The NASA "James Webb" telescope made another great scientific discovery - it found traces of carbon dioxide (CO2) on a planet outside the solar system.
Although that exoplanet will never be suitable for life, the successful discovery of CO2 gives scientists hope that similar observations can be made on planets closer to Earth, AFP writes.
"My first thought was, 'Wow, we really have a chance to detect the atmosphere of an Earth-sized planet,'" tweeted Natalie Batala, a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, one of hundreds of researchers on the Web project.
A study of the exoplanet WASP-39, a hot gas giant orbiting a star 700 light-years away, will soon be published in the journal Nature, reports N1.
"For me, it opens the door for future research into super-Earths or even Earth-sized planets," said Pierre-Olivier Lagage, an astrophysicist at France's Atomic Energy Commission (CEA). Super-Earths are planets larger than ours, but smaller than Neptune.
The discovery of carbon dioxide will also help scientists better understand how WASP-39 formed, NASA said.
This exoplanet orbits its star once every four days, has a mass of a quarter of Jupiter, but 1,3 times the diameter.
Its orbital frequency and large atmosphere made WASP-39 an ideal candidate for early tests of Webb's NIRSpec infrared sensor.
The telescopes "Hubble" and "Spicer" already detected water vapor, sodium and potassium in the atmosphere of that exoplanet, but it was only with "Web" that carbon dioxide was discovered.
"It was a special moment, an important frontier in the knowledge of exoplanets was crossed," said Zafar Rusamkulov, a researcher from Johns Hopkins University, in a NASA statement.
The $1961 billion telescope, named after the director of NASA from 1986 to XNUMX, was launched late last year.
The project is led by NASA in partnership with the European and Canadian space agencies, and the telescope is 100 times more powerful than Hubble.
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