NASA's high-powered James Webb Space Telescope has found water vapor in the atmosphere of a one-of-a-kind exoplanet hundreds of light-years from Earth.
The second map showed that there is a difference of up to 1,000 degrees between the hottest and coolest points of the planet. The temperatures also seemed to change based on elevation, by hundreds of degrees.
WASP-18 b, seen in an artist concept, is a gas giant exoplanet 10 times more massive than Jupiter that orbits its star in just 23 hours. Researchers used NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to study the planet as it moved behind its star. Temperatures there reach 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit .
"Because the water features in this spectrum are so subtle, they were difficult to identify in previous observations. That made it really exciting to finally see water features with these JWST observations," said Anjali Piette, a postdoctoral fellow at the Carnegie Institution for Science and one of the authors of the new research, in NASA's news release.
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