NASA's James Webb telescope continues to make surprising discoveries one after another. This time it has detected the presence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of an exoplanet. The name of that planet is WASP-39.
Researchers thought that the planet's atmosphere was never suitable for life. Now that the presence of carbon dioxide has been successfully detected there, the same researchers will try to search for life on the planet in the future rather than a rocky object.
Professor Natalie Batalha of the University of California, USA, who worked on the James Webb Telescope project, tweeted, "My first thought: Wow, we really have a chance to detect the atmospheres of Earth-sized planets."
This gas planet, named WASP-39, is orbiting a star 700 light-years away. The researchers are talking about the publication of the article related to the research on the planet in the journal Nature soon.
This opens the door to future studies of super-Earths (planets larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune) and Earth-sized planets, said Pierre Olivier Lagez, an astrophysicist at France's Atomic Energy Commission.
According to a NASA news release, WASP-39 will help scientists learn how the planet formed by detecting carbon dioxide. The planet orbits the star once every four days. Its mass is one-fourth that of Jupiter. But it is 1.3 times larger in diameter than Jupiter.
Due to the planet's orbital frequency and large atmosphere, James Webb's sophisticated infrared sensor called NIRSpec made the presence of carbon dioxide easy to detect. Whenever the planet passes in front of the star, almost all light is extinguished. But a small amount of light can pass through the atmosphere as it passes around the edge of the star. James Webb's ultra-sensitive NIRspec is able to detect this slight change in the home's atmosphere. From this, scientists were able to find out the composition of the gas there.
Earlier, the Hubble and Spitzer telescopes WASP-39 were able to detect the planet's vapor, sodium and potassium. This time, James Webb added carbon dioxide information to this list.
"This is a special moment," Johns Hopkins University researcher Zafar Rustomkulov said in a NASA news release. Through this discovery it was possible to overcome an important frontier of home science.
The James Webb Telescope has already been discussed around the world as the world's largest and newest telescope. Recently, scientists have opened several eye-catching pictures of Jupiter taken by this telescope. NASA and the European Space Agency spent $10 billion to build the James Webb Telescope, the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. It began operations in space late last year. The telescope has been observing the universe using infrared cameras since last summer. It is located 1 million miles from Earth. Last month, through the telescope, scientists brought the view of the universe 1,300 billion years ago.
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