The James Webb space telescope has achieved another first, as it produced the most detailed "portrait" to date of an exoplanet's atmosphere, revealing details of its chemical composition and clouds in a way never before possible.
It is the hot planet WASP39b at a distance of 700 light years from Earth, which now becomes the planet we know the most about in our galaxy, after the eight planets in our solar system.
Researchers from several countries have made five separate pre-publications of their findings in arXiv, with regular publications in Nature to follow. "We had studied many planets before, but we had never seen data like this," said Laura Kreidberg, director of the German Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg.
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WASP-39b, a gas giant located in the constellation Virgo, has about one-third the mass of Jupiter, It takes only four days for a full orbit around its star (that's the length of its year) and due to the short distance between the exoplanet and the star (only 7 million miles), it takes only three days to orbit its star. km, or eight times shorter than the Sun-Mercury distance), temperatures of almost 900 degrees Celsius develop on this exoplanet. This makes it inhospitable to life at least as we know it on our own planet.
James Webb, launched in December 2021, observed WASP-39b for 40 hours and, among other things, found carbon dioxide in its atmosphere (observed for the first time). It also detected in it water in the form of water vapour, carbon monoxide, sodium, potassium, etc, A chemical composition similar to that of Saturn.
Furthermore, the detection of sulphur dioxide indicates that photochemical reactions are taking place in the exoplanet's atmosphere: as light from the parent star falls on it, it breaks down the water in the atmosphere into hydrogen and hydroxide, which in turn reacts with hydrogen sulphide to produce sulphur dioxide.
Furthermore, the detection of sulphur dioxide indicates that photochemical reactions are taking place in the exoplanet's atmosphere: as light from the parent star falls on it, it breaks down the water in the atmosphere into hydrogen and hydroxide, which in turn reacts with hydrogen sulphide to produce sulphur dioxide. This is the first time a photochemical reaction has been detected beyond our solar system, and it even resembles the reaction that produces ozone in the Earth's atmosphere.
The analysis from the James Webb Space Telescope.
The analysis from the James Webb Space Telescope. Bottom right, the composition of the exoplanet's atmosphere
James Webb's observations still show that WASP-39b lacks total cloud cover, which has also never before been observed on an exoplanet. The planet appears to be covered with only 60% dense clouds, which do not contain water vapour as on Earth but other chemical elements.
James Webb, a collaboration between the US (NASA), European (ESA) and Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and the most powerful and largest ever sent into space, has set its sights on some 70 exoplanets, including the seven rocky terrestrial planets of the nearby Trappist-1 system, so new data on the atmospheres of other exoplanets are expected.
Source: Cyprus Times
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