Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope reported new spectroscopic data from a rocky exoplanet orbiting a nearby star, giving the clearest signal yet of specific gases in its atmosphere. Researchers caution it’s too early to draw conclusions about habitability, but the data shows the kind of atmospheric detail that was essentially impossible to gather before Webb launched.
Why it matters: Every time we get a cleaner atmospheric signal from a small, rocky planet, we get closer to being able to answer one of the biggest open questions in astronomy — are there other worlds out there with conditions similar to Earth’s?