The Webb Space Telescope discovered a nearby planet

Scientists have discovered a rocky exoplanet with a possible atmosphere, which they believe may be bubbling up from a magma ocean on the distant world.

The planet is called 55 Cancri e. It is located about 41 light years from Earth and, according to the team’s observations, has a layer of gases on its surface that may constitute an atmosphere. 55 Cancri e is a super Earth, a rocky body about 8.8 times the size of our world with an equilibrium temperature of about 2,000 Kelvin or 3,140 degrees Fahrenheit. The team’s findings were published today in Nature.

“55 Cancri e is one of the most enigmatic exoplanets,” Brice-Olivier Demory, an astrophysicist at the University of Bern and co-author of the study, said in a university statement. “Despite the enormous amounts of observing time gained with a dozen ground-based and space-based facilities over the past decade, its very nature has remained elusive—until today, when pieces of the puzzle could finally be put together thanks to the Space Telescope.” James Webb (JWST).”

Webb has been conducting scientific operations from a point approximately one million miles from Earth for almost two years, providing a wealth of information about galaxy formation, ancient light sources, distant exoplanets, and even other worlds in our own solar system. The team studied the exoplanet using Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), its two main imagers. “The measurements rule out the scenario in which the planet is a lava world enveloped by a tenuous atmosphere made of vaporized rock,” the researchers wrote in their study, “and indicate a genuine volatile atmosphere likely rich in (carbon dioxide) or (carbon).

The planet is tidally locked, meaning that one of its sides faces toward its host star at all times (in the same way that the Moon’s near side always faces Earth). But measurements of 55 Cancri’s daytime temperature turned out to be colder than the team expected: evidence that an atmosphere is distributing heat around the planet.

“There have been many observations of atmospheres on exoplanets, but they all have massive atmospheres dominated by hydrogen,” Renyu Hu, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and lead author of the study, said in an email to Gizmodo. “Here we finally obtained an observation of the atmosphere surrounding a rocky exoplanet.”

Although 55 Cancri e is not hospitable to life as we know it, it is a useful case study to show how the Webb telescope can characterize distant worlds without directly imaging them. Rocky exoplanets, unlike gas giants, are very difficult to visualize directly; They are not bright like stars and are much less massive. Instead, scientists discern aspects of an exoplanet’s composition. wearing the stars they orbit. The recent research team identified 55 Cancri’s possible atmosphere by carefully measuring the amount of light coming from the planet as it orbited its star. He Next-generation Habitable Worlds ObservatoryIf it does take off, it will make it much easier to discern aspects of distant exoplanets, potentially increasing scientists’ ability to find life beyond Earth.

Astronomers have documented more than 5,000 exoplanets till the date. These worlds must be observed closely so that researchers can separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of astrobiology; Even looking at hostile worlds can shed light on how planets evolve and what kind of planetary diversity exists in the cosmos.

In March 2023, a different team of researchers discovered that the The rocky planet TRAPPIST-1b has no atmosphere., perhaps because its proximity to its host star destroys everything the planet can develop. The TRAPPIST-1 system is attractive to astrobiologists because several of its worlds lie in the so-called “habitable zone,” which makes the worlds neither too hot nor too cold for life as we know it to persist.

Atmospheres are crucial for supporting life, so as interest in the TRAPPIST-1 system wanes, 55 Cancri e emerges as a fascinating candidate for astrobiological studies.

Further: The best images from the Webb space telescope, a year later

A version of this article originally appeared on Gizmodo.