Imagine a rocky world that has spent billions of years in the blazing light of a star so close it spans a quarter of the planet’s sky. A world where a year lasts 11 hours, but the day never ends. A world whose dayside temperature is so high that the surface must now be a sea of liquid hot magma. Conventional wisdom might suggest that a planet like this is far too small and hot to hold on to an atmosphere. 

But new results from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope indicate otherwise. 

The molten surface of exoplanet TOI-561 b, an ancient, ultra-hot super-Earth 280 light-years away, seems to be covered in a thick blanket of gas that makes the planet look much, much cooler than it should be. And once again, Webb observations are generating more questions than they are answering.