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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Science
Robin McKie Science Editor

How the James Webb telescope is ‘set to find strange and bizarre worlds’

Cosmic dust glowing in infra-red light – captured by the James Webb telescope  in this image of the super-bright Wolf-Rayet star.
Cosmic dust glowing in infra-red light – captured by the James Webb telescope in this image of the super-bright Wolf-Rayet star. Photograph: Nasa/Reuters

There is a distant world where quartz crystals float above a searing hot, puffy atmosphere. Vaporised sand grains, not water droplets, form the clouds that fill the sky on Wasp-107b, a planet 1,300 light years from Earth.

Then there is GJ1214, the sauna planet. With a mass eight times that of Earth, it orbits its parent star at a distance that is one-seventieth of the gap between Earth and the sun and seems to be coated in a thick dense atmosphere containing vast amounts of steam.

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