This Diamond Exoplanet Lost Its Atmosphere ⁘ Then It Grew Another

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James Webb Space Telescope chief scientist Jane Rigby receives highest US civilian award | Space

Her T-shirt was decorated with illuminated realms warped by massive structures in their vicinity, stretched and squashed like taffy thanks to gravitational tides that twist the very fabric of spacetime as though it were a bendable sea of four-dimensional rubber. This image was actually among the first stills captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, a gold-plated, multibillion-dollar instrument located a million miles from Earth ⁘ a machine for which Rigby serves as the chief scientist, and for which she just earned the White House's 2024 Presidential Medal of Freedom.

It is scenes such as this quarry of manipulated galaxies that Rigby manages to help bring down to Earth with the rest of the JWST team, both metaphorically and literally speaking. Images constructed with this telescope have allowed scientists to deepen their nuanced research, encouraged journalists to muse endlessly in their stories and indeed inspired designers to craft thought-provoking pieces that encapsulate concepts once confined to fiction. They've changed how we see the universe, and how we mentally place ourselves within.

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Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have discovered that a scorching hot lava planet, believed to be composed of diamond, grew a second atmosphere ⁘ and that was after its star destroyed its first atmosphere.

The planet, known as 55 Cancri e , is located around 41 light-years from the solar system and has a width almost twice that of Earth and a mass around nine times greater than our planet. Among the bucket of extrasolar planets, or "exoplanets," scientists have cataloged over the years, this world is classified as a " super-Earth ." That means it's more massive than Earth, but way lighter than planets like Neptune and Uranus. Yet, that's where comparisons to our world end for 55 Cancri e .

This exoplanet is so dense that astronomers have hypothesized it to be composed of mostly carbon that's been compressed to diamond. Also, the exoplanet exists a mere 1.4 miles (2.3 kilometers) from its sun-like star, 55 Cancri A. That's equal to 0.01544 times the distance between Earth and the sun. This proximity means 55 Cancri e orbits its host star once every approximately 17 Earth hours and has a roasting hot surface temperature of around 4,400 degrees Fahrenheit (about 2,400 degrees Celsius).

The radiation from its star has thus stripped 55 Cancri e of its original or primary atmosphere, just as is seen with other rocky planets that orbit their stars at such close proximities. However, the new research indicates a thick layer of gases surrounds the planet, implying it has "grown" a second atmosphere ⁘ and the scientists behind the discovery thinks they know how this happened.

To investigate which of these scenarios was correct, Hu and colleagues examined JWST observations of the planet as it passed behind the star 55 Cancri A, an event called a secondary eclipse . Data from two secondary eclipses of 55 Cancri e ruled out the possibility of it being a virtually bare lava world lacking a substantial atmosphere.