JWST gets best view yet of planet in hotly pursued star system

An artist’s rendering shows approximations of the seven planets of the TRAPPIST-1 system. TRAPPIST-1b is closest to its star.Using the James Webb Space Telescope , astronomers have confirmed that the planet TRAPPIST-1b probably has no atmosphere. Researchers have been excited to use the new telescope to explore it and its six siblings, which are all roughly the size of Earth and which orbit a star 12 parsecs from Earth.

Previous studies with the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, using a different technique, showed that TRAPPIST-1b — the innermost planet in the system — probably doesn’t have a large puffy atmosphere made mostly of hydrogen . But researchers couldn’t rule out whether it has a dense atmosphere, as Earth might have had billions of years ago.JWST looked at TRAPPIST-1 in mid-infrared wavelengths of light — 20 times redder than the human eye can see — to see how that radiation changed as TRAPPIST-1b moved behind the star. By measuring the brightness of the star and planet together compared with that of the star alone, astronomers could calculate how much came from the planet.

It’s not surprising that TRAPPIST-1b has no atmosphere, because it is blasted by four times as much radiation as Earth receives from the Sun. TRAPPIST-1 is also wracked by stellar flares and other activity that sends radiation across its planets, potentially scouring away atmospheres. Still, understanding these conditions is crucial because M dwarf stars — cool, dim stars such as TRAPPIST-1 — often have Earth-sized planets orbiting them.

A key early step in studying the TRAPPIST-1 system is to take advantage of JWST’s power to understand the star itself, says Julien de Wit, an exoplanet researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge: “know thy star” should come before “know thy planets”. Astronomers should work together to study TRAPPIST-1 with JWST using multiple techniques, to understand the star as fully as possible, he says.

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