Caltech nasa careers6/17/2023 ![]() ![]() The same side of WASP-18b always faces the star, just as the same side of the moon always faces Earth. This allows us to infer spatial information about the planetary atmosphere.” ![]() “The JWST observations have such high precision that we can also measure the minute variations occurring while the planet is slipping behind (and then emerging from) the limb of the star. “This type of observation allows us to study the thermal infrared radiation that the planet emits on the star-facing side,” she said. “Unlike previous papers from our team, this one describes a secondary eclipse, which occurs when a planet disappears behind the host star,” said coauthor Natalie Batalha, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz who leads the JWST Transiting Exoplanet Early Release Science Team and helped coordinate the study. They reported their findings in a paper published May 31 in Nature. Now astronomers have used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to identify water vapor in the atmosphere of WASP-18b and make a temperature map of the planet as it slipped behind, and reappeared from, its star. In addition to observatories on the ground, NASA’s Hubble, Chandra, TESS, and Spitzer space telescopes have all been used to observe WASP-18b, an ultra-hot gas giant 10 times more massive than Jupiter. There’s nothing like it in our solar system. A year for WASP-18b (one orbit of its star) takes just 23 hours. There’s an intriguing exoplanet out there-400 light-years out there-that is so tantalizing astronomers have been studying it since its discovery in 2009. ![]()
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