![]() ![]() Instead of watching the planet pass in front of its star, Kempton and colleagues used JWST to look for the glow of the planet right before it disappeared behind the star. But the atmosphere is thick and hazy, blocking astronomers’ ability to detect individual molecules in it. Previously, astronomers tried to observe the makeup of GJ 1214b’s atmosphere by watching how starlight filtered through it. “What we’d like to do with atmospheric characterization is measure their atmospheres and see which is which,” Kempton said. They could be balls of rock with thick hydrogen and helium atmospheres, or maybe water worlds ( SN: 2/22/12). “What the heck are sub-Neptunes?” asked astronomer Eliza Kempton of the University of Maryland in College Park. The planet is a sub-Neptune, meaning its size is somewhere between that of a rocky world like Earth and a gaseous one like Neptune. One of the smaller planets that JWST looked at is GJ 1214b, which has frustrated astronomers since its discovery in 2009 ( SN: 12/16/09). “We don’t even have all the observations yet, but they are already quite exciting.” “The main message is, we’re in business,” said University of Montreal astronomer Björn Benneke. But researchers are buoyed by what JWST’s sharp vision in infrared wavelengths could eventually unearth about the smaller planets beyond our solar system. ![]() These early peeks at far-off worlds don’t yet reveal a lot about these remote locales. And JWST is starting to find new rocky worlds too. ![]()
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