It looks like GJ 1214b might have an atmosphere that's made mostly out of water." That pushes this planet into "a category of its own in a way that was never certain before," says Kreidberg.

While studying GJ 1214b, researchers tracked the planet through nearly its entire orbit over the course of about 40 hours, according to NASA. The planet's year takes only 1.6 Earth days.

In their Nature paper, the researchers measured the infrared light that GJ 1214b emitted over the course of about 40 hours -- the time it takes the planet to orbit its star. As day turns to night ...

GJ 1214b was discovered in late 2009, but until now, our picture of it has been murky. “It’s been an extremely frustrating planet to study because it has all these clouds in the atmosphere, which ...

A team of researchers used the James Webb Space Telescope to observe exoplanet GJ 1214b’s atmosphere by measuring the heat it emits while orbiting its host star. Their results, published in the ...

GJ 1214b is a strange planet. It has a radius about 2.7 times that of Earth and a mass roughly eight times greater. It’s ...

An enigmatic, cloud-enshrouded planet that has puzzled astronomers for years turns out to be less hot than expected – and surprisingly shiny. That's what the James Webb Space Telescope revealed ...

Scientists have discovered a new type of alien planet — a steamy waterworld that is larger than Earth but smaller than Uranus. The standard-bearer for this new class of exoplanet is called GJ ...

Astronomers pointed the James Webb Space Telescope at a common kind of planet that's bigger than Earth but smaller than Neptune. What they saw wasn't what they expected.

Our own solar system has nothing like this planet, called GJ 1214b. It's bigger than the rocky planets like Earth, but still smaller than any of our system's ice or gas giants.

It looks like GJ 1214b might have an atmosphere that's made mostly out of water." That pushes this planet into "a category of its own in a way that was never certain before," says Kreidberg.

She says astronomers have zeroed in on GJ 1214b in particular because it's the single-most accessible planet like this to observe. It orbits a small yet bright star that's relatively nearby, just ...