The month-old James Webb Space Telescope has added another major scientific discovery to its growing list: detecting for the first time carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet outside our solar system.
Although the exoplanet would never be able to support life as we know it, the successful detection of CO2 gives researchers hope that similar observations could be made on rocky objects that are more hospitable to life.
“My first thought: Wow, we really have a chance to discover the atmospheres of Earth-sized planets,” tweeted Natalie Batalha, a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz and one of hundreds who worked on the Webb project.
Their study of exoplanet WASP-39, a hot gas giant orbiting a star 700 light-years away, will soon be published in the journal Nature.
“For me, it opens a door for future research on super-Earths (planets larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune) or even Earth-sized planets,” says Pierre-Olivier Lagage, an astrophysicist at the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA). said AFP.
Detection of CO2 will also help scientists learn more about how WASP-39 formed, NASA said in a news release. Orbiting its star once every four Earth days, the exoplanet has a mass one-fourth that of Jupiter but a diameter 1.3 times larger.
Its orbital frequency and large atmosphere made WASP-39 an ideal candidate for an early test of Webb’s state-of-the-art infrared sensor, known as NIRSpec.
Each time the exoplanet crosses its star, it blocks an almost imperceptible amount of light.
But at the edges of the planet, a tiny amount of light penetrates the atmosphere.
Webb’s highly sensitive NIRSpec can detect the small changes the atmosphere has in light, allowing scientists to determine its gas composition.
The Hubble and Spitzer telescopes had already detected water vapor, sodium and potassium in WASP-39’s atmosphere, but thanks to Webb and his NIRSpec instrument, carbon dioxide can now be added to that list.
“It was a special moment to cross an important threshold in exoplanet science,” Zafar Rustamkulov, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University, said in the NASA press release.
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