{"id":130844,"date":"2022-08-25T10:05:25","date_gmt":"2022-08-25T14:05:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ucf.edu\/news\/?p=130844"},"modified":"2022-08-25T13:06:46","modified_gmt":"2022-08-25T17:06:46","slug":"james-webb-space-telescope-detects-carbon-dioxide-on-planet-outside-solar-system","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ucf.edu\/news\/james-webb-space-telescope-detects-carbon-dioxide-on-planet-outside-solar-system\/","title":{"rendered":"James Webb Space Telescope Detects Carbon Dioxide on Planet Outside Solar System"},"content":{"rendered":"
A University of Central Florida researcher is part of an international team that has used NASA\u2019s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to capture definitive evidence for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a gas-giant planet orbiting a sun-like star 700 light-years away.<\/p>\n
The finding was published online today and will appear in the journal Nature<\/em>.<\/p>\n The discovery provides insights into the composition and formation of the planet and demonstrates JWST\u2019s ability to detect and measure carbon dioxide in the thinner atmospheres of smaller rocky planets.<\/p>\n It is the first detailed, indisputable evidence for carbon dioxide ever detected on a planet outside the solar system. The planet is called WASP-39 b and is in the constellation Virgo. The team used JWST\u2019s Near Infrared Spectrograph, or NIRSpec, and also detected another molecule that has yet to be identified.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a very, very clear detection,\u201d says study co-author Joseph Harrington, a UCF Pegasus Professor of Physics. \u201cIt\u2019s a whack-you-on-the-head level of detection.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAll prior observatories, Hubble, Spitzer, ground based, you name it, were struggling to be able to detect carbon dioxide,\u201d Harrington says. \u201cBefore, we had a very noisy signal, and you really couldn’t see anything. Now we have a very clear detection. It’s a really a demonstration of what the telescope can do.\u201d<\/p>\n No observatory has ever measured such subtle differences in brightness of so many individual colors across the 3 to 5.5-micron range in an exoplanet transmission spectrum before. Access to this part of the spectrum is crucial for measuring abundances of gases like water and methane, as well as carbon dioxide, which are thought to exist in many different types of exoplanets.<\/p>\n Understanding the composition of a planet\u2019s atmosphere is important because it tells researchers something about the origin of the planet and how it evolved.<\/p>\n \u201cDetecting what the atmosphere is made of tells you a lot about the chemistry of that planet,\u201d Harrington says. \u201cWhen you’re learning about the balance of the chemicals in the atmosphere, it has implications for life. The amounts of carbon versus oxygen are pretty key items, because we’re made of carbon and oxygen. The goal of all of exoplanet science really is to characterize Earth-like planets and potentially find life.\u201d<\/p>\n Harrington\u2019s role in the study included developing the proposal and editing the manuscript. He and his students have developed open-source analysis tools that will be used later in the project. The team of co-authors included more than 130 investigators from 15 countries.<\/p>\n One of the co-authors, Kevin Stevenson, a staff astronomer at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, is co-principal investigator of the project and has been involved with it since its inception.<\/p>\n