NASA’s Webb ushers in a new era of exoplanet science with the first unequivocal detection of carbon dioxide in a planetary atmosphere outside our solar system. After years of preparation and anticipation, exoplanet scientists are overjoyed. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured an astonish
has captured an astonishingly detailed rainbow of near-infrared starlight filtered through the atmosphere of a hot gas giant exoplanet 700 light-years away.
A transmission spectrum of the hot gas giant exoplanet WASP-39 b captured by Webb’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph on July 10, 2022, reveals the first clear evidence for carbon dioxide in a planet outside the solar system. This is also the first detailed exoplanet transmission spectrum ever captured that covers wavelengths between 3 and 5.5 microns.
The blue line is a best-fit model that takes into account the data, the known properties of WASP-39 b and its star , and assumed characteristics of the atmosphere. Researchers can vary the parameters in the model – changing unknown characteristics like cloud height in the atmosphere and abundances of various gases – to get a better fit and further understand what the atmosphere is really like.
This observation was made using the NIRSpec PRISM bright object time-series mode, which involves using a prism to spread out light from a single bright object and measure the brightness of each wavelength at set intervals of time.
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