James Webb Space Telescope finds a salty surprise on famous 'Pink Planet'

The discovery marks an advancement in the study of cold objects beyond the solar system. Initially discovered in 2013, GJ504b orbits a sun-like star located around 57 light-years from Earth. With a mass around 25 times that of Jupiter, this Pink Planet may not be a planet at all despite its moniker. It may instead be a brown dwarf, a failed star that formed like a star but was unable to gather enough mass to achieve the nuclear fusion of hydrogen to helium in its core. Thus, astronomers refer to it as a "planetary-mass companion," which means a planet-size object orbiting a parent star. GJ504b remains one of the coldest planetary-mass companions discovered using ground-based telescopes, with a temperature of around 550 degrees Fahrenheit (290 degrees Celsius). Although, that still makes it hot enough to bake bread. Now, James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) data reveals it has a key ingredient for bread making too: salt located in its atmospheric clouds, unlike anything astronomers have seen before. "The Pink Planet is the coldest companion ever discovered using ground-based instruments," team leader Aneesh Baburaj of Northwestern University said in a statement. "Many teams all around the world performed follow-up observations to study its light, but it was too faint for ground-based instruments. That made it a perfect target for JWST. "When we finally obtained its spectrum, it immediately looked interesting. But once we started digging deeper into the data, we realized it was not like anything we have analyzed before." The Pink Planet is cold and old The team studied this planetary companion . They found the relative coolness of the Pink Planet is a result of the planet's age. Both gas giant planets and brown dwarfs are born blisteringly hot but cool off as they get older. This new research estimated that GJ504b is between 2.5 billion and 4 billion years old. Breaking down light from the Pink Planet into individual wavelengths, the team was also able to determine its chemical composition. This is possible because elements absorb and emit light at characteristic wavelengths, meaning they leave "fingerprints" on light passing through their atmospheres. "In the past, other astronomers observed the companion for an entire night with some of the biggest telescopes in the world to obtain a spectrum," Baburaj said. "And they could not object. With JWST, our entire observation took around two hours, and we were successful." The JWST data revealed a rich cocktail of chemicals in the atmosphere of the Pink Planet that included water, carbon dioxide, methane, and ammonia.