Thousands of new, high-quality pictures added every day. "We're going to have to go back to the drawing board," she adds, "to understand why the planet is as shiny as it is. Find Draw Telescope stock images in HD and millions of other royalty-free stock photos, illustrations and vectors in the Shutterstock collection. "I certainly didn't expect the atmosphere to be so shiny. "It's great to finally see some of the secrets revealed," says Kreidberg. She called this planet the "white whale" for scientists who study planets outside our solar system, just because it's been so difficult to characterize. The new findings fascinated planet researcher Laura Kreidberg, with the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, who wasn't part of this research team but who has used the Hubble Space Telescope to peer at GJ 1214b in the past. She says the James Webb Space Telescope should be looking at more planets in this size range, which will reveal whether this one is an oddball or truly representative of this class of planets. "We're pretty confident that there is water there," says Kempton, who notes that the planet is too hot for water to exist as a liquid. The telescope also saw signs that the planet's atmosphere is not hydrogen-rich, suggesting it's not just a scaled-down Neptune, and there was evidence of water vapor and methane. "That tells us something about what these clouds or hazes in the atmosphere are made of, and that's really the new big question now," she says, adding that scientists will likely start trying to create chemical hazes in the lab that have similar properties, to see what might be happening. 19 hours ago &0183 &32 Combining data from some of NASA’s most powerful instruments, four new composites highlight the enormity of the cosmos in unprecedented detail. Scientists had previously thought the clouds might be made of some kind of dark, sooty haze, she says, but that doesn't fit with all the light being reflected. "We didn't expect the planet to be so reflective, and we actually kind of expected the opposite," says Kempton.
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