All posts tagged: JWST discoveries

Astronomers map the climate of Earth-like exoplanets for the first time

Astronomers map the climate of Earth-like exoplanets for the first time

Published by Jenni Sidey

A pair of scorched worlds circling the red dwarf TRAPPIST-1 now offer one of the clearest looks yet at what life may be up against around the most common stars in the Milky Way. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, an international team that included researchers from the University of Bern and the University of Geneva has, for the first time, mapped the climate of rocky exoplanets with masses similar to Earth. Their target was not a giant gas planet or a bloated world with an easy-to-read atmosphere, but two small rocky planets in the famous TRAPPIST-1 system, known as TRAPPIST-1b and TRAPPIST-1c. What they found was stark. The two worlds seem to swing between blistering daylight and brutal cold, with day-to-night temperature differences topping 500 degrees Celsius. That kind of contrast points to a simple conclusion: neither planet appears to have a dense atmosphere capable of moving heat from one side to the other. The result, published in Nature Astronomy, sharpens one of the biggest questions in exoplanet science. Rocky planets around red dwarf …

The haziest planet we’ve ever seen won’t give up its secrets

The haziest planet we’ve ever seen won’t give up its secrets

Published by Jenni Sidey

Something is hiding inside Kepler-51d, and it’s doing a remarkably good job of it. About 2,615 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, this peculiar world orbits a young Sun-like star every 130 days. It’s roughly the size of Saturn. Its mass, however, is only a few times that of Earth, making it so unimaginably light for its size that planetary scientists sometimes compare it to cotton candy. Now, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has stared directly at this planet as it crossed in front of its host star, and the result is both a scientific milestone and a profound frustration. The planet is wrapped in the thickest haze ever measured on any world. A study led by Penn State researchers, published in the The Astronomical Journal, found that this haze is so dense and so high in the atmosphere that it effectively blocks all chemical fingerprints beneath it. The team cannot tell what the planet is made of. They cannot determine where it formed. The haze, it turns out, is not just an atmospheric feature. …