NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope continues to amaze the world with its findings. One of the newest is molecular and chemical profiles of distant world skies: WASP-39 ban extremely hot planet orbiting a star some 700 light years away.

Is about a planet the same size as Saturnbut it has an orbit with its star eight times narrower than Mercury does with our Sun.

Although this same space agency has been analyzed by other space telescopes such as NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer, Webb’s new reading brings up a full menu of atoms, molecules, and even what clouds look like up close.

One of the unprecedented revelations was first detection in the atmosphere of an exoplanet of sulfur dioxidea molecule resulting from a chemical reaction triggered by high-energy light from a star orbiting the planet. On Earth, the protective ozone layer in the upper atmosphere is created in a similar way..

Also other atmospheric components such as oxygen, carbon dioxide, sodium, potassium and water vapor were detectedconfirmed previous observations from other telescopes, although Webb found traces of water that had never been seen before.

The data also shows that Oxygen is much more abundant than carbon in the atmosphere. This potentially indicates that WASP-39 b originally formed far from the center of the star,” said Kazumasa Ohno, an exoplanet researcher at UC Santa Cruz who worked on Webb’s data.

Knowing all the chemicals in the atmosphere gives scientists an idea of ​​how the abundance of different elements is related to each other.as well as the proportions between them.

The same, allows us to determine how this planet, and possibly others, formed from the disk of gas and dust that surrounds its parent star in its youth.

“We had expected what it would show us, but it was more accurate, more diverse and more beautiful than I thought it would be”says Hannah Wakeford, an astrophysicist at the University of Bristol in England who studies the atmospheres of exoplanets.

This finding is a good test for the Webb instrument.who will continue to work on various investigations of all types of exoplanets, including probing the atmospheres of smaller rocky planets and building up the technological know-how to interpret possible signs of future habitability.

Wrote NTN24 (with information from NASA)