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Jan 17, 2023

Webb Telescope’s just found its first exoplanet — but there’s a hellish catch

Posted by in category: space

Exoplanet LH 475b has a radius about 99 percent the size of Earth’s, but that rocky radius is surrounded by either a choking atmosphere of carbon dioxide — or the vacuum of space, according to recent observations with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). But it’s definitely a planet, and that’s something astronomers couldn’t say for sure until now.

Astronomer Jacob Lustig-Yeager, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, presented their work at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

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