A scorching planet 1,300 light-years away is not round after all

Dr Lili Alderson and colleagues at Cornell and Bristol used the James Webb Space Telescope and a new technique called transmission strings to map the true shape of WASP-17b, a white-hot giant planet. Its atmosphere, published in Nature Astronomy, turns out to be a lopsided, stretched sphere shaped by fierce winds — the first time astronomers have measured an exoplanet's uneven outline.