Webb’s Gigantic Mirror and Precision Instrumentation Join Forces To Capture the Most Detailed Spectrum of an Exoplanet Atmosphere Ever In a remarkable dream come true for exoplaneteers, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has demonstrated its unprecedented capacity to analyze the atmosphere of an exo
in 2013. However, Webb’s immediate and more detailed observation marks an enormous leap forward in the quest to characterize potentially habitable planets beyond Earth.. Located roughly 1,150 light-years away in the southern-sky constellation Phoenix, it represents a type of gas giant that has no direct analog in our solar system. With a mass less than half that ofand a diameter 1.2 times greater, WASP-96 b is much puffier than any planet orbiting our Sun.
On June 21, Webb’s Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph measured light from the WASP-96 system for 6.4 hours as the planet moved across the star. The result is a light curve showing the overall dimming of starlight during the transit, and a transmission spectrum revealing the brightness change of individual wavelengths of infrared light between 0.6 and 2.8 microns.
A transmission spectrum is made by comparing starlight filtered through a planet’s atmosphere as it moves across the star to the unfiltered starlight detected when the planet is beside the star. Researchers are able to detect and measure the abundances of key gases in a planet’s atmosphere based on the absorption pattern – the locations and heights of peaks on the graph.
The exceptional detail and clarity of these measurements is possible because of Webb’s state-of-the-art design. Its 270-square-foot gold-coated mirror collects infrared light efficiently. Its precision spectrographs spread light out into rainbows of thousands of infrared colors. And its sensitive infrared detectors measure extremely subtle differences in brightness.
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