The James Webb Space telescope has given us some pretty unbelievable photos, showing us the faces of incredible objects in deep space. However, astronomers say that for the first time it’s now giving us an idea of what’s inside a distant and bizarres planet.
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00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:04 The James Webb Space Telescope has given us
00:06 some pretty unbelievable photos, showing us
00:08 the faces of incredible objects in deep space.
00:11 However, astronomers say that for the first time,
00:14 it's now giving us an idea of what's inside
00:16 a distant and bizarre planet.
00:18 The exoplanet in question is called WASP-107b,
00:22 a planet recently described as having
00:23 the density of cotton candy.
00:25 It was believed that physicists might have to go back
00:27 to the drawing board with regards
00:29 to their planetary formation models,
00:30 as they theorized the planet had an extremely tiny core
00:33 surrounded by hydrogen and helium.
00:35 This was an affront to planetary formation models.
00:38 However, the detection of very low levels of methane
00:40 by the James Webb Telescope means
00:42 the planet is much hotter than we thought.
00:44 With the researchers writing about it,
00:46 the web data tells us that planets like WASP-107b
00:49 didn't have to form in some odd way,
00:51 with a super small core and a huge gassy envelope.
00:54 Instead, we can take something more like Neptune.
00:56 With a lot of rock and not as much gas,
00:58 we can just dial up the temperature
00:59 and poof it up to look the way WASP-107b does.
01:02 That's because methane is not stable at high temperatures.
01:05 However, they still detected other carbon-bearing molecules.
01:08 This suggests that not only is WASP-107b's interior
01:11 much hotter than they thought, but it's also much larger,
01:14 with the researchers saying it's around 12 times
01:16 the mass of Earth's core.
01:19 (upbeat music)
01:21 (upbeat music)