Webb telescope captures CO2 for the first time in an exoplanet atmosphere
The James Webb Space Telescope, which has only been around for a few months, has made another important scientific discovery. For the first time, it has found signs of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet outside of our solar system.
Even though the exoplanet would never be able to support life as we know it, the successful discovery of CO2 gives researchers hope that similar observations could be made on rocky objects that could support life.
Natalie Batalha, a professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz and one of the thousands of people who worked on the Webb project, tweeted, “My first thought was, wow, we really do have a chance to find the atmospheres of planets about the size of Earth.”
Their research on WASP-39, a hot gas giant that circles a star 700 light years away very closely, will soon be published in the journal Nature.
Pierre-Olivier Lagage, an astrophysicist with France’s Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), told AFP, “It opens the door for future research on super-Earths, which are planets bigger than Earth but smaller than Neptune, or even Earth-sized planets.”
NASA said in a press release that finding CO2 will also help scientists learn more about how WASP-39 formed. The exoplanet goes around its star once every four Earth days, and its diameter is 1.3 times bigger than Jupiter’s.
WASP-39 was a good choice for an early test of Webb’s state-of-the-art infrared sensor, called NIRSpec, because of its orbit and large atmosphere.
Each time the exoplanet moves in front of its star, it blocks out almost no light. But a tiny amount of light gets through the atmosphere around the planet’s edges.
Webb’s NIRSpec is very sensitive, so it can pick up on the small changes in light that the atmosphere makes. This lets scientists figure out what gases are in the atmosphere.
Hubble and Spitzer had already found water vapor, sodium, and potassium in the atmosphere of WASP-39. Now, thanks to Webb and its NIRSpec instrument, carbon dioxide can be added to that list.
In a NASA press release, Zafar Rustamkulov, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University, said, “It was a special moment and an important step forward in the study of exoplanets.”
