University of Bristol Archivi

Webb Reveals an Exoplanet Atmosphere as Never Seen Before

The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope just scored another first: a molecular and chemical profile of a distant world’s skies.

The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope just scored another first: a molecular and chemical portrait of a distant world’s skies. While Webb and other space telescopes, including the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, have previously revealed isolated ingredients of this heated planet’s atmosphere, the new readings provide a full menu of atoms, molecules, and even signs of active chemistry and clouds. The latest data also give a hint of how these clouds might look up close: broken up rather than as a single, uniform blanket over the planet.

The telescope’s array of highly sensitive instruments was trained on the atmosphere of WASP-39 b, a “hot Saturn” (a planet about as massive as Saturn but in an orbit tighter than Mercury) orbiting a star some 700 light-years away. This Saturn-sized exoplanet was one of the first examined by the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope when it began regular science operations. The results have excited the exoplanet science community. Webb’s exquisitely sensitive instruments have provided a profile of WASP-39 b’s atmospheric constituents and identified a plethora of contents, including water, sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide, sodium and potassium.

Image Description: Graphic titled “Hot Gas Giant Exoplanet WASP-39 b Atmosphere Composition.” The graphic includes four graphs—transmission spectra—arranged in a 2 by 2 grid with an illustration of the planet and its star in the background. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, J. Olmsted (STScI)

This graph displays data from Webb’s NIRISS instrument, showing fingerprints of potassium (K), water (H2O), and carbon monoxide (CO). Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, J. Olmsted (STScI)

This graph displays data from Webb’s NIRCam instrument, showing a prominent water signature. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, J. Olmsted (STScI)

This graph displays data from Webb’s NIRSpec instrument, indicating signatures of water, sulfur dioxide (SO2), carbon dioxide (CO2), and carbon monoxide (CO). Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, J. Olmsted (STScI)

This graph displays data from Webb’s NIRSpec instrument, indicating signatures of potassium (K), water (H2O), carbon monoxide (CO), sulfur dioxide (SO2), carbon dioxide (CO2), and sodium (Na). Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, J. Olmsted (STScI)

The findings bode well for the capability of Webb’s instruments to conduct the broad range of investigations of exoplanets — planets around other stars — hoped for by the science community. That includes probing the atmospheres of smaller, rocky planets like those in the TRAPPIST-1 system.

“We observed the exoplanet with several instruments that together cover a broad swath of the infrared spectrum and a panoply of chemical fingerprints inaccessible until JWST,” said Natalie Batalha, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who contributed to and helped coordinate the new research. “Data like these are a game changer.”

The suite of discoveries is detailed in a set of five new scientific papers, three of which are in press and two of which are under review. Among the unprecedented revelations is the first detection in an exoplanet atmosphere of sulphur dioxide, a molecule produced from chemical reactions triggered by high-energy light from the planet’s parent star. On Earth, the protective ozone layer in the upper atmosphere is created in a similar way.

“This is the first time we have seen concrete evidence of photochemistry — chemical reactions initiated by energetic stellar light — on exoplanets,” said Shang-Min Tsai, a researcher at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and lead author of the paper explaining the origin of sulphur dioxide in WASP-39 b’s atmosphere. “I see this as a really promising outlook for advancing our understanding of exoplanet atmospheres with [this mission].”

This led to another first: scientists applying computer models of photochemistry to data that require such physics to be fully explained. The resulting improvements in modelling will help build the technological know-how needed to interpret potential signs of habitability in the future.

“Planets are sculpted and transformed by orbiting within the radiation bath of the host star,” Batalha said. “On Earth, those transformations allow life to thrive.”

The planet’s proximity to its host star — eight times closer than Mercury is to our Sun — also makes it a laboratory for studying the effects of radiation from host stars on exoplanets. Better knowledge of the star-planet connection should bring a deeper understanding of how these processes affect the diversity of planets observed in the galaxy.

Other atmospheric constituents detected by the Webb telescope include sodium (Na), potassium (K), and water vapour (H2O), confirming previous space- and ground-based telescope observations as well as finding additional fingerprints of water, at these longer wavelengths, that haven’t been seen before.

Webb also saw carbon dioxide (CO2) at higher resolution, providing twice as much data as reported from its previous observations. Meanwhile, carbon monoxide (CO) was detected, but obvious signatures of both methane (CH4) and hydrogen sulphide (H2S) were absent from the Webb data. If present, these molecules occur at very low levels.

To capture this broad spectrum of WASP-39 b’s atmosphere, an international team numbering in the hundreds independently analysed data from four of the Webb telescope’s finely calibrated instrument modes.

“We had predicted what [the telescope] would show us, but it was more precise, more diverse and more beautiful than I think I actually believed it would be,” said Hannah Wakeford, an astrophysicist at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom who investigates exoplanet atmospheres.

Having such a complete roster of chemical ingredients in an exoplanet atmosphere also gives scientists a glimpse of the abundance of different elements in relation to each other, such as the carbon-to-oxygen or potassium-to-oxygen ratios. That in turn provides insight into how this planet — and perhaps others — formed out of the disc of gas and dust surrounding the parent star in its younger years.

WASP-39 b’s chemical inventory suggests a history of smashups and mergers of smaller bodies called planetesimals to create an eventual goliath of a planet.

“The abundance of sulphur [relative to] hydrogen indicated that the planet presumably experienced significant accretion of planetesimals that can deliver [these ingredients] to the atmosphere,” said Kazumasa Ohno, a UC Santa Cruz exoplanet researcher who worked on Webb data. “The data also indicates that the oxygen is a lot more abundant than the carbon in the atmosphere. This potentially indicates that WASP-39 b originally formed far away from the central star.

By precisely revealing the details of an exoplanet atmosphere, the Webb telescope’s instruments performed well beyond scientists’ expectations — and promise a new phase of exploration of the broad variety of exoplanets in the galaxy.

“We are going to be able to see the big picture of exoplanet atmospheres,” said Laura Flagg, a researcher at Cornell University and a member of the international team. “It is incredibly exciting to know that everything is going to be rewritten. That is one of the best parts of being a scientist.”

More information

Webb is the largest, most powerful telescope ever launched into space. Under an international collaboration agreement, ESA provided the telescope’s launch service, using the Ariane 5 launch vehicle. Working with partners, ESA was responsible for the development and qualification of Ariane 5 adaptations for the Webb mission and for the procurement of the launch service by Arianespace. ESA also provided the workhorse spectrograph NIRSpec and 50% of the mid-infrared instrument MIRI, which was designed and built by a consortium of nationally funded European Institutes (The MIRI European Consortium) in partnership with JPL and the University of Arizona.

Webb is an international partnership between NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).

Press release from ESA Webb

Keep Reading

Fish Fossils of Tujiaaspis vividus Breathe New Life into Fin and Limb Evolutionary Hypothesis

A trove of fossils, unearthed in rock from China dating back some 436 million years, has revealed for the first time that the mysterious galeaspids, members of an extinct clade of jawless fish, possessed paired fins.

The discovery, by an international team led by Prof. ZHU Min from the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Prof. Philip Donoghue from the University of Bristol, shows the primitive condition of paired fins before they separated into pectoral and pelvic fins, the forerunner of arms and legs.

The findings were published in Nature on Sept. 28.

Fish fossils of Tujiaaspis vividus breathe new life into fin and limb evolutionary hypothesis. Fig. 1 Life reconstructions of Tujiaaspis vividus (Image by ZHENG Qiuyang)

Until now, the only surviving galeaspid fossils were heads, but these new fossils comprise whole bodies. They were found in rocks in Hunan Province and Chongqing and were named Tujiaaspis after the indigenous Tujia people who live in the region.

Fig. 3 The holotype specimen and its interpretative drawing of Tujiaaspis vividus from 436 million years old rocks of Chongqing, China (Image by Gai, et al.)

Theories abound about the evolutionary beginnings of vertebrate fins and limbs—the evolutionary precursors of arms and legs—and are mostly based on comparative embryology. There is a rich fossil record of early vertebrate , but they either had separated paired fins or they didn’t. There has been little evidence for the gradual evolution of fins.

According to first author GAI Zhikun, a professor at IVPP, “The anatomy of galeaspids has been something of a mystery since they were first discovered more than half a century ago. Tens of thousands of fossils are known from China and Vietnam, but almost all of them are just heads—nothing has been known about the rest of their bodies—until now.”

The new fossils are spectacular, preserving the whole body for the first time and revealing that these animals possessed paired fins that extended all the way from the back of the head to the very tip of the tail. This is a great surprise since scientists had thought galeaspids lack paired fins altogether.

“Tujiaaspis breathes new life into a century old hypothesis for the evolution of paired fins, through differentiation of pectoral (arms) and pelvic (legs) fins over evolutionary time from a continuous head-to-tail fin precursor,” said corresponding author Prof. Donoghue.

This “fin-fold” hypothesis has been very popular, but it has lacked any supporting evidence until now. The discovery of Tujiaaspis resurrects the fin-fold hypothesis and reconciles it with contemporary data on genetic control of the embryonic development of fins in living vertebrates.

Tujiaaspis shows the “primitive condition” for the evolution of paired fins, according to Prof. ZHU, who said that later jawless fish showed the first evidence for the separation of this fin-fold into pectoral and pelvic fins. Prof. ZHU also noted that the vestiges of elongate fin-folds could be seen in the embryos of living jawed fishes, which could be manipulated to produce them.

Fig. 2 3D reconstruction of Tujiaaspis vividus (Image by YANG Dinghua)

Bristol’s Dr. Humberto Ferron, a co-author, used computational engineering approaches to simulate the behaviour of models of Tujiaaspis with and without the paired fins. He said,

“The paired fins of Tujiaaspis act as hydrofoils, passively generating lift for the fish without any muscular input from the fins themselves. The lateral fin-folds of Tujiaaspis allowed it to swim more efficiently.”

“Our new analyses suggest that the ancestor of jawed vertebrates likely possessed paired fin-folds, which became separated into pectoral and pelvic regions,” said co-author Dr. Joseph Keating from the University of Bristol.

He noted that the primitive fins evolved musculature and skeletal support that allowed our fish ancestor to better steer their swimming and add propulsion.

“It is amazing to think that the evolutionary innovations seen in Tujiaaspis underpin locomotion in animals as diverse as birds, whales, bats, and humans,” he said.

Press release from the Chinese Academy of Sciences

Keep Reading