WASP-121b, also known as Tylos, is a giant, ultra-hot, gaseous planet located 858 light years from Earth. It’s hot because it sits so close to its sister star. In fact, it takes just over a day, or 30 hours, for the giant to orbit its star.
WASP is an exoplanet, or extrasolar planet, meaning that it’s found outside of our Solar System. And while we’ve known about it since 2016, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), — which launched four years ago — has helped us to gain a number of new insights about this gassy giant.
“It’s so hot that basically any element, including things like iron and silicates, which are essentially rocks, will be vaporized and in the gas phase,” says Thomas Evans-Soma, an astronomer with the University of Newcastle in Australia. He recently led a study published in Nature Astronomy documenting the finding.
WASP is what’s called ...
