{"id":11405,"date":"2022-07-12T17:35:38","date_gmt":"2022-07-12T09:35:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/jwst-teases-new-era-in-exoplanet-astronomy\/"},"modified":"2022-07-12T17:35:38","modified_gmt":"2022-07-12T09:35:38","slug":"jwst-teases-new-era-in-exoplanet-astronomy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/jwst-teases-new-era-in-exoplanet-astronomy\/","title":{"rendered":"JWST teases new era in exoplanet astronomy"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"
NASA\u2019s James Webb Space Telescope has captured the distinct signature of water, along with evidence for clouds and haze, in the atmosphere surrounding a hot, puffy gas giant planet orbiting a distant sun-like star. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Among the dazzling images from the James Webb Space Telescope released Tuesday was a squiggly line of spectral data that contained the tell-tale chemical fingerprint of water vapor and clouds in the atmosphere of a scorching hot planet circling a star 1,150 light-years from Earth.<\/p>\n

The planet, named WASP-96 b, orbits hellishly close to its sun-like host star in the southern sky constellation Phoenix. It takes just three-and-a-half days to make one lap around its parent star, circling just one-ninth of the distance between Mercury and the sun. Previous measurements indicated WASP-96 b has a temperature higher than 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (1,000 degrees Celsius).<\/p>\n

Astronomers discovered WASP-96 b in a ground-based survey in 2013, and initially thought the planet was free of cloud cover. But Webb\u2019s data suggest otherwise.<\/p>\n

Webb found evidence of \u201cclouds and haze\u201d in the atmosphere, NASA said.<\/p>\n

WASP-96 b is one of more than 5,000 confirmed exoplanets in the Milky Way. It has half the mass of Jupiter but is 1.2 times larger in diameter, with a \u201cpuffy\u201d structure unlike any planet in our solar system.<\/p>\n

The Hubble Space Telescope has detected water vapor in an exoplanet atmosphere before, but Webb has the ability to more efficiently measure chemical composition in greater detail.<\/p>\n

Stationed in orbit around a gravitationally stable balance point nearly a million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth, the Webb telescope is the largest astronomical observatory ever put into space.<\/p>\n

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Artist\u2019s impression of an exoplanet system with a planet transiting in front of its parent star. Credit: ESA\/ATG medialab<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

With a segmented gold-coated primary mirror 21.3 feet (6.5 meters) in diameter, Webb is 100 times more sensitive than Hubble and carries sophisticated detectors to break apart starlight into countless slices like a high-tech prism, allowing sensors to analyze for the chemical composition of distant celestial targets.<\/p>\n

Canada\u2019s Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph instrument on Webb measured light from the parent star of WASP-96 b for 6.4 hours as it filtered through the exoplanet\u2019s atmosphere.<\/p>\n

The observation \u201creveals previously hidden details of the atmosphere: the unambiguous signature of water, indications of haze, and evidence of clouds that were thought not to exist based on prior observations,\u201d NASA said in a press release.<\/p>\n

\u201cA transmission spectrum is made by comparing starlight filtered through a planet\u2019s atmosphere as it moves across the star to the unfiltered starlight detected when the planet is beside the star,\u201d NASA said. \u201cResearchers are able to detect and measure the abundances of key gases in a planet\u2019s atmosphere based on the absorption pattern \u2013 the locations and heights of peaks on the graph.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the same way that people have distinctive fingerprints and DNA sequences, atoms and molecules have characteristic patterns of wavelengths that they absorb,\u201d NASA said.<\/p>\n

Astronomers can use the spectrum to measure how much water vapor is in the planet\u2019s atmosphere, constsain the abundance of various elements like carbon and oxygen, and estimate the temperature at different levels of the atmosphere, according to NASA. That could yield clues about where and how the planet formed.<\/p>\n

Webb is not designed to be a discoverer of exoplanets. Smaller NASA telescopes like Kepler and TESS do that job, allowing JWST to follow up for detailed observations to characterize the alien worlds.<\/p>\n

Future exoplanet observations by Webb could reveal the presence of chemical biomarkers, such as ozone and methane, that could be generated by biological processes. NASA said no such signature was immediately obvious with WASP-96 b. No surprise, considering its blazing temperature.<\/p>\n

Future targets for Webb include the seven rocky planets of the TRAPPIST-1 system, which orbit a star 40 light-years from Earth, nearly 30 times closer than the WASP-96 b exoplanet. Three of the seven planets around the TRAPPIST-1 star are in the so-called habitable zone, where temperatures could support the presence of liquid water.<\/p>\n

Webb will also attempt to directly image the fuzzy reflected starlight from the largest exoplanets, using a coronagraph to blot out the bright shine of the host star.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a lot more to come,\u201d said Knicole Col\u00f3n, Webb\u2019s deputy project scientist for exoplanet science at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center.<\/p>\n

Email the author.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NASA\u2019s James Webb Space Telescope has captured the distinct signature of water, along with evidence for clouds and haze, in the atmosphere surrounding a hot, puffy gas giant planet orbiting a distant sun-like star. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI Among the dazzling images from the James Webb Space Telescope released Tuesday was a squiggly line […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11405"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11405"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11405\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}