The telescope has compiled a molecular and chemical portrait of the atmosphere of the “hot Saturn” WASP-39b in unprecedented detail, revealing water, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, sodium and potassium in it.
The exoplanet lives seven hundred light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Virgo and is located eight times closer to its star than Mercury is to the Sun.
The presence of such a complete list of chemical ingredients in the shell of the exoplanet WASP-39b gives an idea of the abundance of various elements in relation to each other, which allows us to make assumptions about how it formed in the disk of gas and dust surrounding the parent star in its young years.
