New planet captured by James Webb space telescope shocks scientists
1James Webb Space Telescope spots ALIEN PLANET shrouded in weird sand-filled clouds
The James Webb Space Telescope has found a strange alien world shrouded in clouds of sand-like silicate grains.
The exoplanet discovery, described in a new paper as the first detection of its kind, was made by the James Webb Space Telescope's NIRSpec and MIRI instruments. In the data, astronomers spotted evidence of silicate-rich clouds around a brown dwarf nearly 20 times the size of Jupiter. The finding confirms some earlier theories about these odd planet-like worlds.
Brown dwarfs are strange objects that are not quite big enough to ignite into stars but a little too big for ordinary planets. While brown dwarfs can't burn regular hydrogen, they can produce their own light and heat by burning deuterium (a less common isotope of hydrogen that contains an extra neutron).
The brown dwarf in question is called VHS 1256 b and orbits two small red dwarf stars, some 72 light-years from Earth in the constellation Corvus, or crow, in the southern sky. Astronomers discovered the strange exoplanet in 2016 and it has puzzled them ever since due to its reddish glow. They believed that glow could be caused by some type of atmosphere. Observations from the James Webb Space Telescope have now confirmed those theories, revealing that VHS 1256 b must be wrapped in thick clouds full of sand-like silicate grains, according to Forbes (opens in new tab).
Webb also detected water, methane, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, sodium and potassium in the atmosphere of VHS 1256 b.
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