About 2,000 light-years away, a Jupiter-sized planet completes a full year in under eight hours, orbiting so close to the collapsed star it circles that gravity has pulled it into the shape of a lemon — and when the James Webb Space Telescope examined its atmosphere, astronomers found a form of carbon that shouldn't exist at those temperatures unless the planet is missing almost all of its nitrogen and oxygen.

About 2,000 light-years away, a Jupiter-sized planet completes a full year in under eight hours, orbiting so close to the collapsed star it circles that gravity has pulled it into the shape of a lemon — and when the James Webb Space Telescope examined its atmosphere, astronomers found a form of carbon that shouldn't exist at those temperatures unless the planet is missing almost all of its nitrogen and oxygen.

About 2,000 light-years away, a planet roughly the mass of Jupiter completes a full orbit in 7.8 hours, circling so close to the collapsed star at its centre that the star’s gravity has stretched it into a lemon shape. When the James Webb Space Telescope examined its atmosphere, it found something that has not turned up in any of the roughly 150 exoplanet atmospheres characterised so far: molecular carbon, in a system that appears to be missing …