Boston MA, Gatra.com- NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has identified sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere of an exoplanet. JWST just scored its first goal of detailing the molecular and chemical makeup of a distant planet’s skies. Thereby Everyday space11/23.
The telescope’s array of highly sensitive instruments trained in the atmosphere of “hot Saturn” — a Saturn-sized planet orbiting a star some 700 light-years away — is known as WASP-39b. Meanwhile JWST and other space telescopes, including Hubble and Spitzer, have previously discovered materials isolated from the planet’s hot atmosphere.
The new discoveries provide a full menu of active atoms, molecules, and even chemical signatures and boiling clouds. “The clarity of the signals from the number of different molecules in the data is extraordinary,” said Mercedes Lopez-Morales, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard and the Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and one of the scientists who contributed to the new discoveries.
“We had anticipated that we’d see a lot of those signals, but still, when I first saw the data, I was blown away,” Lopez-Morales said.
The new data also provides clues about how the clouds on this exoplanet might look up close: divided by a single uniform blanket over the planet.
This discovery bodes well for JWST’s ability to make the kinds of probes of exoplanets around other stars that scientists have hoped for. This includes probing the atmospheres of smaller rocky planets like those in the TRAPPIST-1 system.
“We observed exoplanets with different instruments that together provide a broad infrared spectrum and a large number of chemical fingerprints that JWST inaccessible,” said Natalie Batalha, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who contributed to the study. help coordinate new research. “Data like this is a game changer.”
The discovery set is detailed in a newly submitted set of five scientific papers available on the arXiv preprint server. Among the unprecedented revelations was the first detection of sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere of an exoplanet, a molecule resulting from a chemical reaction triggered by high-energy light from the planet’s host star. On Earth, the protective ozone layer in the upper atmosphere is created in a similar way.
“The astonishing detection of sulfur dioxide has finally confirmed that photochemistry shaped the climate of ‘hot Saturn,'” said Diana Powell, a NASA Hubble fellow, astronomer in the Center for Astrophysics and a core member of the team that made the discovery. of sulfur dioxide. “Earth’s climate is also shaped by photochemistry, so our planet has much more in common with ‘hot Saturn’ than we previously knew!”
Jea Adams, a Harvard graduate student and researcher at the Center for Astrophysics, analyzed the data that confirmed the sulfur dioxide signal.
“As an early career researcher of exoplanet atmospheres, it was very exciting to be part of a survey like this,” Adams said. “The process of analyzing this data was magical. We saw clues to this feature in the early data, but these high-precision instruments clearly revealed the SO2 signature and helped us solve the puzzle.”
At an estimated temperature of 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit and an atmosphere composed primarily of hydrogen, WASP-39b is believed to be uninhabitable. The exoplanet has been compared to Saturn and Jupiter, with a mass similar to that of Saturn, but an overall size as large as Jupiter. But the new work points to ways to find potential evidence of life on habitable planets.
The planet’s proximity to its host star, eight times closer than Mercury is to the sun, also makes it a laboratory for studying the effects of its host star’s radiation on exoplanets. A better understanding of star-planetary relationships should lead to a deeper understanding of how this process creates the diversity of planets observed in galaxies.
Other atmospheric constituents detected by JWST include sodium, potassium and water vapour, confirming previous ground and space telescope observations and finding additional water features, at longer wavelengths, that had not been seen before.
JWST also saw carbon dioxide at higher resolution, providing twice as much data as previously reported by observations. Meanwhile, carbon monoxide was detected, but clear signs of methane and hydrogen sulfide were absent from the data. If anything, these molecules are found at very low levels, a significant finding for scientists making chemical inventories of exoplanets to better understand the formation and development of these distant worlds.
Capturing the broad spectrum of WASP-39b’s atmosphere is a science tour, as an international team of hundreds independently analyze data from JWST’s four well-tuned instrument modes. They then carried out a detailed comparison of the results, resulting in a scientifically more nuanced result.
JWST observes the universe in infrared light, at the red end of the light spectrum beyond what the human eye can see, which allows telescopes to pick up chemical fingerprints that can’t be detected in visible light.
Each of the three instruments also has different versions of infrared “IR” in the name: NIRSpec, NIRCam and NIRISS.
To see WASP-39b’s light, JWST tracks the planet as it passes in front of its star, allowing some of the starlight to filter through the planet’s atmosphere. Different types of chemicals in the atmosphere absorb different colors of the star’s light spectrum, so the missing colors tell astronomers which molecules are present.
By precisely decoding the atmospheres of exoplanets, JWST’s instruments have far exceeded scientists’ expectations and promise a new phase of exploration among the various exoplanets of the galaxy.
“I can’t wait to see what we find in the atmospheres of small terrestrial planets,” Lopez-Morales said.
