Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
JAMES WEBB SPACE TELSCOPE FOUND DEFINITIVE EVIDENCE FOR WATER IN HOT GAS GIANT EXOPLANET WASP-96 b!!!! It’s about 1,150 light years away from earth - and this is the most detailed, near-infared transmission spectrum of an exoplanet atmosphere that has EVER been captured.
(There’s also evidence for haze and clouds, which couldn’t be seen before.)
To be clear, this is not liquid water, nor is it the kind of water vapor that makes up clouds on Earth, since WASP-96b is a gas giant larger than Jupiter that orbits much closer to its sun than Mercury does to ours. That is certainly superheated steam that is being detected.
What’s really remarkable about this isn’t the fact that they found proof of water (we’ve found a lot of planets with water in their spectra, and we’ve found water on worlds in our own solar system as well– but it is still pretty fucking remarkable!) but rather JUST how in depth the spectroscopy on WASP-96b is. Spectra in the range of 1.7 microns to 3.5 microns have not been available to us until now. That’s important, because a lot of spectral lines are in that region– as you can see up top.
The spectrum in that image starts in the lowest energy wavelengths of the visible spectrum (aka red light that we can see with our eyeballs) and goes all the way to 2.8 microns, in the near-infrared range. This is the first time that a transmission spectrum has been able to pick up that range this accurately, and it’s also the first time that that entire range has been able to be picked up in a single shot rather than ‘chunks’. This is MASSIVELY IMPORTANT, because it requires less work and less time to analyze data when you get it all in one piece. Which means scientists will be able to analyze the compositions of exoplanets much more quickly!
yeah if humans tried to smell space just like that, we’d die, no doubt about it
but the smell of space lingers on spacewalk suits, and docking hatches when astronauts open them!
apparently, space itself smells like burning hot metal, or a hot barbeque grill with a slight hint of spent gasoline. The moon, apparently, smells like a gun after its been shot!
The coolest thing about it all is that the smell is actually what are left of dying stars- it’s literally the smell of stardust, and the particles smell like that because they’re so rich in hydrocarbons- something so very essential to life, and speculated by a lot of astronomers and astrobiologists and such to be the very thing life on earth started from!
another neat fact is that no two solar systems smell the same- ours smells like that because our solar system in particular is extremely rich in carbon, and other solar systems and places in the universe will have extremely different smells depending on what elements are most abundant in their system!
ALT
