The team also notes that while it’s possible the planet has no atmosphere, there are some atmospheric compositions that have not been ruled out, such as a pure carbon dioxide atmosphere. “It can’t have a thick methane-dominated atmosphere, similar to that of Saturn’s moon Titan.” “There are some terrestrial-type atmospheres that we can rule out,” explained Lustig-Yaeger. “The telescope is so sensitive that it can easily detect a range of molecules, but we can’t yet make any definitive conclusions about the planet’s atmosphere.”Īlthough the team can’t conclude what is present, they can definitely say what is not present. “The observatory’s data are beautiful,” said Erin May, also of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Although the data shows that this is an Earth-sized terrestrial planet, they do not yet know if it has an atmosphere. The team attempted to assess what is in the planet’s atmosphere by analyzing its transmission spectrum. The green line represents a pure methane atmosphere, which is not favored since if methane were present, it would be expected to block more starlight at 3.3 microns.Īmong all operating telescopes, only Webb is capable of characterizing the atmospheres of Earth-sized exoplanets. The purple line represents a pure carbon dioxide atmosphere and is indistinguishable from a flat line at the current level of precision. The data (white dots) are consistent with a featureless spectrum representative of a planet that has no atmosphere (yellow line). As this spectrum shows, Webb did not observe a detectable quantity of any element or molecule. Researchers used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) to observe exoplanet LHS 475 b on August 31, 2022.
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