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James Webb telescope: New data on WASP-39b is a ‘game changer,’ scientists say

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The James Webb Space Telescope has captured a detailed molecular and chemical portrait of a faraway planet’s skies, scoring another first for the exoplanet science community.

WASP-39b, otherwise known as Bocaprins, can be found orbiting a star some 700 light-years away. It is an exoplanet — a planet outside our solar system — as massive as Saturn but much closer to its host star, making for an estimated temperature of 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit (871 degrees Celsius) emitting from its gases, according to NASA. This “hot Saturn” was one of the first exoplanets that the Webb telescope examined when it first began its regular science operations.

The new readings provide a full breakdown of Bocaprins’ atmosphere, including atoms, molecules, cloud formations (which appear to be broken up, rather than a single, uniform blanket as scientists previously expected) and even signs of photochemistry caused by its host star.

“We observed the exoplanet with multiple instruments that, together, provide a broad swath of the infrared spectrum and a panoply of chemical fingerprints inaccessible until (this mission),” said Natalie Batalha, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who contributed to and helped coordinate the new research, in a NASA release. “Data like these are a game changer.”

The new data provided the first sign in an exoplanet’s atmosphere of sulfur dioxide, a molecule produced from chemical reactions triggered by the planet’s host star and its high-energy light. On Earth, the atmosphere’s protective ozone layer is created in a similar way from heat and sunlight in a photochemical reaction.

Bocaprins’ close proximity to its host star makes it an ideal subject for studying such star-planet connections. The planet is eight times closer to its host star than Mercury is to our sun.

“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 in the United Kingdom, in a NASA release. “I see this as a really promising outlook for advancing our understanding of exoplanet atmospheres.”

Other compounds detected in Bocaprins’ atmosphere include sodium, potassium and water vapor, confirming previous observations made by other space and ground-based telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope.

Having such a complete roster of chemical ingredients in an exoplanet atmosphere provides insight into how this planet — and perhaps others — formed. Bocaprins’ diverse chemical inventory suggests that multiple smaller bodies, called planetesimals, had merged to create an eventual goliath of a planet, of similar size to the second-largest planet in our solar system.

“This is just the first out of many exoplanets that are going to be studied in detail by JWST. … We are already getting very exciting results,” Nestor Espinoza, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, told CNN. “This is just the beginning.”

The findings are favorable for suggesting the capability of Webb’s instruments to conduct investigations on exoplanets. By revealing a detailed descriptor of an exoplanet’s atmosphere, the telescope has performed beyond scientists’ expectations and promises a new phase of exploration on the broad variety of exoplanets in the galaxy, according to NASA.

“We are going to be able to see the big picture of exoplanet atmospheres,” said Laura Flagg, a researcher at Cornell University and a member of the international team that analyzed data from Webb, in a statement. “It is incredibly exciting to know that everything is going to be rewritten. That is one of the best parts of being a scientist.”

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NASA’s James Webb telescope captures first evidence of carbon dioxide on exoplanet WASP-39b

The exoplanet, WASP-39b, is a hot gas giant orbiting a sunlike star that is 700 light-years from Earth and part of a larger Webb investigation that includes two other transiting planets, according to NASA. Understanding the atmospheric makeup of planets like WASP-39b is critical for knowing their origins and how they evolved, the agency noted in a news release.

“Carbon dioxide molecules are sensitive tracers of the story of planet formation,” said Mike Line, an associate professor in Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration, in the news release. Line is a member of the JWST Transiting Exoplanet Community Early Release Science team, which conducted the investigation.

The team made the carbon dioxide observation using the telescope’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph — one of Webb’s four scientific instruments — to observe WASP-39b’s atmosphere. Their research is part of the Early Release Science Program, an initiative designed to provide data from the telescope to the exoplanet research community as soon as possible, guiding further scientific study and discovery.

This latest finding has been accepted for publication in the journal Nature.

“By measuring this carbon dioxide feature, we can determine how much solid versus how much gaseous material was used to form this gas giant planet,” Line added. “In the coming decade, JWST will make this measurement for a variety of planets, providing insight into the details of how planets form and the uniqueness of our own solar system.”

A new era in exoplanet research

The highly sensitive Webb telescope launched on Christmas Day 2021 toward its current orbit 1.5 million kilometers (nearly 932,000 miles) from Earth. By observing the universe with longer wavelengths of light than other space telescopes use, Webb can study the beginning of time more closely, hunt for unobserved formations among the first galaxies, and peer inside dust clouds where stars and planetary systems are currently forming.

In the captured spectrum of the planet’s atmosphere, the researchers saw a small hill between 4.1 and 4.6 microns — a “clear signal of carbon dioxide,” said team leader Natalie Batalha, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California at Santa Cruz, in the release. (A micron is a unit of length equal to one millionth of a meter.)

“Depending on the atmosphere’s composition, thickness, and cloudiness, it absorbs some colors of light more than others — making the planet appear larger,” said team member Munazza Alam, a postdoctoral fellow in the Earth & Planets Laboratory at the Carnegie Institution for Science. “We can analyze these miniscule differences in the size of the planet to reveal the atmosphere’s chemical makeup.”

Access to this part of the light spectrum — which the Webb telescope makes possible — is crucial for measuring abundances of gases such as methane and water, as well as carbon dioxide, which are thought to exist in many exoplanets, according to NASA. Because individual gases absorb different combinations of colors, researchers can examine “small differences in brightness of the transmitted light across a spectrum of wavelengths to determine exactly what an atmosphere is made of,” according to NASA.

Previously, NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer telescopes discovered water vapor, sodium and potassium in the planet’s atmosphere. “Previous observations of this planet with Hubble and Spitzer had given us tantalizing hints that carbon dioxide could be present,” Batalha said. “The data from JWST showed an unequivocal carbon dioxide feature that was so prominent it was practically shouting at us.”

“As soon as the data appeared on my screen, the whopping carbon dioxide feature grabbed me,” said team member Zafar Rustamkulov, a graduate student of in the Morton K. Blaustein Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, in a news release. “It was a special moment, crossing an important threshold in exoplanet sciences,” he added.

Discovered in 2011, WASP-39b’s mass is about the same as Saturn’s and roughly a fourth of Jupiter’s, while its diameter is 1.3 times greater than Jupiter’s. Since the exoplanet orbits very close to its star, it completes one circuit in slightly over four Earth days.

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