She called this planet the "white whale" for scientists who study planets outside our solar system, just because it's been so difficult to characterize. The new findings fascinated planet researcher Laura Kreidberg, with the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, who wasn't part of this research team but who has used the Hubble Space Telescope to peer at GJ 1214b in the past. She says the James Webb Space Telescope should be looking at more planets in this size range, which will reveal whether this one is an oddball or truly representative of this class of planets. "We're pretty confident that there is water there," says Kempton, who notes that the planet is too hot for water to exist as a liquid. The telescope also saw signs that the planet's atmosphere is not hydrogen-rich, suggesting it's not just a scaled-down Neptune, and there was evidence of water vapor and methane. "That tells us something about what these clouds or hazes in the atmosphere are made of, and that's really the new big question now," she says, adding that scientists will likely start trying to create chemical hazes in the lab that have similar properties, to see what might be happening. Scientists had previously thought the clouds might be made of some kind of dark, sooty haze, she says, but that doesn't fit with all the light being reflected. "We didn't expect the planet to be so reflective, and we actually kind of expected the opposite," says Kempton. That means instead of absorbing all of the energy coming from its star, this planet must be highly reflective and able to scatter back about half of the incoming energy. The temperature on the dayside of the planet is about 530 degrees Fahrenheit-way too hot for any known life, but still far colder than the researchers expected. "We were able to effectively map out the temperature of the planet on all of its different phases," says Kempton. The telescope watched as the planet orbited its star, which occurs once every 38 hours. Space NASA assigns astronauts to enter lunar orbit for the first time in decades
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