London – “Al-Quds Al-Arabi”: NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) identified several details of a new “hellish” planet, according to scientists who said it was “the first of its kind in the history of the universe.”
According to a report published by the British newspaper “Daily Mail”, and viewed by “Al-Quds Al-Arabi”, the telescope, which costs 10 billion dollars, was able to identify the planet that scientists called “VHS 1256 b”, which is a planet 40 light years from Earth, which has an atmosphere of Hot, swirling sand clouds that constantly rise, mix, and move during its 22-hour day.
And temperatures on the new discovered planet, which scientists described as hell-like or “hellish”, reach 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit (815 degrees Celsius).
The research team, led by Brittany Miles of the University of Arizona, USA, was also able to detect water, methane and carbon monoxide detections with data from the telescope and found evidence of the presence of carbon dioxide.
Scientists say that the discovered planet has passed only 150 million years since its formation, which makes it relatively young in astronomical terms, and scientists believe that the youngness of this planet may explain the cause of the sky’s turmoil.
“No other telescope has identified so many features at once for a single target,” said co-author Andrew Schemer, of the University of California, Santa Cruz. “We see a lot of particles in one spectrum with this telescope,” he added.
The observations were made using the famous American telescope «James Webb» and with the help of the instrument mid-infrared «MIRI» and they are designed to observe 100 objects at one time.
MIRI contains a camera and a spectrophotometer that sees light in the mid-infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum at wavelengths longer than our eyes can see.
Using the instruments, the telescope detected larger and smaller silicate dust grains within these clouds.
Beth Beller, co-author at the University of Edinburgh, said the tiny silicate grains in its atmosphere may be more like tiny particles in smoke. “The large grains may be very small, very hot sand particles,” she added.
The researchers found that the planet has a lower gravity compared to more massive brown dwarfs, which means that silicate clouds can emerge and remain higher in its atmosphere where telescopes can detect them.
“We’ve identified silicates, but a better understanding of the grain sizes and shapes that correspond to specific types of clouds will require a lot of additional work,” Miles said. This isn’t the last word on the planet, it’s the beginning of a large-scale modeling effort to fit the telescope’s complex data.”