More Webb observations were shared at the meeting on Wednesday, including never-before-seen views of a dusty disk swirling around a nearby red dwarf star. “Webb is bringing us closer and closer to a new understanding of Earth-like worlds outside the Solar System, and the mission is only just getting started.” “These first observational results from an Earth-sized, rocky planet open the door to many future possibilities for studying rocky planet atmospheres with Webb,” said Mark Clampin, Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters, in a statement. The researchers believe their discovery will just be the first of many in Webb’s future. Given that the star is less than half the temperature of our sun, it’s possible that the planet could still maintain an atmosphere despite its close proximity to the star. The planet completes a single orbit around its red dwarf host star every 2 Earth days. “We have barely begun scratching the surface of what their atmospheres might be like.” “We’re at the forefront of studying small, rocky exoplanets,” Lustig-Yaeger said. This graphic shows the change in relative brightness of the host star and planet, spanning three hours. If the researchers detect any clouds on LHS 475 b, it may turn out to be more like Venus - which is considered to be Earth’s hotter twin with a carbon dioxide atmosphere. Webb’s detections also revealed that the planet is a few hundred degrees warmer than our planet. The astronomers will have another chance to observe the planet again over the summer and conduct follow-up analysis on the potential presence of an atmosphere. “It can’t have a thick methane-dominated atmosphere, similar to that of Saturn’s moon Titan.” “There are some terrestrial-type atmospheres that we can rule out,” Lustig-Yaeger said. For now, the team hasn’t been able to make any definitive conclusions, but the telescope’s sensitivity picked up on a range of molecules that were present. The research team used Webb to analyze the planet across multiple wavelengths of light to see whether it has an atmosphere. Webb is the only telescope that has the capability to characterize the atmospheres of exoplanets that are the size of Earth. “The fact that it is also a small, rocky planet is impressive for the observatory,” Stevenson said. The existence of the planet has been confirmed by the Webb telescope. This illustration shows the exoplanet LHS 475 b, rocky and almost the exact same size as Earth. The planet’s discovery was announced Wednesday at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle. Webb’s pristine data validate it,” Lustig-Yaeger said in a statement. “There is no question that the planet is there. They watched for dips in starlight as the planet passed in front of its host star, called a transit, and watched two transits occur. Previous data collected by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, had suggested the planet might exist.Ī team of researchers, led by staff astronomer Kevin Stevenson and postdoctoral fellow Jacob Lustig-Yaeger at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, observed the target using Webb. The rocky world is 41 light-years away in the Octans constellation. The celestial body, known as LHS 475 b and located outside of our solar system, is almost exactly the same size as Earth. A nearby giant spiral galaxy, Messier 83, seems to be stealing gas from the dwarf galaxy, stopping new stars from being born.The James Webb Space Telescope can add another cosmic accomplishment to its list: The space observatory has been used to confirm the existence of an exoplanet for the first time. Rather than being stubborn, LEDA 677373 seems to have been the unfortunate victim of a cosmic crime. These observations showed that the galaxy has been around for at least six billion years - plenty of time to form stars. In a bid to find out why, Hubble imaged the galaxy’s individual stars at different wavelengths, a method that allows astronomers to figure out a star’s age. This particular dwarf galaxy contains a plentiful reservoir of gas from which it could form stars. Their diverse properties make them intriguing objects to astronomers, but their small size means that we can only explore those that lie closest to us, within the Local Group, such as LEDA 677373 shown above. Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA.Dwarf galaxies are small, faint collections of stars and gas. A NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of LEDA 677373 (α=13h 37.0m, δ=-33° 22′ J2000), a dwarf galaxy 14 million light-years away in the constellation of Centaurus.
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