The James Webb Telescope just helped solve another big space mystery

The James Webb Space Telescope helped astronomers solve a nearly two-decade-old puzzle earlier this year when it revealed the mysteries behind a weird alien world that’s been baffling researchers ever since it was discovered way back in December of 2009. 

There really isn’t a planet quite like Gliese 1214b in our solar system. Commonly called GJ 1214b, this strange planet is just 48 light years away from Earth and it has the unique feature of being a world too hot to support liquid water according to Mashable. 

Despite an inability to support liquid water, Mashable noted that GJ 1214b actually does have the potential to hold significant amounts of vaporized water in its atmosphere. But this isn’t really something researchers knew about the planet until just recently!

According to NPR, GL 1214b is bigger than rocky planets like Earth but it's also smaller than the ice and gas giants in our solar system. Some astronomers call it a Super-Earth type planet while others refer to it as a Neptune-like type planet. 

"Is it like a big, scaled-up Earth? Is it a small, scaled-down Neptune?” University of Maryland astronomer Eliza Kempton pondered during an interview with NPR.

“Is it something totally different that we've never seen before, maybe something called a waterworld, where the atmosphere would be all steamy?" Kempton continued. 

Astronomers have chosen to study GJ 1214b because it is the closest example of the Neptune-like planet type researchers can observe since our solar system is only home to two of the universe's four planet types: rocky terrestrials and gas giants. 

There aren’t any Super-Earth planet types or Neptune-like planet types we can visit with probes and that's why GJ 1214b has been such an important celestial body to study. 

Unfortunately, GJ 1214b has also proven to be particularly difficult to understand according to Eliza Kempton. "This planet has been a challenge,” the astronomer told NPR. “We've been trying to understand what its atmosphere is made of for a long time." 

Normally, a planet like GJ 1214b would be easy to gather data about but the makeup of its atmosphere made the regular methods of observation almost impossible, at least until the James Wood Space Telescope was launched in December 2021. 

The telescope gave researchers the ability to study the heat signature of GJ 1214b and that's exactly what they did according to Eliza Kempton, who was the lead author of a new study explaining how she and her co-authors unlocked the mysteries of GJ 1214b. 

"What we tried to do was to observe the heat coming off the planet, and we were very successful," Kempton explained to NPR. After following GJ 1214b’s orbit, Kempton and her colleagues were able to create a map of the planet in its various phases.

Mashable noted that this heat map not only revealed the day and night temperatures of the planet—535° Fahrenheit and 326° Ferehiet respectively—but it also helped researchers better understand the makeup of the hazy clouds that shrouded GJ 1214b in mystery.

Photo by NASA/ Image credit: CfA/David Aguilar

“We think we detect water vapor, but it’s challenging because water vapor absorption overlaps with methane absorption, so we can’t say 100% that we detected water vapor and not methane," Kempton said in a press release from the University of Maryland. 

“However,” Kempton added, “we see this evidence on both hemispheres of the planet, which heightens our confidence that there really is water there.”

Even though the mystery isn’t fully solved just yet, we have a much better understanding of GJ 1214b and we also have some new questions that need to be investigated further. 

The University of Maryland press release noted the planet wasn't nearly as hot as the researchers were predicting and the planet is far shiner than anyone had previously thought. 

“Whatever is making up the hazes or clouds is not what we expected. It’s bright, it’s reflective and that’s confusing and surprising,” Kempton said. “This is going to point us toward a lot of further studies to try to understand what those hazes could be.”