The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has achieved groundbreaking discoveries in the field of exoplanet studies.
In particular, it has made strides in the analysis of their atmospheres by studying light from the parent star as it travels through the gas surrounding the planets.
JWST recently observed gas giant planets in the system HR 8799 and detected the presence of carbon dioxide in their atmospheres, suggesting there are similarities between the formation of this system and our own.
HR 8799 is a pretty remarkable exoplanetary system located 130 light-years from Earth in the constellation Pegasus. It's a system centred around a young, main-sequence star that is about 1.5 times the mass of our Sun and only about 30 million years old.
What makes HR 8799 particularly interesting is that it hosts one of the first directly imaged multiple-planet systems, with four confirmed giant planets orbiting the star at distances ranging from 15 to 70 astronomical units.
These planets, designated HR 8799 b, c, d, and e, are all massive gas giants, each estimated to be between 5 and 10 times the mass of Jupiter.
Giant planets like these can form through two distinct processes: core accretion, where solid cores of heavier elements slowly attract gas (as happened in our Solar System), or disk instability, where gas particles rapidly coalesce from a young star's cooling disk.
Understanding which formation model is most common helps scientists classify planetary systems throughout the galaxy.
Such analysis has been at the heart of a study by a team of researchers led by William Balmer, of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
Their study also involved observations from 51 Eridani, and as Balmer explains, "Our hope with this kind of research is to understand our own Solar System, life, and ourselves in the comparison to other exoplanetary systems, so we can contextualise our existence."
The observations of the gas planets in HR8799 and 51 Eridani reveal that they contain significant amounts of carbon dioxide gas, providing strong evidence that the system's four giant planets formed through core accretion – the same process believed to have created Jupiter and Saturn, where solid cores gradually attract surrounding gas from a protoplanetary disk.
Of the nearly 6,000 exoplanets already discovered, only a handful have been directly imaged due to the enormous brightness difference between planets and their host stars.
JWST's NIRCam coronagraph technology has made these observations possible by blocking starlight to reveal the infrared emissions from planets themselves.
They were able to analyse specific wavelengths absorbed by various gases and so were able to determine that the four HR 8799 planets contain higher concentrations of heavy elements than previously believed.
The observations of HR 8799 and 51 Eridani were conducted as part of Webb's Guaranteed Time Observations programs.
As the world's foremost space science observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope continues to be a key player not only in the hunt and observations of distant exoplanets, but also the continued exploration of the Solar System and studies into the structures and origins of the Universe.
This article was originally published by Universe Today. Read the original article.