James Webb telescope detects light from a small, Earth-like planet — and finds it's missing its atmosphere

An illustration of a rocky, Earth-like planet soaking up heat from its small red sun

Five years ago, NASA's infrared Spitzer Space Telescope helped discover a family of seven rocky exoplanets orbiting the same star, known as TRAPPIST-1. Now, NASA's new infrared powerhouse — the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) — measured the temperature of one of those worlds, TRAPPIST-1b, in new research published in the journal Nature. 

The bad news: The Earth-like planet is almost certainly uninhabitable.