NASA's Webb captures HD 80606 b heating 1,100 degrees rapidly
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope just spotted something wild: a frozen gas giant called HD 80606 b suddenly heated up by 1,100 degrees in just a few hours as it swung super close to its star.
This rare heat spike was presented by Tiffany Kataria and her team on June 16 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
HD 80606 b shows methane, CO2
HD 80606 b is about four times the mass of Jupiter and takes a super odd, looping path around its star every 111 days. When it gets really close (just a tiny fraction of the Earth-Sun distance) it experiences these dramatic temperature jumps.
Using JWST's MIRI instrument, scientists found not only crazy-high temperatures but also methane and carbon dioxide in its atmosphere.
As Tiffany Kataria of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory put it, the temperatures were "even more extreme than we expected," giving us new clues about how wild exoplanets can get.