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SCIENTISTS have confirmed the existence of a Super-Earth exoplanet where one side is bathed in eternal sunlight.
This means the exoplanet, dubbed LHS 3844b (or Kua'kua), also has one side that lives in perpetual darkness.
Nasa's James Webb Space Telescope has been investigating the planet for at least a year.
Now JWST has confirmed that tidally locked exoplanets exist within our galaxy, the Milky Way.
Tidal locking is a phenomenon we observe every day here on Earth when we look at the moon.
It's when a celestial body has the same rotational period as its orbital period around a larger mass.
The new findings were presented in a study published in The Astrophysical Journal.
"This thing that has been theoretical now feels real," astronomer Nicolas Cowan of McGill University in Canada told Nature.
"This is actually what these planets look like," Cowan added.
LHS 3844 b is located about 49 light-years away and orbits extremely close to its star, completing one revolution in just 11 hours.
Initial observations from Nasa's Spitzer Telescope show that the planet is very unlikely to have a substantial, or thick atmosphere.
While Webb hasn't been able to photograph the exoplanet's surface directly, researchers can use spectroscopy to identify its composition.
Over the last three decades, researchers have uncovered several super-Earth exoplanets, however, most of them remain shrouded in mystery.
Super-Earths are a class of outer-solar system planets that are made up of gas, rock, or a combination of both.
They have a mass higher than Earth's but lower than Uranus' and Neptune's.
These types of planets are of interest to researchers because they don't exist in our solar system and can provide new insights.
Specifically, they can help us learn what early Earth might have been like when it was extremely hot.
Here's what you need to know...
However, Nasa noted that the term is a reference only to an exoplanet’s size and does not suggest these planets are necessarily similar to Earth.
"The true nature of these planets remains shrouded in uncertainty because we have nothing like them in our own solar system," Nasa notes on its website.
"And yet, they are common among planets found so far in our galaxy," the US space agency continued.
To date, Nasa has discovered dozens of super-Earths, some of which it calls "strange planets...that have no analog in our solar system."
