Publications by authors named "Saugata Barat"
Article Synopsis
- Photochemistry plays a critical role in regulating the composition and stability of planetary atmospheres, but clear photochemical products have not been detected in exoplanets until recently.* -
- The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) detected sulfur dioxide (SO) in the atmosphere of the exoplanet WASP-39b, suggesting photochemical processes create SO in this gas giant's atmosphere.* -
- The presence of SO, linked to the oxidation of hydrogen sulfide, indicates WASP-39b has high metallicity (about 10 times that of the sun), and its spectral features could help understand more about similar exoplanets.*
Measuring the abundances of carbon and oxygen in exoplanet atmospheres is considered a crucial avenue for unlocking the formation and evolution of exoplanetary systems. Access to the chemical inventory of an exoplanet requires high-precision observations, often inferred from individual molecular detections with low-resolution space-based and high-resolution ground-based facilities. Here we report the medium-resolution (R ≈ 600) transmission spectrum of an exoplanet atmosphere between 3 and 5 μm covering several absorption features for the Saturn-mass exoplanet WASP-39b (ref.
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