JWST finds the planet TRAPPIST-1b may not have an atmosphere

The James Webb Telescope (JWST) has searched one of many well-known TRAPPIST-1 exoplanets for an environment, and it didn’t discover something. Some fashions had predicted thick atmospheres for all of those worlds, but when they haven’t any atmospheres in any respect it might decrease the variety of probably liveable planets within the cosmos.

The TRAPPIST-1 system consists of a crimson dwarf star with not less than seven planets orbiting it, 4 of which orbit within the liveable zone – the world round a star the place temperatures permit for liquid water. Thomas Greene at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California and his colleagues used JWST to look at TRAPPIST-1b, the planet closest to the star.

They regarded on the planet simply earlier than and after it handed behind the star, which is the optimum time to identify how warmth from the star is affecting the planet. “People were predicting that these planets would have pretty thick atmospheres that would circulate the heat around the planet, so they wouldn’t be very bright,” says Greene. “So we took five observations because we thought we would have to stack them up to see anything, but when the data came back it was staring us right in the face.”

TRAPPIST-1b was far brighter than the researchers anticipated, indicating that the daylight was hitting one aspect of the planet and never being absorbed by a thick ambiance. The temperature of that aspect of the planet, referred to as the day aspect, was about 230°C (446°F), about 100 levels hotter than we’d anticipate if there have been an environment distributing the warmth across the globe.

The more than likely clarification is that this planet’s ambiance was misplaced quickly after its formation, when the star was brightest, or {that a} highly effective stellar flare stripped it away. “There’s a lot of energy getting dumped onto the planets, and that can do bad things to atmospheres,” says Greene. “There are probably important interactions between the star and the planets – it’ll be really interesting when we look at the results for the whole system.”

Over the subsequent yr, varied teams of researchers plan to make use of JWST to look at every of the TRAPPIST-1 worlds. With so a lot of them, the system can function a laboratory to know the exact circumstances on quite a lot of exoplanets round crimson dwarf stars and whether or not they is likely to be amenable to life, which is vital as a result of they’re essentially the most considerable kind of stars within the universe and are anticipated to host the overwhelming majority of exoplanets.