Discovery of a thick atmosphere on a lava world reshapes our understanding of rocky exoplanets.
Discovery of a thick atmosphere on a lava world reshapes our understanding of rocky exoplanets.
Scientists have found a planet that challenges the long-held assumption that lava planets are too hot to sustain an atmosphere. Waterloo Scientist Dr. Lisa Dang, physics and astronomy professor, and her collaborators made this discovery when they found a thick atmosphere around the rocky exoplanet TOI-561 b after flagging it as a planet of interest.
TOI-561b is a rocky planet orbiting so close to its parent star, and theory predicts it should have had its atmosphere blown away by the intense stellar radiation. Using data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) that covered 37 hours and almost four orbits of the planet, they found that the temperature on the day side of TOI-561 b wasn’t as hot as they thought it should have been. To get the temperature of a planet that far away, scientists look to measure the light emitted by the planet.
Read More: University of Waterloo
Image: This artist’s concept shows what the hot super-Earth exoplanet TOI-561 b and its star could look like based on observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and other observatories. Webb data suggests that the planet is surrounded by a thick atmosphere above a magma ocean. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford (STScI)
