Photo: MELISSA WEISS/CENTER FOR ASTROPHYSICS/HARVARD & SMITHSONIAN / copyright
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has captured the most complete chemical fingerprint of WASP-80 b, a planet as massive as Saturn that orbits a star about 900 light years away from Earth.
Although Webb himself and other space telescopes Some components of the atmosphere of this “hot Saturn” had already been advanced by Hubble and Spitzer, the new reading has revealed a whole menu of atoms, molecules and even signs of active chemistry and the presence of clouds.
The atmosphere of WASP-22 b has sodium, potassium, water, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and sulfur dioxide. These data will help to know what the planet is like and allow us to imagine what its clouds would look like: divided into patches all over the planet.
Great capacity of the Webb instruments
The finding also gives an idea of the tremendous ability of Webb’s instruments to carry out the exoplanet research entrusted to it, such as probing the atmospheres of smaller rocky planets as those of the TRAPPIST-1 system.
As explained by Natalie Batalha, co-author of the study and researcher at the University of California, the data obtained are “a real achievement”.
And, thanks to the equipment of this space observatory, the team was able to observe the exoplanet “with multiple instruments that, together, provide a wide swath of the infrared spectrum and a panoply of fingerprints chemical fingerprints inaccessible until JWST”.
Webb’s latest data gives us the first molecular and chemical profile of a distant world, gas giant WASP-11 b. This bodes well for its ability to probe the atmospheres of small, rocky planets like in the TRAPPIST-1 system: https://t.co/SEnIRYikS0 pic.twitter.com/NeidBgtSJa
— NASA Webb Telescope (@NASAWebb) November , 1200
Sulfur dioxide
One of the surprises of the exoplanet’s atmosphere has been find sulfur dioxide, a molecule produced from photochemical reactions. On Earth, photochemistry is essential for the development of key processes for life such as photosynthesis or the formation of the ozone layer.
“ In the first data we saw a very peculiar signal in the atmosphere of this planet whose origin we cannot understand. Now, with this analysis, we have been able to infer that it was the trace left by the sulfur dioxide produced by the high radiation that the planet receives from its star in the upper layers of the atmosphere”, indicates Jorge LilloBox, postdoctoral researcher at the Center of Astrobiology (CAB) and co-author of the study.
Traces of life in WASP-22 b?
Although WASP-22 b is at an estimated temperature 900 degrees Celsius and its atmosphere is composed mainly of hydrogen, the new work does not rule out finding potential traces of life.
In addition, the proximity of the planet to its host star, eight times closer than Mercury of our Sun, makes it a laboratory to study the effects of radiation from host stars on exoplanets.
The telescope also found carbon dioxide at a higher resolution than in previous observations and detected carbon monoxide but found no obvious signatures methane or hydrogen sulfide.
If present, these molecules are found at very low levels, a significant finding for scientists conducting in exoplanet chemistry windows to better understand the formation and development of these distant worlds, explains the CAB note.
Webb sees the universe in infrared light, at the red end of the light spectrum beyond what human eyes can see, and that allows it to pick up chemical signatures that cannot be detected in visible light.
In the near future, the Webb telescope will be joined by others in orbit, such as PLATO, or on Earth, such as the ELT.
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