The light from LHS 3844 b does not suggest oceans, clouds, or even air. What it points to instead is a dark, battered surface. This surface may have more in common with Mercury or the Moon than with anything you would recognize from Earth. Using the Mid-Infrared Instrument, or MIRI, aboard the James Webb Space Telescope, a team led by Sebastian Zieba and Laura Kreidberg, from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy and Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, examined the rocky exoplanet’s dayside glow and used it to probe the planet’s surface. Their results, published in Nature Astronomy, suggest that LHS 3844 b is likely airless. They also found that it is coated either in fresh volcanic rock or in older material that has been darkened and ground down by space weathering over time. That alone marks a shift in what astronomers can do. For years, much of exoplanet science focused on atmospheres. Here, the target was rock. LHS 3844 b sits about 48.5 light-years away and is about 30 percent larger than …