A hot, Jupiter-like globe that orbits a star around 700 light years from Earth has been discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope to have a rich mixture of gases whirling in its sky.
Researchers claim that the telescope has detected sulfur dioxide in addition to carbon dioxide, water, and other substances that are reported in a series of new scientific articles published online.
That must have been created by a series of chemical processes in the atmosphere of the gas giant planet, which were set off by light from the Sun-like star it tightly surrounds and revolves about once every four days.
Jacob Bean, an astronomer at the University of Chicago, adds, "That's really fascinating."
He points out that planetary atmospheres include a significant amount of reactions brought on by light. For instance, sunlight creates ozone in the Earth's atmosphere, which prevents dangerous radiation from reaching the surface of the planet. However, no planet's atmosphere outside of our solar system has ever had this sort of chemistry clearly seen before.
According to Bean, knowing how other planets function "is going to be vital for understanding life on other planets."
Thousands of planets in elliptical orbits around distant stars have been discovered by scientists, almost usually indirectly, by observing the stars via telescopes to observe the effects of the planets' existence. Most of the time, scientists only have a general idea of the size and distance from the star of the planets.
However, on occasion they have been able to decipher the starlight that passes through and get information about the atmospheres of planets. This is due to the fact that various molecules absorb light at various wavelengths.
For instance, the Hubble Space Telescope found a very large quantity of water vapor in the atmosphere of the planet WASP-39 b.
In order to compare the image offered by their new equipment to what had previously been seen with Hubble, scientists were anxious to stare at this planet when NASA's new flagship telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, debuted in December.
Bean argues that while the Hubble findings have been validated, "we have gone so much deeper in our knowledge of this planet by disclosing all these various compounds and being able to define their abundances much more accurately, and then to observe things that we didn't really anticipate."
Bean cites the sulfur dioxide as an example of something Hubble never got an opportunity to see. But it was simple and came naturally from James Webb's first findings.
Astronomers also found evidence that this planet has a patchy, dispersed cloud cover, in addition to a wide variety of various substances that they detected in the atmosphere, he continues.
Bean states, "It's not all clouded over." "It's always amazing when we can discover something new about one of these sorts of planets that helps me to improve my mental image of what the planet looks like, at least in my brain," says the researcher.
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