Scientists have discovered a rocky exoplanet with a possible atmosphere and think it could be rising from a magma ocean on a distant world.
This planet is called 55 Cancri e. The planet is about 41 light-years from Earth, and researchers have observed a layer of gas on its surface that could form an atmosphere. 55 Cancri is a super-Earth, a rocky body roughly 8.8 times the size of Earth and with an equilibrium temperature of about 2,000 Kelvin, or 3,140 degrees Fahrenheit. The team’s findings were as follows: published In nature today.
“55 Cancri is one of the most mysterious exoplanets,” Brice-Olivier Demoly, an astrophysicist at the University of Bern and co-author of the study, said in a university statement. Stated. “Despite the vast amount of observation time gained over the past decade at dozens of ground and space facilities, its nature itself has remained elusive, but today, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Part of the puzzle is finally coming together.”
Webb has conducted scientific activities from a distance of approximately 1 million miles from Earth. almost 2 years, yielding many insights into the formation of galaxies, ancient light sources, distant exoplanets, and even other worlds in our solar system. The research team studied the exoplanets using Webb’s two main imaging instruments: the near-infrared camera (NIRCam) and the mid-infrared instrument (MIRI). “These measurements rule out the scenario that the planet is a lava world with a tenuous atmosphere made of evaporated rock,” the researchers wrote in their study. [carbon dioxide] or [carbon monoxide]”
The planet is tidally locked, meaning that one of its sides always faces its host star (much like the moon’s near side always faces Earth). However, measurements of 55 Cancri’s daytime temperatures revealed that they were colder than the researchers expected. This is evidence that the atmosphere distributes heat around the Earth.
Renyu Hu, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and lead author of the study, said, “Numerous observations have been made of exoplanet atmospheres, but none of them contain hydrogen. “It has a huge atmosphere consisting mainly of…” he said in an email to Gizmodo. “Here, we finally have observations of the atmosphere surrounding a rocky exoplanet.”
55 Cancri is not a hospitable place for life as we know it, but this shows how the Webb telescope can characterize distant worlds without directly imaging them. A useful case study to illustrate. In contrast to gas giants, rocky exoplanets are It is very difficult to visualize directlythey are not as bright as stars and have much less mass.Instead, scientists identify aspects of the exoplanet’s composition Use The stars they orbit. A team of researchers recently identified the possible atmosphere of 55 Cancri by carefully measuring the amount of light it emits as it orbits the star.of Next Generation Habitable World ObservatoryIf it were to land on Earth, it would be much easier to identify distant exoplanets, potentially increasing scientists’ ability to discover life beyond Earth.
Astronomers have documented all of this. 5,000 exoplanets up to now. Researchers need to take a closer look at these worlds to distinguish the wheat from the chaff from an astrobiological perspective. Just by looking at hostile worlds, we can reveal how planets evolve and what kind of planetary diversity exists in the universe.
In March 2023, another team of researchers discovered that: Rocky planet TRAPPIST-1b has no atmosphereProbably because it’s so close to its host star that anything the planet could develop into would be zapped. The TRAPPIST-1 system is attractive to astrobiologists. That’s because some of those worlds are located in so-called “habitable zones,” where the world is neither too hot nor too cold for life as we know it to persist.
Because the atmosphere is so important to supporting life, 55 Cancri has emerged as an attractive candidate for astrobiology research as interest in the TRAPPIST-1 system wanes.
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