Astrophysicists on Earth are no strangers to WASP-39b, an exoplanet orbiting a star about 700 light-years from Earth, though they’ve never actually seen it directly. Now, the Webb Space Telescope has offered fresh insight into this distant world: Its observations have revealed the recipe list for the planet’s toxic atmosphere.
WASP-39b is a gas giant about the mass of Saturn and the size of Jupiter, but it orbits its star at about the same distance as Mercury is from the Sun, making the exoplanet very, very hot. The exoplanet was discovered in 2011; earlier this year, Webb telescope observations revealed carbon dioxide lurking in its atmosphere.
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More molecules and chemical compounds have now been indentified, including evidence of water, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, sodium, and potassium. The findings are under review for publication and currently available on the preprint server arXiv.
Read more: Gizmodo
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