Webb Telescope Reveals Noxious Atmosphere of a Planet 700 Light-Years Away
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:
WASP-39b is a hot Saturn with some nasty chemicals in its skies
Astrophysicists on Earth are no strangers to WASP-39b, an exoplanet orbiting a star about 700 light-years from Earth, though they've never actually seen it directly. Now, the Webb Space Telescope has offered fresh insight into this distant world: Its observations have revealed the recipe list for the planet's toxic atmosphere.
WASP-39b is a gas giant about the mass of Saturn and the size of Jupiter, but it orbits its star at about the same distance as Mercury is from the Sun, making the exoplanet very, very hot. The exoplanet was discovered in 2011; earlier this year, Webb telescope observations revealed carbon dioxide lurking in its atmosphere.
More molecules and chemical compounds have now been indentified, including evidence of water, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, sodium, and potassium. The findings are under review for publication and currently available on the preprint server arXiv.
"This is the first time we have seen concrete evidence of photochemistry - chemical reactions initiated by energetic stellar light - on exoplanets," said Shang-Min Tsai, a researcher at the University of Oxford lead author of the paper explaining sulfur dioxide's presence in the planet's atmosphere, in a European Space Agency release. "I see this as a really promising outlook for advancing our understanding of exoplanet atmospheres with [this mission]."
[...] Webb's capabilities have broader implications for understanding the diversity of exoplanets in our galaxy, with an eye toward their potential habitability. With its extreme heat and gaseous composition, WASP-39b is certainly not hospitable to any life we know of-but it's showcasing the kind of molecular-level analysis Webb can apply to distant worlds.
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