More details: See hereToday, we know of more than 5,000 exoplanets : planets outside our solar system that orbit other stars. While the effort to discover new worlds goes on, we're steadily learning more about the exoplanets we've already detected: their sizes, what they're made of and whether they have atmospheres.
In our solar system, we have two distinct categories of planets ⁘ the small rocky ones, including Earth and Mars, and the gas giants such as Jupiter and Saturn. However, exoplanets span a great spectrum of sizes. Our solar system lacks a planet whose size falls into the range between Earth and Neptune, but it turns out that's the most common type of planet we have seen around other stars in our galaxy.
L 98-59 d was discovered in 2019 with Nasa 's Tess space telescope . Most exoplanets, including L 98-59 d, have been detected using the "transit method" . This measures the tiny dips in starlight when the planet passes in front of the star. This dip is more pronounced for larger planets and enables us to figure out the size of a planet.
I am part of an international team of scientists who used JWST to observe one transit of L 98-59 d across the disc of its host star. We then obtained the transmission spectrum of the atmosphere of the exoplanet from these observations. This spectrum hinted at the possible presence of an atmosphere filled with sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulphide .
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