The planet is rocky and almost precisely the same size as Earth, but whips around its star in only two days. Researchers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have formally embarked on a new frontier: Identifying and analyzing rocky exoplanets that orbit red dwarf stars. A team led by Kevin Steve
, a planet that orbits another star, for the first time. Formally classified as LHS 475 b, the planet is almost exactly the same size as our own, clocking in at 99% of Earth’s diameter. The research team is led by Kevin Stevenson and Jacob Lustig-Yaeger, both of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.
A flat line in a transmission spectrum, like this one, can be exciting – it can tell us a lot about the planet. The purple line represents a pure carbon dioxide atmosphere and is indistinguishable from a flat line at the current level of precision. An atmosphere made up of pure carbon dioxide is far more difficult to detect, even for Webb’s advanced instruments. “We require very, very precise data to be able to distinguish a pure carbon dioxide atmosphere from no atmosphere at all,” explained Jacob Lustig-Yaeger of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
The gray lines extending above and below each data point are error bars that show the uncertainty of each measurement, or the reasonable range of actual possible values. For a single observation, the error on these measurements is extremely small . Among all operating telescopes, only Webb is capable of characterizing the atmospheres of Earth-sized exoplanets. The team attempted to assess what is in the planet’s atmosphere by analyzing its transmission spectrum. Although the data show that this is an Earth-sized terrestrial planet, they do not yet know if it has an atmosphere. “The observatory’s data are beautiful,” said Erin May, also of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
Credit: Illustration: NASA, ESA, CSA, Leah Hustak , Science: Kevin B. Stevenson , Jacob A. Lustig-Yaeger , Erin M. May , Guangwei Fu , Sarah E. Moran
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