Extrasolar gas giant planets are a necessary stop on the road to finding life elsewhere in the cosmos. Here's why we need to understand their atmospheres.
gathered by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope along with previous observations from Hubble and other space- and ground-based telescopes. WASP-107 b is a -warm Neptune’ exoplanet orbiting a relatively small and cool star approximately 210 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Virgo.If astrobiologists are ever going to detect life beyond our solar system, it will arguably be done via spectroscopy of a planetary atmosphere as it passes in front of its parent star.
Three decades ago, Swiss astronomers Michel Mayor and Didiez Queloz of Geneva Observatory, detected the first planet orbiting another sunlike star. Roughly half the size of our own Jupiter, they found it on an incredibly and unexpectedly short 4.2-day orbit around the solar type star 51 Pegasi. These gas giants are the easiest to observe; they have wonderfully extended atmospheres, so we can get information from each part of these gas giants’ atmospheres, said Helling. This helps us to either prove that our models are correct, or if not, to improve them, she said. These are the first steps before we really can understand extraterrestrial rocky planets, said Helling.
We can do that for ten to twenty planets now, but I think we’ll be able to do that for a couple of hundred planets in a few years’ time, said Fortney.
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