NASA's James Webb Space Telescope Discovers Water on a Distant Planet. Details are available here
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has detected water in the atmosphere of a hot, puffy gaseous planet orbiting a Sun-like star over a thousand light-years away, the US space agency announced today. According to NASA, the monitoring is the most informative to date, demonstrating Webb's extraordinary ability to analyze distant atmospheres. WASP-96 b is one of the Milky Way's more than 5,000 confirmed exoplanets. It is located approximately 1,150 light-years away in the southern-sky constellation Phoenix, and it symbolizes a type of gas giant that has no direct alternative in our solar system, according to the organization. WASP-96 b is much puffier than any planet orbiting our Sun, with a mass less than 50 percent that of Jupiter and a diameter 1.2 times larger. It is significantly hotter when the temperature exceeds 538 degrees Celsius. According to NASA, WASP-96 b orbits its Sun-like star at one-ninth the length between Mercury and the Sun, completing one circuit every three and a half Earth days. WASP-96 b is an ideal target for atmospheric observations due to its large size, short orbital period, puffy ambience, and lack of contaminating light from nearby objects in the sky. Read the full article
