Scientists have scored a pristine view of a pair of exotic worlds orbiting a star more than 300 light-years away — one with sand-like clouds and another surrounded in space by moon-making material.
The discoveries come from YSES-1, a star system in the deep southern sky. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, a collaboration of NASA and its European and Canadian counterparts, a team of astronomers saw so-called “silicate clouds” directly for the first time on an exoplanet, a world far beyond our own solar system. The team’s detection of a dusty disk around the sibling planet is also rare, perhaps just the third time scientists have seen one so clearly.
Webb usually observes exoplanets through indirect methods, such as transmission spectroscopy, a technique for studying a planet’s atmosphere by analyzing how starlight filters through it. What distinguishes this new research is that the two worlds — YSES-1b and YSES-1c — were directly imaged, meaning the telescope captured light from the planets themselves.
Sitting far from their host star, these young planets glow from the leftover heat of their formation. Thanks to their temperature, size, and distance, the result is a clean picture of the exoplanets in thermal infrared, allowing scientists to get much more data.
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