A breakthrough in the search for habitable worlds

Researchers believe they are on the verge of a major breakthrough in the search for other worlds that could harbor life. This is according to a report after the James Webb Space Telescope detected water vapor on an alien planet.

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Astronomers made an unusual discovery using the James Webb Space Telescope. Images of the rocky planet GJ 486 b clearly show water vapor on an exoplanet – just where the vapor comes from is currently not entirely clear.

Is there an atmosphere around GJ 486 b?

Water vapor could indicate the presence of an atmosphere around GJ 486 b. This could be an important discovery in the search for habitable worlds outside the solar system.

The challenge now is to determine whether the water vapor could have come from the planet’s host star or from the planet itself. At this point, scientists can’t tell if water is part of the planet’s atmosphere.

“Water vapor in the atmosphere on a hot, rocky planet would be a major breakthrough for exoplanet research,” Kevin Stephenson, principal investigator of the discovery and a researcher at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, said in a statement. “But we have to be careful and make sure that the star is not the culprit.”

Astronomers aim to see if a rocky planet in such an extreme environment could be able to create an atmosphere and maintain it long enough for life to develop – a process that took about a billion years on Earth. The exoplanet in question, GJ 486 b, orbits a red dwarf star 26 light-years away in the constellation Virgo. It is now being studied and explored in more detail with the help of new data.

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