New exoplanet class emerges
Astronomers have flagged a brand‑new class of exoplanets that don't fit 'super‑Earth' or 'mini‑Neptune' boxes — a discovery that forces fresh planet‑formation thinking and pushes demand for better spectrometers (youtube.com). A separate recent survey identified 45 planets in the habitable zone, including four within ~40 light‑years — new priority targets for life‑detection missions (dailymail.co.uk). Webb also mapped seven active volcanoes on Io in near‑infrared detail, underlining how next‑gen telescopes are changing what we can actually study up close (earth.com).
An international team led by Everett Schlawin (University of Arizona) and Kazumasa Ohno (National Astronomical Observatory of Japan) published a James Webb–based study in The Astrophysical Journal Letters (DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ad7fef) that proposes GJ 1214 b be classed as a carbon‑dioxide–rich “super‑Venus.” (nao.ac.jp)) JWST transmission and phase‑curve data used in the study show a best‑fit model with elevated CO2 above a thick aerosol layer and a high‑metallicity atmosphere for GJ 1214 b, which orbits a red dwarf about 48 light‑years away and completes one orbit in roughly 38 hours. (news.arizona.edu)) Cornell University’s Carl Sagan Institute led a catalogue paper, “Probing the Limits of Habitability,” published March 19 in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stag028), that narrows the field to 45 rocky worlds in an empirical habitable zone and 24 in a more conservative 3D habitable zone. (news.cornell.edu)) The Cornell team used Gaia DR3 and the NASA Exoplanet Archive to rank targets and specifically highlights TRAPPIST‑1 d, e, f and g at about 40 light‑years and LHS 1140 b at ~48 light‑years among the most observationally promising worlds. (astro.cornell.edu)) The paper also flags which targets are best suited to different techniques and explicitly frames the list as an observing roadmap for JWST, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (launch planned 2027), the Extremely Large Telescope (first light projected 2029) and the proposed Habitable Worlds Observatory (expected in the 2040s). (news.cornell.edu)) A separate MNRAS study led by Joel Sánchez Bermúdez applied JWST‑NIRISS aperture‑masking interferometry and neural‑network deconvolution at 4.3 µm to map Io’s hot spots, identifying one dominant eruption (I) with a brightness of 33 ± 4.3 GW µm−1 plus six fainter volcanic sources and benchmarking results against Keck II images. (academic.oup.com))
