Tag: planets

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Could ‘Terminator Zones’ on Distant Planets Harbor Life?

Astronomers Say These in-Between Regions Could Be Prime Sites for Liquid Water

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In a new study, astronomers from the University of California at Irvine describe how extraterrestrial life has the potential to exist on distant exoplanets inside a special area called the “terminator zone,” which is a ring on planets that have one side that always faces its star and one side that is always dark.

“These planets have a permanent day side and a permanent night side,” said Ana Lobo, a postdoctoral researcher in the UCI Department of Physics & Astronomy who led the new work, which just published in The Astrophysical Journal. Lobo added that such planets are particularly common because they exist around stars that make up about 70 percent of the stars seen in the night sky – so-called M-dwarf stars, which are relatively dimmer than our sun.

The terminator is the dividing line between the day and night sides of the planet. Terminator zones could exist in that “just right” temperature zone between too hot and too cold.

“You want a planet that’s in the sweet spot of just the right temperature for having liquid water,” said Lobo, because liquid water, as far as scientists know, is an essential ingredient for life.

On the dark sides of terminator planets, perpetual night would yield plummeting temperatures that could cause any water to be frozen in ice. The side of the planet always facing its star could be too hot for water to remain in the open for long.
“This is a planet where the dayside can be scorching hot, well beyond habitability, and the night side is going to be freezing, potentially covered in ice. You could have large glaciers on the night side,” Lobo said.

Lobo, alongside Aomawa Shields, UCI associate professor of physics & astronomy, modeled the climate of terminator planets using software typically used to model our own planet’s climate, but with a few adjustments, including slowing down planetary rotation.
It’s believed to be the first time astronomers have been able to show that such planets can sustain habitable climates confined to this terminator region. Historically, researchers have mostly studied ocean-covered exoplanets in their search for candidates for habitability. But now that Lobo and her team have shown that terminator planets are also viable refuges for life, it increases the options life-hunting astronomers have to choose from in the search for any possible extraterrestrial civilization.
Elsewhere on the ET front, geologist, and Atlantis Rising contributor, Robert Schoch reported in 2017, in Atlantis Rising Magazine that there are those who think the peculiar irregular dimming of, what has been dubbed Tabby’s Star (KIC 8462852star), could be caused by a ‘Dyson sphere’. The phenomenon continues to the present. Enclosing a star with an artificial structure like a giant lantern shade, to harness its energy, was proposed by British physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson in 1960. If such a thing exists on Tabby’s star (named after discoverer Tabetha Boyajian) it would be clear evidence for the existence of an extremely advanced engineering technology by an alien society.
Another alien-technology story concerns the notorious “Wow” signal, reported by astronomer Jerry R. Ehman in 1977. Ehman, a researcher with the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) spotted an anomalous radio signal that looked artificial in nature and wrote “Wow” on his data printout. Ever since, it has been called the “Wow” signal. It has never been satisfactorily explained, but now there is a new attempt.
Antonio Paris, a professor of astronomy at St. Petersburg College in Florida, has determined that two comets were passing through the area of the sky under observation by Ehman’s telescope, and one of them was accompanied by a hydrogen cloud. Paris, isn’t sure how, but he thinks the comet may have caused the “Wow” signal. He thinks it was a natural phenomenon, but he can’t rule out artificial origins. ▲

AR #99

The Future of Scientific Genius

by J. Douglas Kenyon, Publisher’s Letter

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AI Now Searching for Ancient Life on Mars and Other Planets

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Scientists have discovered a simple and reliable test for signs of past or present life on other planets — “the holy grail of astrobiology.”

In the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers now report that, with 90% accuracy, their new artificial intelligence-based method distinguished modern and ancient biological samples from those of abiotic origin (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2307149120).

Most immediately, the new test could reveal the history of mysterious, ancient rocks on Earth, and possibly that of samples already collected by the Mars Curiosity rover’s Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument. The latter tests could be conducted using an onboard analytical instrument nicknamed “SAM” (for Sample Analysis at Mars.
“We’ll need to tweak our method to match SAM’s protocols, but it’s possible that we already have data in hand to determine if there are molecules on Mars from an organic Martian biosphere.”

“The search for extraterrestrial life remains one of the most tantalizing endeavors in modern science,” says lead author Jim Cleaves of the Earth and Planets Laboratory, Carnegie Institution for Science, Washington, DC.

“The implications of this new research are many, but there are three big takeaways: First, at some deep level, biochemistry differs from abiotic organic chemistry; second, we can look at Mars and ancient Earth samples to tell if they were once alive; and third, it is likely this new method could distinguish alternative biospheres from those of Earth, with significant implications for future astrobiology missions.”

The innovative analytical method does not rely simply on identifying a specific molecule or group of compounds in a sample. Instead, the researchers demonstrated that AI can differentiate biotic from abiotic samples by detecting subtle differences within a sample’s molecular patterns as revealed by pyrolysis gas chromatography analysis (which separates and identifies a sample’s component parts), followed by mass spectrometry (which determines the molecular weights of those components).

Vast multidimensional data from the molecular analyses of 134 known abiotic or biotic carbon-rich samples were used to train AI to predict a new sample’s origin. With approximately 90% accuracy, AI successfully identified samples that had originated from:
• Living things, such as modern shells, teeth, bones, insects, leaves, rice, human hair, and cells preserved in fine-grained rock
• Remnants of ancient life altered by geological processing (e.g. coal, oil, amber, and carbon-rich fossils), or
• Samples with abiotic origins, such as pure laboratory chemicals (e.g., amino acids) and carbon-rich meteorites.
The authors add that until now the origins of many ancient carbon-bearing samples have been difficult to determine because collections of organic molecules, whether biotic or abiotic, tend to degrade over time.
Surprisingly, in spite of significant decay and alteration, the new analytical method detected signs of biology preserved in some instances over hundreds of millions of years.

AR #80

The Case for Life on Mars Gets Stronger

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Astronomers find abundance of Milky Way-like galaxies

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Galaxies from the early Universe are more like our own Milky Way than previously thought, flipping the entire narrative of how scientists think about structure formation in the Universe, according to new research published today.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), an international team of researchers including those at The University of Manchester and University of Victoria in Canada discovered that galaxies like our own Milky Way dominate throughout the universe and are surprisingly common.

These galaxies go far back in the Universe’s history with many of these galaxies forming 10 billion years ago or longer.
The Milky Way is a typical ‘disk’ galaxy, which a shape similar to a pancake or compact disk, rotating about its centre and often containing spiral arms.  These galaxies are thought to be the most common in the nearby Universe and might be the types of galaxies where life can develop given the nature of their formation history. 

However, astronomers previously considered that these types of galaxies were too fragile to exist in the early Universe when galaxy mergers were more common, destroying what we thought was their delicate shapes.

The new discovery, published today in the Astrophysical Journal, finds that these ‘disk’ galaxies are ten times more common than what astronomers believed based on previous observations with the Hubble Space Telescope.

Christopher Conselice, Professor of Extragalactic Astronomy at The University of Manchester, said: “Using the Hubble Space Telescope we thought that disk galaxies were almost non-existent until the Universe was about six billion years old, these new JWST results push the time these Milky Way-like galaxies form to almost the beginning of the Universe.”
The research completely overturns the existing understanding of how scientists think our Universe evolves, and the scientists say new ideas need to be considered.

Lead author, Leonardo Ferreira from the University of Victoria, said: “For over 30 years it was thought that these disk galaxies were rare in the early Universe due to the common violent encounters that galaxies undergo. The fact that JWST finds so many is another sign of the power of this instrument and that the structures of galaxies form earlier in the Universe, much earlier in fact, than anyone had anticipated. 

It was once thought that disk galaxies such as the Milky Way were relatively rare through cosmic history, and that they only formed after the Universe was already middle aged. 

“Based on our results astronomers must rethink our understanding of the formation of the first galaxies and how galaxy evolution occurred over the past 10 billion years.”
 
 
Professor Christopher Conselice

Previously, astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope believed that galaxies had mostly irregular and peculiar structures that resemble mergers.  However, the superior abilities of JWST now allows us to see the true structure of these galaxies for the first time. 
The researchers say that this is yet another sign that ‘structure’ in the Universe forms much quicker than anyone had anticipated.

Professor Conselice continues: “These JWST results show that disk galaxies like our own Milky Way, are the most common type of galaxy in the Universe. This implies that most stars exist and form within these galaxies which is changing our complete understanding of how galaxy formation occurs. These results also suggest important questions about dark matter in the early Universe which we know very little about.”
“Based on our results astronomers must rethink our understanding of the formation of the first galaxies and how galaxy evolution occurred over the past 10 billion years.”

AR #57

Project Stardust
by William Henry

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When Worlds Collide: New Evidence for Immense Ancient Impacts

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A Neptune-sized planet denser than steel has been discovered by an international team of astronomers, who believe its composition could be the result of a giant planetary clash.

TOI-1853b’s mass is almost twice that of any other similar-sized planet known and its density is incredibly high, meaning that it is made up of a larger fraction of rock than would typically be expected at that scale.

In the study, just published in Nature, scientists led by Luca Naponiello of University of Rome Tor Vergata suggest that this is the result of planetary collisions. These huge impacts would have removed some of the lighter atmosphere and water leaving a multitude of rock behind (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06499-2).

Senior Research Associate and co author Dr Phil Carter from the University of Bristol’s School of Physics, explained: “We have strong evidence for highly energetic collisions between planetary bodies in our solar system, such as the existence of Earth’s Moon, and good evidence from a small number of exoplanets.

“We know that there is a huge diversity of planets in exoplanetary systems; many have no analog in our solar system but often have masses and compositions between that of the rocky planets and Neptune/Uranus (the ice giants).
“TOI-1853b is the size of Neptune but has a density higher than steel. Our work shows that this can happen if the planet experienced extremely energetic planet-planet collisions during its formation.

“These collisions stripped away some of the lighter atmosphere and water leaving a substantially rock-enriched, high-density planet.”

Now the team plan detailed follow-up observations of TOI-1853b to attempt to detect any residual atmosphere and examine its composition.

Associate Professor and co author Dr Zoë Leinhardt concluded: “We had not previously investigated such extreme giant impacts as they are not something we had expected. There is much work to be done to improve the material models that underlie our simulations, and to extend the range of extreme giant impacts modelled.”

AR #111

Catastrophism Reconsidered

by William B. Stoecker

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Storms on Saturn Last for Hundreds of Years

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The largest storm in the solar system, a 10,000-mile-wide anticyclone called the Great Red Spot, has decorated Jupiter’s surface for hundreds of years. A new study now shows that Saturn — though much blander and less colorful than Jupiter — also has long-lasting megastorms with impacts deep in the atmosphere that persist for centuries.

The study was conducted by astronomers from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, who looked at radio emissions from the planet, which come from below the surface, and found long-term disruptions in the distribution of ammonia gas. The study was just published in the journal Science Advances, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adg9419).

Megastorms occur approximately every 20 to 30 years on Saturn and are similar to hurricanes on Earth, although significantly larger. But unlike Earth’s hurricanes, no one knows what causes megastorms in Saturn’s atmosphere, which is composed mainly of hydrogen and helium with traces of methane, water and ammonia.

“Understanding the mechanisms of the largest storms in the solar system puts the theory of hurricanes into a broader cosmic context, challenging our current knowledge and pushing the boundaries of terrestrial meteorology,” said lead author Cheng Li, a former 51 Peg b Fellow at UC Berkeley who is now an assistant professor at the University of Michigan.

Imke de Pater, a UC Berkeley professor emerita of astronomy and of earth and planetary sciences, has been studying gas giants for over four decades to better understand their composition and what makes them unique, employing the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico to probe the radio emissions from deep inside the planet.

“At radio wavelengths, we probe below the visible cloud layers on giant planets. Since chemical reactions and dynamics will alter the composition of a planet’s atmosphere, observations below these cloud layers are required to constrain the planet’s true atmospheric composition, a key parameter for planet formation models,” she said. “Radio observations help characterize dynamical, physical and chemical processes including heat transport, cloud formation and convection in the atmospheres of giant planets on both global and local scales.” As reported in the new study, de Pater, Li and UC Berkeley graduate student Chris Moeckel found something surprising in the radio emissions from the planet: anomalies in the concentration of ammonia gas in the atmosphere, which they connected to the past occurrences of megastorms in the planet’s northern hemisphere.

According to the team, the concentration of ammonia is lower at midaltitudes, just below the uppermost ammonia-ice cloud layer, but has become enriched at lower altitudes, 100 to 200 kilometers deeper in the atmosphere. They believe that the ammonia is being transported from the upper to the lower atmosphere via the processes of precipitation and reevaporation. What’s more, that effect can last for hundreds of years. The study further revealed that although both Saturn and Jupiter are made of hydrogen gas, the two gas giants are remarkably dissimilar. While Jupiter does have tropospheric anomalies, they have been tied to its zones (whitish bands) and belts (darkish bands) and are not caused by storms like they are on Saturn. The considerable difference between these neighboring gas giants is challenging what scientists know about the formation of megastorms on gas giants and other planets and may inform how they’re found and studied on exoplanets in the future.

AR #74

Crystal Saturn?

by Barton Ruggles

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Ancient Plans for Mysterious Desert Mega Structures

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Although human constructions have modified natural spaces for millennia, few plans or maps predate the period of the literate civilizations of Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt. Researchers have now been able to identify engravings in Jordan and Saudi Arabia as the oldest known true-to-scale construction plans in human history. The 8,000 to 9,000-year-old engravings depict so-called desert dragons—kilometer long prehistoric megastructures used to trap animals.

Researchers from the French research organization “Centre national de la recherche scientifique” (CNRS), together with Prof. Dr. Frank Preusser from the University of Freiburg, have now been able to identify engravings in Jordan and Saudi Arabia as the oldest known true-to-scale construction plans in human history. “Conclusions can be drawn from the findings about the people of the time. The ability to transfer a large space to a small, two-dimensional plan represents a milestone in intelligent behavior,” explains Preusser. The results, which were published in mid-May in the scientific journal PLOS ONE, should help to understand how desert dragons were conceived and built.

Both finds are representations of nearby desert dragons engraved with stone tools. First sighted from aircrafts in the 1920s, desert dragons, up to five kilometers long, consist of stone walls that converge in a complex bounded by pits. As archaeologists have been able to determine in recent years, they were used for large-scale trapping of wild animals. In Jordan, there are eight desert dragons in the area of Jibal al-Khasabiyeh. There, the researchers found a depiction engraved in stone that measures 80 by 32 cm, its age is about 9,000 years. At Jebel az-Zilliyat in Saudi Arabia, two visible pairs of dragons are found three and a half kilometres apart. Here, too, a scaled engraving dating back about 8,000 years was discovered with a total length of 382 cm and a width of 235 cm.

Plans of large structures have so far only been attested by rough representations, in stark contrast to the precision of the engravings of al-Khashabiyeh and az-Zilliyat. The question of their exact use and how they were implemented, especially due to the difficulty of grasping the entire complex from the ground, remains for the time being the secret of the people by whom they were created.

AR #109

Once Upon a Time in Inner Space

by Martin Ruggles

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Third of Milky Way Planets May Be Able to Host Life

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In a new analysis based on the latest telescope data, astronomers have discovered that a third of the planets around the most common stars in the galaxy could be in a goldilocks orbit close enough, and gentle enough, to hold onto liquid water—and possibly harbor life.

The remaining two-thirds of the planets around these ubiquitous small stars are likely roasted by gravitational tides, sterilizing them.

University of Florida astronomy professor Sarah Ballard and doctoral student Sheila Sagear published their findings the week of May 29 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Ballard and Sagear have long studied exoplanets, those worlds that orbit stars other than the sun (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2217398120https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2217398120).

“I think this result is really important for the next decade of exoplanet research, because eyes are shifting toward this population of stars,” Sagear said. “These stars are excellent targets to look for small planets in an orbit where it’s conceivable that water might be liquid and therefore the planet might be habitable.”

Our familiar, warm, yellow sun is a relative rarity in the Milky Way. By far the most common stars are considerably smaller and cooler, sporting just half the mass of our sun at most. Billions of planets orbit these common dwarf stars in our galaxy.

Scientists think that liquid water is required for life to evolve on other planets, like it did on Earth. Because these dwarf stars are cooler, any planets would have to huddle very close to their star to draw enough warmth to host liquid water. However, these close orbits leave the planets susceptible to extreme tidal forces caused by the star’s gravitational effect on the planets.

Sagear and Ballard measured the eccentricity – how oval the orbit is –  of a sample of more than 150 planets around these dwarf stars, which are about the size of Jupiter. If a planet orbits close enough to its star, at about the distance that Mercury orbits the sun, an eccentric orbit can subject it to a process known as tidal heating. As the planet is stretched and deformed by changing gravitational forces on its irregular orbit, friction heats it up. At the extreme end, this could bake the planet, removing all chance for liquid water.

“It’s only for these small stars that the zone of habitability is close enough for these tidal forces to be relevant,” Ballard said.

Data came from NASA’s Kepler telescope, which captures information about exoplanets as they move in front of their host stars. To measure the planets’ orbits, Ballard and Sagear focused especially on how long the planets took to move across the face of the stars. Their study also relied on new data from the Gaia telescope, which measured the distance to billions of stars in the galaxy.

“The distance is really the key piece of information we were missing before that allows us to do this analysis now,” Sagear said.

AR #109

Once Upon a Time in Inner Space

by Martin Ruggles

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Exoplanet May Harbor Life

A newly discovered exoplanet could be worth searching for signs of life. Analyses by a team led by astronomer Diana Kossakowski of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy describe a planet that orbits its home star, the red dwarf Wolf 1069, in the habitable zone. This zone includes distances around the star for which liquid water can exist on the surface of the planet. In addition, the planet named Wolf 1069 b has an Earth-like mass. Very likely, this planet is a rocky planet that may also have an atmosphere. This makes the planet one of the few promising targets to search for signs of life-friendly conditions and biosignatures.

When astronomers search for planets outside our solar system, they are particularly interested in Earth-like planets. Of the more than 5,000 exoplanets they have discovered so far, only about a dozen have an Earth-like mass and populate the habitable zone, the range in a planetary system where water can maintain its liquid form on the planet’s surface. With Wolf 1069 b, the number of such exoplanets on which life could have evolved has increased by one candidate.

Detecting such low-mass planets is still a major challenge. Diana Kossakowski and her team at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg have taken on this task. As part of the Carmenes project, an instrument was developed specifically for the search of potentially habitable worlds. The Carmenes team is using this apparatus at the Calar Alto Observatory in Spain. “When we analyzed the data of the star Wolf 1069, we discovered a clear, low-amplitude signal of what appears to be a planet of roughly Earth mass.” says Diana Kossakowski. “It orbits the star within 15.6 days at a distance equivalent to one-fifteenth of the separation between the Earth and the Sun,” The results of the study have now been published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

According to the study, the surface of the dwarf star is relatively cool and thus appears orange-reddish. “As a result, the so-called habitable zone is shifted inwards”, Kossakowski explains. Despite its close distance to the central star, the planet Wolf 1069 b therefore receives only about 65 percent of the incident radiant power of what Earth receives from the Sun. These special conditions make planets around red dwarf stars like Wolf 1069 potentially friendly to life. In addition, they may all share a special property. Their rotation is probably tidally locked to the orbit of its host star. In other words, the star always faces the same side of the planet. So there is eternal day, while on the other side it is always night. This is also the reason why we always face the same side of the moon.

Graphic and caption
https://www.mpg.de/19798012/exoplanet-earth-like-habitable?c=12034746

AR #120

Was Venus Once Habitable?

and

Alien Megastructure Not Yet Ruled Out

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Looking for ET with Machine Learning

When pondering the probability of discovering technologically advanced extraterrestrial life, the question that often arises is, “if they’re out there, why haven’t we found them yet?” And often, the response is that we have only searched a tiny portion of the galaxy. Further, algorithms developed decades ago for the earliest digital computers can be outdated and inefficient when applied to modern petabyte-scale datasets. Now, research published in Nature Astronomy and led by an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto, Peter Ma, along with researchers from the SETI Institute, Breakthrough Listen and scientific research institutions around the world, has applied a deep learning technique to a previously studied dataset of nearby stars and uncovered eight previously unidentified signals of interest.

“In total, we had searched through 150 TB of data of 820 nearby stars, on a dataset that had previously been searched through in 2017 by classical techniques but labeled as devoid of interesting signals,” said Peter Ma, lead author. “We’re scaling this search effort to 1 million stars today with the MeerKAT telescope and beyond. We believe that work like this will help accelerate the rate we’re able to make discoveries in our grand effort to answer the question ‘are we alone in the universe?’”

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) looks for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence originating beyond Earth by trying to detect technosignatures, or evidence of technology, that alien civilizations could have developed. The most common technique is to search for radio signals. Radio is a great way to send information over the incredible distances between the stars; it quickly passes through the dust and gas that permeate space, and it does so at the speed of light (about 20,000 times faster than our best rockets). Many SETI efforts use antennas to eavesdrop on any radio signals aliens might be transmitting.

This study re-examined data taken with the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia as part of a Breakthrough Listen campaign that initially indicated no targets of interest. The goal was to apply new deep learning techniques to a classical search algorithm to yield faster, more accurate results. After running the new algorithm and manually re-examining the data to confirm the results, newly detected signals had several key characteristics:

  1. The signals were narrow band, meaning they had narrow spectral width, on the order of just a few Hz. Signals caused by natural phenomena tend to be broadband.
  2. The signals had non-zero drift rates, which means the signals had a slope. Such slopes could indicate a signal’s origin had some relative acceleration with our receivers, hence not local to the radio observatory.
  3. The signals appeared in ON-source observations and not in OFF-source observations. If a signal originates from a specific celestial source, it appears when we point our telescope toward the target and disappears when we look away. Human radio interference usually occurs in ON and OFF observations due to the source being close by.

    Cherry Ng, another of Ma’s research advisors and an astronomer at both the SETI Institute and the French National Center for Scientific Research said, “These results dramatically illustrate the power of applying modern machine learning and computer vision methods to data challenges in astronomy, resulting in both new detections and higher performance. Application of these techniques at scale will be transformational for radio technosignature science.”

    While re-examinations of these new targets of interest have yet to result in re-detections of these signals, this new approach to analyzing data can enable researchers to more effectively understand the data they collect and act quickly to re-examine targets.  Ma and his advisor Dr. Cherry Ng are looking forward to deploying extensions of this algorithm on the SETI Institute’s COSMIC system.

    Since SETI experiments began in 1960 with Frank Drake’s Project Ozma at the Greenbank Observatory, a site now home to the telescope used in this latest work, technological advances have enabled researchers to collect more data than ever. This massive volume of data requires new computational tools to process and analyze that data quickly to identify anomalies that could be evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. This new machine learning approach is breaking new ground in the quest to answer the question, “are we alone?”

    This research is published in Nature Astronomy (https://seti.berkeley.edu/ml_gbt/overview.html).

AR #127

The WOW Signal Reconsidered”

by Robert M. Schoch, Ph.D.

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Exoplanet Show its Atmosphere

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope just scored another first: a molecular and chemical profile of a distant world’s skies.

While Webb and other space telescopes, including NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer, previously have revealed isolated ingredients of this broiling planet’s atmosphere, the new readings from Webb provide a full menu of atoms, molecules, and even signs of active chemistry and clouds.

The latest data also give a hint of how these clouds might look up close: broken up rather than a single, uniform blanket over the planet.

The telescope’s array of highly sensitive instruments was trained on the atmosphere of WASP-39 b, a “hot Saturn” (a planet about as massive as Saturn but in an orbit tighter than Mercury) orbiting a star some 700 light-years away. 
The findings bode well for the capability of Webb’s instruments to conduct the broad range of investigations of all types of exoplanets – planets around other stars – hoped for by the science community. That includes probing the atmospheres of smaller, rocky planets like those in the TRAPPIST-1 system.

“We observed the exoplanet with multiple instruments that, together, provide a broad swath of the infrared spectrum and a panoply of chemical fingerprints inaccessible until [this mission],” said Natalie Batalha, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who contributed to and helped coordinate the new research. “Data like these are a game changer.”

The suite of discoveries is detailed in a set of five new scientific papers, three of which are in press and two of which are under review. Among the unprecedented revelations is the first detection in an exoplanet atmosphere of sulfur dioxide (SO2), a molecule produced from chemical reactions triggered by high-energy light from the planet’s parent star. On Earth, the protective ozone layer in the upper atmosphere is created in a similar way.

“This is the first time we see concrete evidence of photochemistry – chemical reactions initiated by energetic stellar light – on exoplanets,” said Shang-Min Tsai, a researcher at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and lead author of the paper explaining the origin of sulfur dioxide in WASP-39 b’s atmosphere. “I see this as a really promising outlook for advancing our understanding of exoplanet atmospheres with [this mission].” 

This led to another first: scientists applying computer models of photochemistry to data that requires such physics to be fully explained. The resulting improvements in modeling will help build the technological know-how to interpret potential signs of habitability in the future. (https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.10488)

Pictures and captions:
https://www.aura-astronomy.org/blog/2022/11/22/stsci-nasas-webb-reveals-an-exoplanet-atmosphere-as-never-seen-before/

AR #122

Mega Engineering in the Stars

Robert Schoch, Ph.D.