NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope recently observed TRAPPIST-1 b, a rocket planet that has a dayside temperature of approximately 500 kelvins (230°C), thus suggesting that it has no significant atmosphere. This marks Webb’s first detection of any form of light emitted by an exoplanet as small and as cool as the rocky planets in our own solar system.
Hubble determined that TRAPPIST-1 b had no evidence for a puffy atmosphere, but were not able to rule out a dense one. Webb found that the planet is basically a blackbody made of bare rock with no atmosphere to circulate the heat, nor did i see any signs of light being absorbed by carbon dioxide, which would be apparent in these measurements if an atmosphere were present.
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There are ten times as many of these stars in the Milky Way as there are stars like the Sun, and they are twice as likely to have rocky planets as stars like the Sun. But they are also very active – they are very bright when they’re young and they give off flares and X-rays that can wipe out an atmosphere,” said Thomas Greene, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Ames Research Center.
