How The James Webb Space Telescope Is Revealing The Weather And Chemistry On Planets Around Other...

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The weather on the gas giant Ditsö` is literally alien. Clouds of solid quartz appear and disappear thanks to silicon and oxygen atoms continually evaporating from and then condensing in its atmosphere.

Ditsö`, also known as WASP-17 b, orbits a star 1,300 light-years from Earth. One side of the planet is perpetually locked so that it faces the star and is thus permanently illuminated as the dayside. That half of the planet reaches temperatures of 1,773 K (1,500 °C), according to Hannah Wakeford, an astrophysicist at the University of Bristol .

The nanocrystals in Ditsö`'s clouds heat up and break apart as they travel through the dayside but begin to cool down as they approach the planet's darker half. "You've got this tinkling of crystals forming and shrouding the nightside," Wakeford says.

Wakeford knows this as coleader of one of the first teams of scientists to use infrared (IR) spectrometers on board the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) , launched in December 2021. The JWST is the world's latest flagship satellite-based telescope, its spectrometers recording the brightness of IR-wavelength light invisible to human eyes. Scientists want to record light from stars—specifically, the colors whose brightness is reduced when the planets that orbit those stars pass across them. Those dimmer colors have been absorbed by chemicals in the planets' atmospheres.

The researchers can then determine what those chemicals are by interpreting the wavelengths absorbed, giving an unprecedented view of chemistry elsewhere in our galaxy.

The JWST is the largest space telescope ever launched, with a 6.5 m mirror made of 18 hexagonal, gold-coated beryllium sections collecting and focusing light. That's nearly three times as wide as the mirror in its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope. The mirror helps make the JWST 100 times as sensitive as Hubble, which allows it to pick up much dimmer light.