JWST peers into the atmosphere of an exoplanet bombarded by st | Great Space
JWST peers into the atmosphere of an exoplanet bombarded by stellar radiation.
Humanity’s latest space telescope is giving us a clearer picture of planets far outside our solar system.
This week, astronomers announced that they’d found evidence of chemical reactions in the atmosphere of an exoplanet 700 light years away from Earth. Researchers using the James Webb Space Telescope created a detailed chemical portrait of the scorching gases swirling around exoplanet WASP-39b. This “hot Saturn” planet orbits extremely close to its host star, meaning it has high temperatures of up to 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit or 900 degrees Celsius. It is also puffy, with around one quarter the mass of Jupiter but 1.3 times its size.
