Hints of Atmosphere on Earth-Sized Exoplanet Raise Hopes for Life
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September 8, 2025
Hints of Atmosphere on Earth-Sized Exoplanet Raise Hopes for Life
A monumental sign of an atmosphere on TRAPPIST-1e could be the precursor to finally finding a living world around another star
By Jonathan O'Callaghan edited by Lee Billings
This artist’s concept shows the volatile red dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 and its four most closely orbiting planets, all of which have been observed by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). JWST has detected what may be hints of an atmosphere around one of these worlds, the potentially habitable planet TRAPPIST-1e.
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Joseph Olmsted (STScI)
If we’ll ever find life outside our solar system, it will not be an instant discovery. Save for the slim possibility of an intelligent civilization beaming a message in our direction, evidence for aliens will most likely come from scrutinizing nearby rocky worlds by using giant telescopes to study their atmospheres for gases that could hint at living, breathing somethings dwelling unseen on the planet’s surface. This is no easy feat. For stars like our sun, no telescope will be capable of doing this for a generation. For smaller stars, we have only recently developed this capability thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
That’s why two papers published on September 8 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters are so exciting. Using JWST, for the first time, astronomers have managed to find tentative evidence for an atmosphere on a rocky planet in a clement orbit around another star some 40 light-years from Earth. Called TRAPPIST-1e, the planet is one of seven small worlds orbiting its host star, a red dwarf far smaller and dimmer than our sun. Efforts to find atmospheres on any of these planets have been otherwise unsuccessful; the three innermost worlds, it seems, are barren rocks stripped of any wisp of air. But now, thanks to JWST, we’ve seen that might not be the case for TRAPPIST-1e, the fourth planet of this system. If there is life somewhere out there, right now this world seems to be our best bet of finding it.
“We’re seeing something tantalizing,” says Ryan MacDonald at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, a co-author on the papers. “If it is confirmed, it is a huge deal. We would have the first atmosphere on a habitable zone rocky planet beyond our own solar system.”
Jonathan O'Callaghan is an award-winning freelance journalist covering astronomy, astrophysics, commercial spaceflight and space exploration. Follow him on X @Astro_Jonny