“No previous telescopes have had the sensitivity to measure such dim mid-infrared light.” Rocky Planets Orbiting Ultracool Red Dwarfs “These observations really take advantage of Webb’s mid-infrared capability,” said Thomas Greene, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Ames Research Center and lead author on the study published today in the journal Nature. It also bodes well for Webb’s ability to characterize temperate, Earth-sized exoplanets using MIRI. The result marks an important step in determining whether planets orbiting small active stars like TRAPPIST-1 can sustain atmospheres needed to support life. This is the first detection of any form of light emitted by an exoplanet as small and as cool as the rocky planets in our own solar system. The result indicates that the planet’s dayside has a temperature of about 500 kelvins (roughly 450 degrees Fahrenheit) and suggests that it has no significant atmosphere. The measurement is based on the planet’s thermal emission: heat energy given off in the form of infrared light detected by Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI).

An international team of researchers has used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to measure the temperature of the rocky exoplanet TRAPPIST-1 b.

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