Researchers have discovered water vapor in the atmosphere of a planet similar to Jupiter that is circling a star outside our solar system.
Orbiting the nearby star Tau Boötis, the extrasolar planet has the same mass as our solar system's gaseous red planet but is called "hot Jupiter" due to its high temperatures. A collective of researchers from the California Institute of Technology group and several other institutions has been using new techniques to analyze the planet's atmosphere, Astronomy Magazine reported.
"When a planet transits--or passes in orbit in front of its host star--we can use information from this event to detect water vapor and other atmospheric compounds," explained Alexandra Lockwood from Caltech in Pasadena, as quoted by Astronomy Magazine. "Alternatively, if the planet is sufficiently far away from its host star, we can also learn about a planet's atmosphere by imaging it."
Water vapor has been discovered on a few other planets before, but detecting water in a planet's atmosphere requires sensitive instruments as well as specific circumstances that align. Many planets can't be studied for atmospheric content since they don't fit the criteria.
The recent exploration of the Jupiter-esque planet's atmosphere required a novel approach. The scientists used radial velocity (RV) technique to feel out the planet's movement in relation to the star it's orbiting.
"The detection of an exoplanet by the shift in the stellar spectrum alone provides a measure of the planet's minimum mass, with the true mass degenerate with the unknown orbital inclination," the researchers described in the study, which was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
"Treating the tau Boo system as a high flux ratio double-lined spectroscopic binary permits the direct measurement of the planet's true mass as well as its atmospheric properties."
The researchers studied various wavelengths of light coming from Tau Boötis b to see what the planet's atmosphere held. Lockwood compared the flood of light to music played by different instruments.
"The information we get from the spectrograph is like listening to an orchestra performance--you hear all of the music together, but if you listen carefully, you can pick out a trumpet or a violin or a cello, and you know that those instruments are present," Lockwood said in a statement.
"With the telescope, you see all of the light together, but the spectrograph allows you to pick out different pieces--like this wavelength of light means that there is sodium, or this one means that there's water."
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