FOCUS ON - WEBB SCORES ITS FIRST ROCKY PLANET CONFIRMATION

Hopefully the first of many more detections to come

- Sharmila Kuthunur

NASA’s newest space telescope has notched another milestone with observations of its first rocky world. A little over a year after its launch, the historic James Webb Space Telescope has detected its first rocky exoplanet, and the distinction goes to LHS 475 b – an Earth-sized planet as hot as Venus located just 41 light years away from Earth in the constellation of Octans. Webb’s design process began when scientists had identified only a handful of exoplanets, and the observatory wasn’t tuned to discover alien worlds. However, the telescope’s formidable optics – and particularly its ability to split light from a source by wavelength – make it a powerful tool for studying planets and planet candidates that scientists have already spotted.

Using Webb’s Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) instrument, Jacob Lustig-Yaeger, an astronomer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, and his team looked for atmospheres on a handful of rocky Earth-sized exoplanets. One of their targets was a planet called LHS 475 b, hints of which had previously been spotted by NASA’s primary planet-hunter, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission that launched in April 2018.