James Webb peered into the atmosphere of what was thought to be a Venus-like planet, and saw something unexpected.
Of all the planets we’ve discovered beyond our solar system, the majority are not Earth-like at all. They are most often gas giants like Jupiter that orbit very close to their stars, making them extremely hot. These are also generally the easiest type of exoplanet to detect. Very few of the thousands of discovered exoplanets could be potentially habitable — fewer than 50 in total.
“We want to know if rocky planets have atmospheres or not,” said Sebastian Zieba, lead author of Webb’s research into the TRAPPIST-1 system, in a statement. “In the past, we could only really study planets with thick, hydrogen-rich atmospheres. With Webb, we can finally start to search for atmospheres dominated by oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide.”
However, when the researchers used Webb to observe TRAPPIST-1 c’s atmosphere, they found it was very different from Venus’s thick, carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere. Instead, the planet has an extremely thin atmosphere — if it has an atmosphere at all.
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