Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Space

Carbon Dioxide Detected Around Alien World For First Time (science.org) 24

sciencehabit quotes a report from Science Magazine: Astronomers have found carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere of a Saturn-size planet 700 light-years away -- the first unambiguous detection of the gas in a planet beyond the Solar System. The discovery, made by the James Webb Space Telescope, provides clues to how the planet formed. The result also shows just how quickly Webb may identify a spate of other gases, such as methane and ammonia, which could hint at a planet's potential habitability for life. [...] For its first exoplanet observations, astronomers targeted the hot gas giant WASP-39b, which orbits its star every 4 days in an orbit much tighter than Mercury's. The first data were taken on 10 July and the team started work on them a few days later. Even in raw data based on a single transit across the star, the spectral dip of CO2 "sticks out like a sore thumb," says Webb team member Jacob Bean of the University of Chicago. There have been some tentative detections of the gas before, he says, but none of them held up under scrutiny. Webb's spectrum was "the right size, the right shape, and in the right position," Bean says. "CO2 just popped out."

Finding CO2 is valuable because it is a clue to a planet's "metallicity" -- the proportion of elements heavier than helium in its makeup. Hydrogen and helium produced in the big bang are the starting materials for all the visible matter in the universe, but anything heavier was forged later in stars. Researchers believe a good supply of heavy elements is crucial for creating giant planets. When planets form out of a disk of material around a new star, heavier elements form solid grains and pebbles that glom together into a solid core that eventually is massive enough to pull in gases with its own gravity and grow into a gas giant. With Webb, finding "important chemicals will be the norm rather than the exception," says one expert. He predicts that when Webb starts to study cooler planets closer in size to Earth, there will be some real surprises -- perhaps some gases that could indicate whether the planets are amenable to life. "It's anyone's guess," he says. "A whole zoo of chemicals is possible."
The findings first appeared on the preprint server arXiv yesterday and they will appear in Nature in the near future.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Carbon Dioxide Detected Around Alien World For First Time

Comments Filter:
  • Alien world? (Score:5, Informative)

    by quenda ( 644621 ) on Friday August 26, 2022 @02:02AM (#62824587)

    Which of those words does not apply to Venus? Or Mars?
    Which scientific illiterate is allowed to write these headlines?

    • There you go, bringing science into a fun chat about gas, and spoiling Beau's fun.
      • by Anonymous Coward

        So we're supposed to take this as proof of xenosapigenic climate change, then?

        • Re: Just asking (Score:3, Insightful)

          by saloomy ( 2817221 )
          No. For one you do not know if the world ever lacked the CO2 it has now. For another, if climate change is real, someone explain to me when climate was static?
          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by fropenn ( 1116699 )
            Actually we (well, scientists, not me specifically) know lots about the history of CO2 on Earth. See, for example: https://earth.org/data_visuali... [earth.org]

            The important thing about climate change isn't that the Earth's climate is static - it has never had a static climate, at least on a long enough time scale. The point is that human activity has accelerated the rate of change of the Earth's current climate in a manner that is unfavorable to its future capacity to sustain human life. We are already seeing the e
            • Flooding, famine, drought⦠these are new?

              Let me ask you something. Fossil fuels. We use them to make and move food. Do you think we would have more or less famine without them? Seriously? What a load of bullshit.

              No. the second part of your argument is utter bullshit because our energetic civilization has the power to solve for these things, and we already do. Famine because of bad weather is no longer a thing. We have the power to produce more than enough food and move a lot of it around at w
    • Which of those words does not apply to Venus? Or Mars?
      Which scientific illiterate is allowed to write these headlines?

      "Alien" meaning "foreign" or "unknown", why shouldn't it be appropriate to describe exoplanets as "alien worlds", considering that the planets in our solar system have been studied for a long time and are much more familiar at this point.

    • They clearly mean extrasolar, and yes, strictly speaking planets in our system are "alien" in some sense, but it was clear what the headline meant.
    • You beat me to it. Well played sir.
  • Seems we aren't the only fuckups in the universe.

  • Hydrogen and helium produced in the big bang are the starting materials for all the visible matter in the universe, but anything heavier was forged later in stars.

    I saw an article recently - and it does not appear to have been here - which cast doubt on the big bang theory. There are galaxies a very long way away which should have been expanding at the time light left there on its way here, according to the James Webb telescope they were already mature and stable at that time.

  • The troll to tech noise ratio is high with this one.

FORTUNE'S FUN FACTS TO KNOW AND TELL: A guinea pig is not from Guinea but a rodent from South America.

Working...