Webb captures first clear evidence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of WASP-39 B, a gas giant closely orbiting a Sun-like star 700 light years away, NASA says.
Webb's highly sensitive NIRSpec can detect the small changes that the atmosphere has on the light, allowing scientists to determine its gas composition.
(AP Archive)
The months-old James Webb Space Telescope has added another major scientific discovery to its growing list: detecting for the first time signs of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet outside our solar system.
Although 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 carried out on rocky objects more hospitable to life.
"My first thought: wow, we really do have a chance to detect the atmospheres of terrestrial-size planets," tweeted Natalie Batalha, a professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz and one of the hundreds who worked on the Webb project.
Their study of exoplanet WASP-39, a hot gas giant closely orbiting a star 700 light years away, will soon be published in the journal, Nature.
"For me, it opens a door for future research on super-Earths (planets larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune), or even Earth-sized planets," Pierre-Olivier Lagage, an astrophysicist with France's Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), told the AFP news agency.
READ MORE: Stunning images of Jupiter captured by James Webb telescope
Catch your breath — Webb has captured the first clear evidence of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere of a planet outside of our solar system! WASP-39 B is a gas giant closely orbiting a Sun-like star 700 light years away: https://t.co/FenLqV6HSopic.twitter.com/abJvqxfLdG
'Special moment'
The detection of CO2 will also help scientists learn more about how WASP-39 formed, NASA said in a press release.
The exoplanet, which orbits its star once every four Earth days, has a mass one-quarter that of Jupiter but a diameter 1.3 times bigger.
The frequency of its orbit and large atmosphere made WASP-39 an ideal candidate for an early test of Webb's state-of-the-art infrared sensor, known as NIRSpec.
Each time the exoplanet crosses in front of its star, it blocks out an almost imperceptible amount of light.
But around the edges of the planet, a tiny amount of light passes through the atmosphere.
Webb's highly sensitive NIRSpec can detect the small changes that the atmosphere has on the light, allowing scientists to determine its gas composition.
The Hubble and Spitzer telescopes had already detected water vapour, sodium and potassium in WASP-39's atmosphere, but carbon dioxide can now be added to that list thanks to Webb and its NIRSpec instrument.
"It was a special moment, crossing an important threshold in exoplanet sciences," said Zafar Rustamkulov, a Johns Hopkins University researcher, in the NASA press release.
READ MORE:'Never seen before': Stunning images of cosmic cliffs, valleys and galaxies
Source: AFP
The James Webb Telescope has taken a new image of the most distant star, nearly 28 billion light years away, and has captured it in stunning detail.
Researchers were able to spot galaxies and had a glimpse of a star called Earendel using the telescope.
Earendel means 'morning or rising star' and is situated in a galaxy called Sunrise Arc. The star is aligned with the galaxy cluster providing maximum magnification.
Dan Coe at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland said, “Nobody’s ever seen a star this highly magnified, not to mention a galaxy.”
Since light takes time to travel, the pictures of the star Earendel are the way it was 900 million years ago, soon after the Big Bang.
JWST is expected to have its next round of observation in December which will reveal what Earendel and Sunrise Arc are composed of. Coe says, "We’re all made of starstuff, but that stuff wasn’t around in the early universe. This is a rare opportunity to see if the heavy elements were there in this star 13 billion years ago.”
Astronomers from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland wrote in a published paper, "JWST was designed to study the first stars. Until recently, we assumed that meant populations of stars within the first galaxies. But in the past three years, three individual strongly lensed stars have been discovered. This offers new hope of directly observing individual stars at cosmological distances with JWST."
