Amazing stuff!
"... The telescope’s array of highly sensitive instruments was trained on the atmosphere of a “hot Saturn” – a planet about as massive as Saturn orbiting a star some 700 light-years away – known as WASP-39 b. While Webb and other space telescopes, including Hubble and Spitzer, previously have revealed isolated ingredients of this broiling planet’s atmosphere, the new readings provide a full menu of atoms, molecules and even signs of active chemistry and clouds. ...
Other atmospheric constituents detected by the Webb telescope include sodium, potassium and water vapor ...
Capturing such a broad spectrum of WASP-39 b’s atmosphere was a scientific tour de force, as an international team numbering in the hundreds independently analyzed data from four of the Webb telescope’s finely calibrated instrument modes. ..."
The suite of discoveries is detailed in a set of five new scientific papers which have not yet been published. Among the unprecedented revelations is the first detection in an exoplanet atmosphere of sulfur dioxide, a molecule produced from chemical reactions triggered by high-energy light from the planet’s parent star. ...
“This is the first time we see concrete evidence of photochemistry – chemical reactions initialized by energetic stellar light – on exoplanets,” ...Other atmospheric constituents detected by the Webb telescope include sodium, potassium and water vapor ...
Capturing such a broad spectrum of WASP-39 b’s atmosphere was a scientific tour de force, as an international team numbering in the hundreds independently analyzed data from four of the Webb telescope’s finely calibrated instrument modes. ..."
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