Newswand: NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope observed methane gas and water vapor on exoplanet WASP-80 b as it passed in front of and behind its host star.
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While water vapor has been detected in over a dozen planets to date, until recently methane – a molecule found in abundance in the atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune within our solar system – has remained elusive in the atmospheres of transiting exoplanets when studied with space-based spectroscopy.
Taylor Bell from the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute (BAERI), working at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, and Luis Welbanks from Arizona State University said, “With a temperature about 825 kelvins (about 1,025 degrees Fahrenheit), WASP-80 b is what scientists call a “warm Jupiter.” WASP-80 b goes around its red dwarf star once every three days and is situated 163 light-years away from us in the constellation Aquila.
Using the transit method, they observed the system when the planet moved in front of its star from our perspective, causing the starlight we see to dim a bit. It’s kind of like when someone passes in front of a lamp and the light dims. During this time, a thin ring of the planet’s atmosphere around the planet’s day/night boundary is lit up by the star, and at certain colors of light where the molecules in the planet’s atmosphere absorb light, the atmosphere looks thicker and blocks more starlight, causing a deeper dimming compared to other wavelengths where the atmosphere appears transparent.
Meanwhile, using the eclipse method, they observed the system as the planet passed behind its star from our perspective, causing another small dip in the total light we received. All objects emit some light, called thermal radiation, with the intensity and color of the emitted light depending on how hot the object is. Just before and after the eclipse, the planet’s hot dayside is pointed toward us, and by measuring the dip in light during the eclipse we were able to measure the infrared light emitted by the planet. For eclipse spectra, absorption by molecules in the planet’s atmosphere typically appear as a reduction in the planet’s emitted light at specific wavelengths. Also, since the planet is much smaller and colder than its host star, the depth of an eclipse is much smaller than the depth of a transit.
The initial observations they made needed to be transformed into something called a spectrum; this is essentially a measurement showing how much light is either blocked or emitted by the planet’s atmosphere at different colors (or wavelengths) of light. They interpreted spectrum using two kinds of models to simulate what the atmosphere of a planet under such extreme conditions would look like. The first type of model is entirely flexible, trying millions of combinations of methane and water abundances and temperatures to find the combination that best matches our data. The second type, called ‘self-consistent models,’ also explores millions of combinations but uses our existing knowledge of physics and chemistry to determine the levels of methane and water that could be expected. Both model types reached the same conclusion: a definitive detection of methane.
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