Montreal – Carbon dioxide (CO2) has been detected for the very first time in the atmosphere of an exoplanet, 700 light years from Earth, thanks to the performance of the new James Webb Space Telescope, launched by NASA in collaboration with the European and Canadian Space Agencies.
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The European Space Agency has released videos comparing images of the spectacular “ghost galaxy”, also known as M74, taken by the James Webb Space Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope. M74, a spiral galaxy located 32 million light-years away, is made up of about 100 billion stars.
This is the first clear, detailed and indisputable evidence for the presence of carbon dioxide ever found on a planet outside the solar system.
“I was absolutely blown away,” said physics professor Björn Benneke, of the University of Montreal and a member of the team responsible for studying transiting exoplanets, which worked on the design of the observing program and analyzing NIRSpec data with his graduate students.
“We analyzed the data here in Montreal and we saw this huge carbon dioxide signature: 26 times stronger than any noise in the data. Before James-Webb, we often had to dig through the noise, but there “We had a perfectly defined signature. It’s like seeing something clearly with your own eyes,” said the professor, quoted by Canadian media.
“On Earth, he added, carbon dioxide plays an extremely important role in our climate and we are used to seeing its spectroscopic signatures. Now we see this same signature very far away. exoplanets are worlds as real as the Earth and the planets of our solar system”.
For astrophysicist Vivien Parmentier, from the University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis and co-author of the study published in the journal Nature, “the precision of James Webb is such that this detection is beyond doubt”.
No observatory has ever before measured such subtle differences in the brightness of so many individual infrared colors in an exoplanet’s transmission spectrum.
Access to this part of the spectrum, from 3 to 5.5 microns, is crucial in determining the abundance of gases such as water vapor and methane, as well as CO2, which could exist in many types of exoplanets.