pacific Ocean, water warms and cools, and this pulsation extends an invisible hand that alters precipitation in the Rockies.

In spring 2020, Earth's atmosphere seemed to hold its breath. Transport ground to a halt, factories fell silent, and carbon dioxide emissions from burning fuel dropped by nearly eight percent. But spotting this "carbon echo" on a global scale proved tricky: the atmosphere is constantly mixing, forests and oceans breathe, and weather adds its own noise.

The orchestra of world weather is playing a tune we didn't expect. The first violin is not carbon dioxide but chlorofluorocarbons—gases that until recently hid in refrigerators and aerosol cans. They trap heat ten thousand times more effectively than CO₂, and for decades they have been quietly warming the planet.

The RATAN-600 radio telescope is a ring of hundreds of aluminum panels on a mountainside in Karachay-Cherkessia. In the spring of 2018, its mirror caught radio waves from sixteen red dwarfs — small, dim, but very long-lived stars.

Picture an orchestra where each instrument plays at its own tempo: violins speed up, woodwinds slow down, and percussion keeps losing the beat. That's roughly what Earth's climate looks like, with the ocean, the Sun, volcanoes, and human activity pulling temperature in different directions.

The Atacama Desert in northern Chile is the driest non-polar place on Earth. The sky is almost always clear, and the air is so devoid of moisture that even distant galaxies are visible without interference.

In the summer of 2022, the sky over western India seemed to have forgotten about drought: rains fell more often than usual, while eastern states languished in dryness. Such an imbalance puzzled forecasters, because ocean currents in the Pacific had promised a steady, abundant monsoon across the country.

In the summer of 2023, thermometers around the world registered numbers that even the boldest forecasts had not anticipated. The planet's average temperature rose to 1.48°C above pre-industrial levels, a jump of 0.17°C that broke the previous record as if the climate had suddenly shifted gears.

An artist painting the ocean does not limit themselves to two colors: warm and cold. Likewise, climatologists studying El Niño increasingly speak of a whole palette of shades. El Niño is a warm current off the coast of Peru that, every few years, alters weather across the planet. Its counterpart, La Niña, brings cold.

The carbon cycle is like the planet's breathing. Forests and oceans inhale carbon dioxide, while industry and wildfires exhale it back. In 2023, that inhale became gasping and shallow. At the Mauna Loa station, instruments recorded that CO₂ concentrations rose by 3.37 parts per million over the year, 86% faster than the year before.

The temperature in a room drops by a few degrees while the refrigerator runs without a single moving compressor. Inside, there is no Freon, but a piece of metal that is alternately magnetized and demagnetized.

From July 2023 to July 2024, Earth's atmosphere gained carbon dioxide at a rate of 3.66 parts per million per year. That is the fastest pace since 1979. The reason is not that factories and cars suddenly started emitting more CO₂. The planet's lungs—forests and soils—took a shallower breath. The planet breathes through its green cover.

The red dot in the James Webb Space Telescope image is the galaxy Bz5.3, whose light has traveled 12.5 billion years to reach us. It lies behind the Bullet Cluster, whose gravitational field acted as a lens and brightened it by a factor of 3.7.

In August 2024, the MIRI coronagraph on the James Webb Space Telescope stared at Alpha Centauri A, the nearest Sun-like star to our Sun. At 1.5 arcseconds from the star, a point source, S1, blinked into view. Flux: 3.5 mJy, contrast: 5.5×10⁻⁵. Four to six sigma. A lighthouse flashing in the fog.

In the dark room of the early Universe, the first spark flickered. A few hundred million years after the Big Bang, when space was filled only with hydrogen and helium, Population III stars were born: metal-free giants whose light first tore through the primordial darkness.

A spinning top tilted over a table, with a dusty pancake swirling around it. That is what a young stellar system looks like when the star's spin axis and the plane of its protoplanetary disk do not align. Until recently, astronomers did not know how common such a configuration is in nature.

Four hours and fifty-eight minutes. With a rhythm like a metronome, something passes in front of the white dwarf ZTF J1944+4557, dimming its light by a third, sometimes almost by half.

In 2022, the Subaru telescope photographed a point of light 100 astronomical units from the star AB Aurigae. The point was named planet AB Aur b, but debates did not subside: what exactly is glowing, the planet itself or dust around it?

The dayside of WASP-121b is scorching at 2358 kelvins, hotter than the surface of many stars. Here, in perpetual light, the atmosphere does not just boil: it melts rock and turns it into gas. But not all gas stays gaseous. Some condenses into clouds, and those clouds hide titanium the way a trap hides its prey.

A wind blowing against the planet's rotation stokes a carbon forge. That is what the atmosphere of PSR J2322-2650b looks like: a Jupiter-like companion to a millisecond pulsar.

At the center of the Milky Way, 27,000 light-years from Earth, lives the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*. It weighs in at four million Suns. It does not flare brightly like quasars; instead, it smolders almost imperceptibly. For a long time, astronomers debated whether it blows a wind. Now we have the answer: it does.

In 2023, the James Webb Space Telescope turned its gaze toward a distant star in the constellation Virgo. Orbiting it is HAT-P-26 b, a warm Neptune, a world with a mass of 18.6 Earths and a radius of 6.33 Earths. The planet transited across the star's disk, and at that moment its atmosphere became briefly visible.

The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted a scattering of compact objects in the early universe, nicknamed 'little red dots.' They are too red and too dim to be ordinary quasars, and astrophysicists are scratching their heads over what powers them.

Brown dwarfs are objects that sit between planets and stars: they are more massive than planets but not heavy enough to sustain stable fusion in their cores.

Astronomers couldn't understand why the 'hot Neptune desert' — a region right next to stars — has almost no Neptune-sized planets. It was thought that there they are doomed: the star's proximity boils off the atmosphere, leaving a bare rocky core. But the exoplanet LTT-9779 b, 29 times heavier than Earth and with a 19-hour orbit, survived.

Using the most powerful space telescope, James Webb, astronomers peeked into the cosmic dressing room and saw how the rings of asteroid Chariklo are changing.

Many planets around other stars — exoplanets — have elongated orbits. With each close approach, the star’s gravity squeezes and stretches them, like kneading dough. Friction heats up the interior to the point where rock melts, creating underground oceans of magma.

Planet WASP-121b orbits so near its star that the fierce heat boils its atmosphere away, streaming like a comet's tails. With the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers continuously watched this process for the first time.

The TESS telescope, usually hunting for planets around other stars, spotted 24 dimmings around RZ Psc. These were comets — chunks ranging from 1 to 7 km in size, transiting the star's disk. Like a distant searchlight momentarily blocked by a tiny pebble: the deeper the shadow, the larger the object.

The camera lens is no bigger than a quarter. You'd find it in a smartphone, but here it was mounted on the Hayabusa2 probe for asteroid landings.

In the vast darkness of interstellar space, the rogue planet WISE 0855 flickers with a barely perceptible heat glow, like a cooling ember. Its temperature is only a few dozen degrees above freezing — if life existed there, it would see a sunless sky, in an eternal icy haze.

After the Moon's birth, Earth resembled a sizzling lump of dough: a continuous liquid magma and a dense shroud of gases. The Moon acted like a giant spoon, constantly kneading this lump with its gravity. Friction generated heat, delaying cooling.

The most common type of planet in our Galaxy — rocky worlds around other stars, or exoplanets, shrouded in the simplest gas hydrogen. Their innards remained a mystery until scientists recreated the conditions of the interior in the lab.

The James Webb Space Telescope gathered thousands of spectra from distant galaxies — colorful fingerprints of their light. To avoid drowning in this diversity, astronomers tasked a program with sorting through the finds.

Sub-Neptunes — worlds slightly smaller than Neptune — are common among exoplanets. They are detected using the transit method (by the dimming of a star), pioneered by William Borucki.