JWST May Miss Hidden Water in Mini-Neptunes, Study Suggests

Among the thousands of worlds humanity has catalogued beyond our sun, the most common type remains the least understood — sub-Neptunes, planets our own solar system never produced, shrouded in hazes that confound even our finest instruments. New research from the University of Chicago suggests that JWST, for all its power, may be reading only the surface of these worlds' stories: water, denser than the hydrogen above it, may be sinking out of sight, hiding entire oceans beneath the observable atmosphere. The discovery invites a humbling reconsideration — not of what we see, but of how much we