A year after the supertelescope James Webb reached its destination, for the first time it managed to detect an exoplanet (those that orbit stars) in one of the most awaited missions by astronomers who carry out their monitoring. According to analyses, this could be a possibly habitable planet.
Do you want to know more about the discovery and understand how it was made? So keep following the article below so you don’t miss any of the curiosities we’ve separated for you!
James Webb discovers new habitable planet
Dubbed LHS 475b, the rocky celestial body is just 41 light-years from Earth and is about the same size as our planet. However, according to information, it would hardly harbor life, since the local temperature, according to telescope data, exceeds hundreds of degrees Celsius.
Still, according to data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (Tess) mapping, carried out by the North American Space Agency (NASA), suggested in the past the existence of the star in the constellation of Octans. However, only high-precision equipment like the James Webb was able to confirm this guess recently, which was confirmed at the 241st meeting of the North American Astronomical Society, held in Seattle.
Furthermore, the team that was led by astronomers Jacob Lustig-Yager and Kevin Stevenson, Johns Hopkins University, used the information collected by the telescope to observe the transit of the exoplanet on three occasions. When it passes by the star it orbits, the light emitted by it becomes less intense, given that it served to confirm the existence of the star.
It is noteworthy that, currently, James Webb is the only equipment capable of characterizing the atmospheres of other planets similar in size to Earth. For this reason, astronomers used the telescope to analyze the new planet in different wavelengths of light, in order to find out if it has an atmosphere. So far, it has not been possible to reach a definitive conclusion, but, according to the data, this is a possibility.
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Opportunity for reanalysis
At the beginning of the year, scientists will have another chance to analyze the planet and hope to be able to elucidate questions that are still open. For now, the data suggest that, if there is an atmosphere, it does not have similarities with Earth’s, as in the case of density, which rules out the presence of methane, a metal found on Titan, one of Saturn’s moons.
One of the astronomers’ bets is that the composition is more similar to that of Venus, composed of carbon dioxide. In addition, LHS 475b completes, every two Earth days, a complete revolution on its sun, which has less than half the temperature of our star. Thus, it is possible that for this reason the planet has an atmosphere of its own, despite its proximity to the star.
In a note, Mark Clampin, NASA’s Astrophysics Division, said that these first analyzes open up several future opportunities for us to study new rocky planets through James Webb. Right now, the telescope is bringing humanity ever closer to having a greater understanding of worlds very similar to our own.
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