'Mini Neptune’ outside of our solar system captured by James Webb Space telescope

 The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is able to see what the universe looked like around a quarter of a billion years (possibly back to 100 million years) after the Big Bang, when the first stars and galaxies started to form. It has observed a mysterious planet outside of our solar system known as planet GJ1214b.

The atmosphere in this mysterious world is known to be steamy and vapour contributes to a major part of it. The planet is too hot to harbour liquid water oceans. "The planet is totally blanketed by some sort of haze or cloud layer. The atmosphere just remained totally hidden from us until this observation,” said lead author Eliza Kempton, a researcher at the University of Maryland.

If indeed water-rich, the planet could have been a “water world” with large amounts of watery and icy material at the time of its formation, Kempton noted in a paper published in Nature.
The research team took a chance on a novel approach to penetrate such a thick barrier : In addition to capturing the host star's light that has filtered through the planet's atmosphere, they tracked GJ 1214 b through nearly its entire orbit around the star with the help of Webb's Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI).

They created a "heat map" of the planet Using MIRI, as it orbited the star which revealed both its day and night sides. Kempton noted that the temperatures shifted from 279 to 165 degrees Celsius.

Such a big shift is only possible in an atmosphere made up of heavier molecules, such as water or methane, which appear similar when observed by MIRI. Meaning the atmosphere of the planet is not composed mainly of lighter hydrogen molecules, Kempton explained.

The planet is hot by human standards, it is much cooler than expected, Kempton noted. Because its unusually shiny atmosphere, which came as a surprise to the researchers, reflects a large fraction of the light from its parent star rather than absorbing it and growing hotter.

Mini-Neptunes or sub-Neptunes as they’re called are the most common type of planet in the galaxy, but mysterious to us because they don’t occur in our solar system. Measurements so far show they are broadly similar to a downsized version of our own Neptune. Hopefully with further observation, more will be unveiled. 

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