Uploaded August 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
This is a BIG DEAL.
Cherubim and collaborators who have claimed the first evidence for an atmosphere on a rocky exoplanet.
We’ve found atmospheres of exoplanets before but they’ve been on big gas giant planets like Jupiter, not rocky planets. That’s mostly due to the fact it's really difficult to do this, because rocky planets are smaller and so the light from their atmospheres is just swamped by the stars that they orbit.
So that’s led people to studying rocky planets around smaller stars, like red dwarfs, to reduce the contrast between the star and the planet. Problem is red dwarfs throw off a load of high-energy radiation, which if it hits into a planet's atmosphere can give the gas a load of energy so it escapes into space. So we didn’t know if rocky exoplanets orbiting red dwarfs could even hold on to their atmospheres for billions of years or not.
So this result from Cherubim and collaborators is also exciting because it's shown this is possible for exoplanets around red dwarfs to hold on to their atmospheres for a long time.Because the planet they’ve observed having an atmosphere, is orbiting a star, LHS 1140, which is over 3 billion years old.
Now, the planet was discovered back in 2017 by Dittman and collaborators, so we’ve known about it for a while.
It orbits much closer in to its star than Earth is to the Sun, but because the star is so much smaller and cooler, it only gets about 42% of the starlight that Earth does, which still means it’s in the habitable zone, where not too hot or cold for liquid water to exist.
So you can probably tell why this exoplanet was of interest to people as a potentially Earth-like system.
Video filmed on a Sony ⍺7 IV
Video edited by Martino Gasparrini: martino.freelance@gmail.com
Video produced by Marina Hui & Dr Becky Smethurst
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📚 My book, "A Brief History of Black Holes", out NOW in hardback, paperback, e-book and audiobook (which I narrated myself!): lnk.to/DrBecky
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👕 My merch, including JWST designs, are available here (with worldwide shipping!): dr-becky.teemill.com
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🎧 Royal Astronomical Society Podcast that I co-host: podfollow.com/supermassive
---
🔔 Don't forget to subscribe and click the little bell icon to be notified when I post a new video!
---
👩🏽💻 I'm Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford. I love making videos about science with an unnatural level of enthusiasm. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don't know. If you've ever wondered about something in space and couldn't find an answer online - you can ask me! My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars.
drbecky.uk.com
This is a BIG DEAL.
Cherubim and collaborators who have claimed the first evidence for an atmosphere on a rocky exoplanet.
We’ve found atmospheres of exoplanets before but they’ve been on big gas giant planets like Jupiter, not rocky planets. That’s mostly due to the fact it's really difficult to do this, because rocky planets are smaller and so the light from their atmospheres is just swamped by the stars that they orbit.
So that’s led people to studying rocky planets around smaller stars, like red dwarfs, to reduce the contrast between the star and the planet. Problem is red dwarfs throw off a load of high-energy radiation, which if it hits into a planet's atmosphere can give the gas a load of energy so it escapes into space. So we didn’t know if rocky exoplanets orbiting red dwarfs could even hold on to their atmospheres for billions of years or not.
So this result from Cherubim and collaborators is also exciting because it's shown this is possible for exoplanets around red dwarfs to hold on to their atmospheres for a long time.Because the planet they’ve observed having an atmosphere, is orbiting a star, LHS 1140, which is over 3 billion years old.
Now, the planet was discovered back in 2017 by Dittman and collaborators, so we’ve known about it for a while.
It orbits much closer in to its star than Earth is to the Sun, but because the star is so much smaller and cooler, it only gets about 42% of the starlight that Earth does, which still means it’s in the habitable zone, where not too hot or cold for liquid water to exist.
So you can probably tell why this exoplanet was of interest to people as a potentially Earth-like system.
Video filmed on a Sony ⍺7 IV
Video edited by Martino Gasparrini: martino.freelance@gmail.com
Video produced by Marina Hui & Dr Becky Smethurst
---
📚 My book, "A Brief History of Black Holes", out NOW in hardback, paperback, e-book and audiobook (which I narrated myself!): lnk.to/DrBecky
---
👕 My merch, including JWST designs, are available here (with worldwide shipping!): dr-becky.teemill.com
---
🎧 Royal Astronomical Society Podcast that I co-host: podfollow.com/supermassive
---
🔔 Don't forget to subscribe and click the little bell icon to be notified when I post a new video!
---
👩🏽💻 I'm Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford. I love making videos about science with an unnatural level of enthusiasm. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don't know. If you've ever wondered about something in space and couldn't find an answer online - you can ask me! My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars.
drbecky.uk.com
