Exoplanet 700-Light Years Away Contains Carbon Dioxide Found By James Webb Space Telescope

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope discovered the first convincing evidence of carbon dioxide in an exoplanet's atmosphere- a planet outside of our solar system. The agency recognized the exoplanet as WASP-39b. The exoplanet is a hot gas giant 700 light-years away from Earth and is a part of the bigger Webb research that includes two additional transiting planets.

(Photo: ESA/Hubble, M. Kornmesser, CC BY 4.0/Wikimedia Commons)
ESA Hubble Impression

Carbon Dioxide in WASP-39b

Mike Line, an associate professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University and a JWST Transiting Exoplanet Community Early Release Science team, said that carbon dioxide molecules are sensitive tracers of the tale of planet creation.

One of Webb's four scientific pieces of equipment, the Near-Infrared Spectrograph, was used by scientists to observe carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of WASP-39b. Their work, published on arxiv.org, is a part of the Early Release Science Program, a project created to speed up the release of data from the telescope to the exoplanet research community to aid in the advancement of knowledge.

According to Line, they can establish how much solid and gaseous material was required to construct this gas giant planet by detecting this carbon dioxide feature. JWST will make this measurement for a number of planets over the next ten years, shedding light on the specifics of planet formation and the peculiarities of our solar system.

NASA said in a press release that understanding the atmospheric composition of planets like WASP-39b is essential for understanding their beginnings and how they evolved. WASP-39b, found in 2011, has a diameter 1.3 times larger than Jupiter and a mass nearly equal to Saturn's and a fourth of Jupiter's. The exoplanet makes one round in a little over four Earth days because it orbits its star closely.

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James Webb Space Telescope in Discovery of Carbon Dioxide in Exoplanet

The James Webb Space Telescope can examine the beginning of time more thoroughly, look for undetected structures among the first galaxies, and gaze inside dust clouds where stars and planetary systems are presently forming by monitoring the universe with longer wavelengths of light than previous space telescopes do.

Team leader Natalie Batalha, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California at Santa Cruz, said that the researchers saw a small hill between 4.1 and 4.6 microns in the captured spectrum of the planet's atmosphere, which is a clear signal of carbon dioxide.

On the other hand, team member Munazza Alam, a postdoctoral fellow in the Earth & Planets Laboratory at the Carnegie Institution for Science, said that depending on the atmosphere's composition, thickness, and cloudiness, it absorbs some colors of light more than others-making the planet appear larger. Alam added that they could analyze these minuscule differences in the size of the planet to reveal the atmosphere's chemical makeup.

The ability to observe this region of the light spectrum, made available by the Webb telescope, is essential for determining the abundances of gases like methane, water, and carbon dioxide, which are predicted to exist on several exoplanets. Because different gases absorb different combinations of colors, scientists may analyze minute variations in the transmitted light's brightness across various wavelengths to pinpoint the precise composition of an atmosphere.