Science Daily reports that researchers at Trinity College Dublin, using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, found that SIMP 0136 — a brown dwarf about 20 light-years away previously linked to aurora-like phenomena — has a surprisingly organized weather system.

Nearly all of its atmospheric variability comes down to just two drivers: temperature changes and the vertical structure of its clouds.

The team even identified three recurring weather states that rotate into and out of view, forming a shifting patchwork of hotter regions with thinner clouds and cooler regions with thicker, vertically extended cloud layers.

Both results overturn expectations about how alien atmospheres behave. SIMP 0136's turbulent-looking atmosphere, which Science Daily notes holds weather systems comparable to an extreme version of Jupiter's, turns out to follow a consistent underlying structure rather than change unpredictably.

Meanwhile, SSBCrack News reports that astronomers long characterized exoplanets as smooth, circular objects — until WASP-17b's atmosphere was found to extend farther on one side than the other, a distortion driven by extreme temperatures and powerful winds.

Lead author Dr. Lili Alderson called it proof of concept that planets are in fact 3D objects.

The SIMP 0136 findings came from Webb observations analyzed with Principal Component Analysis, a mathematical technique that lets the data reveal the dominant atmospheric processes without heavy prior assumptions, separating genuine changes from noise.

According to Science Daily, first author Merle Schrader said the weather drivers persist over more than a dozen rotations.

For WASP-17b, SSBCrack News explains the team used a new 'transmission strings' technique developed at the University of Bristol, mapping the atmosphere's outer edges during transit instead of averaging the whole limb into one spectrum — revealing the evening side bulges as winds carry heated air toward the night side.

Both teams say their methods will change how future telescope data is handled.

Professor Johanna Vos told Science Daily the approach rapidly identifies an atmosphere's dominant components, offering an efficient first step before computationally intensive modeling — a tool that can extend to other brown dwarfs and giant exoplanets.

SSBCrack News reports the transmission strings technique could now map atmospheric conditions at different latitudes and between day and night sides across the more than 6,000 confirmed exoplanets.

WASP-17b's study was published in Nature Astronomy, while the SIMP 0136 work appeared in Astronomy & Astrophysics.