NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has discovered something odd about a distant planet - it lacks methane, an ingredient common to many of the planets in our solar system.
"It's a big puzzle," said Kevin Stevenson, a planetary sciences graduate student at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, lead author of a study appearing tomorrow, April 22 in the journal Nature.
"Models tell us that the carbon in this planet should be in the form of methane. Theorists are going to be quite busy trying to figure this one out."
The discovery brings astronomers one step closer to probing the atmospheres of distant planets the size of Earth. The methane-free planet, called GJ 436b, is about the size of Neptune, making it the smallest distant planet that any telescope has successfully "tasted," or analyzed.
Eventually, a larger space telescope could use the same kind of technique to search smaller, Earth-like worlds for methane and other chemical signs of life, such as water, oxygen and carbon dioxide.
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