James Webb telescope: NASA decodes the atmosphere of a distant planet for the first time

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Image taken by NASA's James Webb telescope

Photo: Illustration: Joseph Olmsted / NASA;

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Since NASA's James Webb telescope has been in space, it has been sending spectacular images back to Earth.

This time: the chemical profile of the sky of a distant planet.

While previous models such as the "Hubble" telescope would only have revealed individual components of the atmosphere of the seething planet, the new measurements from "James Webb" provide a "complete menu of atoms, molecules and even signs of active chemistry and clouds", as NASA reports .

According to the data, the clouds are not a uniform blanket over the planet, but rather fragmented.

The telescope was aimed at the atmosphere of WASP-39b, a "hot Saturn" - a planet about the same size as Saturn but in a closer orbit than Mercury.

WASP-39 b and the star it orbits are about 700 light-years from Earth.

To see the light from WASP-39 b, the telescope tracked the planet as it passed in front of its star, allowing some of the star's light to filter through the planet's atmosphere, Nasa said.

Different types of chemicals in the atmosphere absorb different colors of the starlight spectrum, so the missing colors tell astronomers which molecules are present.

By looking at the universe in infrared light, Webb can take chemical fingerprints that are not visible in visible light.

In order to capture this broad spectrum of the atmosphere of WASP-39 b, an international team independently analyzed the data from the "Webb" telescope.

The list of the chemical components of an exoplanet atmosphere also gives the scientists information about the frequency of the different elements in relation to each other, for example about the ratio of carbon to oxygen or potassium to oxygen.

This in turn allows conclusions to be drawn about how this planet formed from the gas and dust disk around the parent star at a young age.

For WASP-39 b, the data suggest there may have been collisions and mergers of smaller bodies called planetsimals.

From these, a gigantic planet could finally have emerged.

NASA tweeted, "@NASAWebb just made another first." The telescope's Twitter profile states, "Webb's latest data gives us the first molecular and chemical profile of a distant world." This bodes well for the telescope's ability to study the atmospheres of small, rocky planets.

"We observed the exoplanet with multiple instruments that combine to provide a wide range of infrared spectra and a variety of chemical fingerprints that were previously inaccessible for this mission," said Natalie Batalha, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who works at the participated in and co-ordinated the new investigation, according to the release.

"Data like this is a turning point."

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