An international team of scientists led by exoplanet expert Drake Deming from the University of Maryland (USA), has detected water vapor in the atmosphere of an exoplanet that is four times larger than Earth (that is, similar to Neptune). , with a mass of 26 times that of our planet and located in the Constellation of Cygnus about 124 light years away.
It is the smallest planet on which scientists have been able to describe some of the chemical components in its atmosphere . And it is that the search to expand our knowledge of the planets that are outside our solar system has become a prominent element in scientific today.
The planet in question is called HAT-P11b and astronomers have been able to detect water vapor thanks to observations from three different NASA telescopes (Hubble, Spitzer and Kepler) and a technique that studies a peculiarity of light that occurs when a planet transits in front of its star . What happens is that the material contained in the exoplanet’s atmosphere absorbs some of the light from its star and this makes the planet appear much larger. Comparing the data showed how much radiation the planet’s atmosphere was absorbing from the star, revealing what chemical elements are present in the star.
“The transmission spectroscopy methodology can be used on transiting exoplanets, those that during their orbit eclipse their star when they are observed from Earth. When the planet is between us and the star, the star’s light passes through the planet’s atmosphere, if it has one. Chemical elements in the atmosphere can leave an ‘imprint’ on that light that we can later detect with our telescopes . Looking for these traces it is possible to infer the composition of the atmosphere ”, says Andrés Jordán, co-author of the work.
Being close to its star (it completes one round of its star in approximately five days), the exoplanet’s temperature is quite high, close to 605 ºC . Despite this, this planet, probably with a rocky core, would be surrounded by a layer of gas, mostly hydrogen that, despite being a cloudless environment, there are marks of water vapor, a precondition for life.
The study has been published in the journal Nature .
