'What the heck is this?' James Webb telescope spots inexplicable planet with diamonds and soot in its atmosphere
Scientists using the James Webb telescope observed a distant exoplanet with an atmosphere of soot and diamonds, challenging all explanations.
The exoplanet PSR J2322-2650b has an atmosphere of soot and diamonds, new James Webb telescope observations hint (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford (STScI))
A distant exoplanet appears to sport a sooty atmosphere that is confusing the scientists who recently spotted it.
The Jupiter-size world, detected by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), doesn't have the familiar helium-hydrogen combination we are used to in atmospheres from our solar system, nor other common molecules, like water, methane or carbon dioxide.
"This was an absolute surprise," study co-author Peter Gao, a staff scientist at the Carnegie Earth and Planets Laboratory, said in a statement. "I remember after we got the data down, our collective reaction was, 'What the heck is this?' It's extremely different from what we expected."
Neutron sun
Researchers probed the bizarre environment of the planet, known as PSR J2322-2650b, in a paper published Tuesday (Dec. 16) in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Although the planet was detected by a radio telescope survey in 2017, it took the sharper vision of JWST (which launched in 2021) to examine PSR J2322-2650b's environment from 750 light-years away.
PSR J2322-2650b orbits a pulsar. Pulsars are fast-spinning neutron stars — the ultradense cores of stars that have exploded as supernovas — that emit radiation in brief, regular pulses that are visible only when their lighthouse-like beams of electromagnetic radiation aim squarely at Earth. (That's bizarre on its own, as no other pulsar is known to have a gas-giant planet, and few pulsars have planets at all, the science team stated.)
The infrared instruments on JWST can't actually see this particular pulsar because it is sending out high-energy gamma-rays. However, JWST's "blindness" to the pulsar is actually a boon to scientists because they can easily probe the companion planet, PSR J2322-2650b, to see what the planet's environment is like.
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"This system is unique because we are able to view the planet illuminated by its host star, but not see the host star at all," co-author Maya Beleznay, a doctoral candidate in physics at Stanford University, said in the statement. "We can study this system in more detail than normal exoplanets."
