Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

January 12 news, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) James Webb Space Telescope discovered an exoplanet for the first time. The planet, called LHS 475b, is located 41 light-years away in the octagonal constellation. It is composed mainly of rocks and is almost the same size as Earth.

Data previously collected by the NASA Transit Exoplanet Reconnaissance Satellite (TESS) suggest that the planet may exist.

A team led by astronomer Kevin Stevenson (Kevin Stevenson) and postdoctoral Jacob Rastig-Jager (Jacob Lustig-Yaeger) at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory used the Weber Telescope to discover the planet. The researchers announced the findings at the 241st American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle on Wednesday local time.

▲ exoplanet LHS 475b data map A planet causes a decrease in the brightness of its parent star when it passes in front of its parent star, which is called a planetary transit. Scientists observed two transit events.

"there is no doubt that the planet is there. Weber's raw data confirm this," Rastig Jager said in a statement.

At present, the Weber Telescope is the only astronomical telescope capable of detecting the atmospheric characteristics of exoplanets of Earth size. The team used Weber to analyze the light of the exoplanet in multiple bands to study whether the planet has an atmosphere. So far, the research team has not been able to draw a clear conclusion, but the Weber Telescope has captured a series of existing molecules.

"We can get rid of an Earth-like atmosphere," Rastig-Jager said. "it can't have a thick atmosphere dominated by methane like Titan."

This summer, astronomers will have the opportunity to observe the planet again and conduct a follow-up study of the possible atmosphere.

Weber telescope data also show that the temperature of LHS 475b is hundreds of degrees higher than that of Earth. If researchers detect clouds on planets, they may be more like Venus.

"We are in the early stages of studying small rocky exoplanets," Rastig-Jager said. "We are just beginning to understand what their atmosphere might look like."

The parent star of LHS 475b is a red dwarf star, and the planet orbits its parent star once every two earth days. Considering that the temperature of the red dwarf is less than half that of the sun, it is still possible for LHS 475b to have an atmosphere even though it is close to its home star.

"these observations make it more possible to study the atmospheres of rocky planets with the Weber Telescope in the future," Mark Mark Clampin, director of astrophysics at NASA headquarters, said in a statement. "Weber brings us closer and closer to a new understanding of the extrasolar world."

Researchers also shared more observations from the Weber Telescope on Wednesday, including its capture of a dust disk orbiting the red dwarf AU Mic in the infrared band.

The dust disk around AU Mic is made up of remnants of planet formation. When the predecessor of the planet collides with each other, a dust disk filled with debris is formed around the star.

"by studying such a fragment disk, we can understand the recent dynamic history of the system," said Kellen Lawson, a leading member of the AU Mic research team. "

AU Mic is located 32 light-years away in the microscope base. According to the researchers, the star is about 23 million years old, and since planet formation usually takes less than 10 million years, planet formation around the star has stopped. Other telescopes have discovered two planets orbiting AU Mic.

"the system is one of the few typical cases of young stars, with known exoplanets and debris disks close enough and bright enough to be fully studied using the powerful instruments of the Weber Telescope," said study co-author Josh Schlieder, lead researcher of the observation program at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

In addition, the researchers used the Weber Telescope to observe NGC 346, a star-forming region in the small Magellanic Cloud.

About 2 billion to 3 billion years after the Big Bang, galaxies were filled with fireworks of star formation. The peak of star formation is called "cosmic noon". "there are many galaxies like the small Magellanic Cloud NGC 346 at noon in the universe," said Margaret Meixner, an astronomer at the University Association for Space Research. "now NGC 346 is the only massive cluster that is crazily forming stars, providing a good opportunity for us to understand what the universe is like at noon."

In the new image taken by the Weber Telescope, forming stars can be seen inhaling ribbons of gas and dust from surrounding molecular clouds. These substances not only nourish the stars, but also eventually form the surrounding planets.

"We see not only the components of the stars, but also the potential components of the planets," co-researcher Guido de Marchi (Guido De Marchi), a space science instructor at the European Space Agency. "because the environment of the small Magellanic Cloud is similar to the galaxies of the universe at noon, rocky planets may have formed earlier in cosmic history than we thought."

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