Clouds shouldn't exist on a world of molten rock. Webb just found them anyway

TOI-561b is a lava world: a planet so close to its star that its surface is an ocean of molten rock, where any atmosphere should long ago have boiled away. Yet when astronomers pointed the James Webb Space Telescope at it and tracked its light through a full orbit, the planet shone back far more brightly than bare rock should — the signature of a thick, reflective atmosphere, quite possibly clouds. The likely explanation is the planet itself: gases escaping from its magma ocean keep replenishing the air faster than the star can strip it. The study, published in The Astronomical Journal, began unusually — its first author, Samuel Boucher, started the project as an undergraduate research intern at the Trottier Institute for Research on Exoplanets, supervised by researcher Lisa Dang, now a professor at the University of Waterloo. An intern's project became a published answer to a billion-year puzzle.