JWST Finds An Exoplanet Around A Pulsar Whose Atmosphere Is All Carbon

Visualization that's part of an animation of a black widow pulsar burning its companion. Credit - NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center / Cruz deWilde

Science advances through data that don’t fit our current understanding. At least that was Thomas Kuhn’s theory in his famous On the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. So scientists should welcome new data that challenges their understanding of how the universe works. A recent paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, using data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) might just have found some data that can do that. It looked at an exoplanet around a millisecond pulsar and found its atmosphere is made up of almost entirely pure carbon.

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