Compositions of exoplanet atmospheres may be skewed because models don't match James Webb Space Telescope's precision.
Astronomers are excited about Webb's ability to study exoplanets in such detail, because the chemical compositions of the planetary atmospheres they hope to find could offer hints about the possible presence of life on some of these distant worlds. But inaccurate readings of the data would mean the obtained insights would be quite unreliable.
"Our translation process will prevent us from catching important subtleties, such as those making the difference between a planet being habitable or not," de Wit said. The researchers came to the conclusion by testing several versions of the existing opacity models and feeding them synthetic light spectra simulating those obtained by the James Webb Space Telescope. They found that various versions of the model produced differing values that demonstrated their accuracy limits, they said.
"That difference matters in order for us to constrain planetary formation mechanisms and reliably identify biosignatures," Prajwal Niraula, a graduate student at EAPS and co-author of the new paper, said in the statement."Currently, the model we use to decrypt spectral information is not up to par with the precision and quality of data we have from the James Webb telescope. We need to up our game and tackle the opacity problem.
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