What happens to a planet in “the radiation bath of its host star”?
made by the telescope to scientists around the world. The researchers used three of Webb’s instruments, NIRSpec, NIRCam, and NIRISS, to collect spectroscopy information about the planet’s atmosphere.
“We observed the exoplanet with several instruments that together cover a broad swath of the infrared spectrum and a panoply of chemical fingerprints inaccessible until JWST,” said one of the researchers, Natalie Batalha of the University of California, Santa Cruz, in aIn the last decade, astronomy researchers have discovered a plethora of exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system.
The research found that there was sodium, potassium, carbon monoxide, and water vapor in the atmosphere, which confirms previous findings that WASP-39b has water vapor in its atmosphere. But it also found sulfur dioxide, the first time this molecule has been detected in an exoplanet atmosphere. Finding these molecules hints at a process similar to that found in Earth’s ozone layer, as sulfur dioxide is formed from chemical reactions in the upper atmosphere caused by light from the host star.
“This is the first time we see concrete evidence of photochemistry – chemical reactions initiated by energetic stellar light – on exoplanets,” said another of the researchers, Shang-Min Tsai of the University of Oxford. “I see this as a really promising outlook for advancing our understanding of exoplanet atmospheres with [this mission].”
With WASP-39 b orbiting so close to its host star, at one-eighth the distance between Mercury and the Sun, studying it can show how radiation from stars interacts with planetary atmospheres. While radiation can be harmful to life (Earth is protected from the Sun’s radiation by its magnetosphere, without which the planet could have been
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