Water Is Detected In A Planet Outside Our Solar System

“We now are applying our effective new infrared technique to several other non-transiting planets orbiting stars near the Sun,” Bender said. “These planets are much closer to us than the nearest transiting planets, but largely have been ignored by astronomers because directly measuring their atmospheres with previously existing techniques was difficult or impossible.” With the new detection technique and more-powerful future telescopes such as the James Webb Space Telescope and the Thirty Meter Telescope, the astronomers expect to be able to examine the atmospheres of planets that are much cooler and more distant from their host stars, where liquid water is even more likely to exist.

Bender is leading a larger project to characterize the atmospheres of many hot-Jupiter extrasolar planets. The tau Boötis discovery is one subcomponent of this larger project. The data analysis and publication of the tau Boötis discovery was led by Alexandra Lockwood at Caltech as part of her thesis with her advisor Geoffrey Blake, Professor of Cosmochemistry and Planetary Sciences and Professor of Chemistry at Caltech, and much of the initial data reduction for this discovery was carried out by Alexander Richert, a Penn State graduate student.

The findings appear in the The Astrophysical Journal Letters in a paper titled “Near-IR Direct Detection of Water Vapor in tau Boötis b.” The coauthors of the paper are at institutions including CalTech, Penn State University, the Naval Research Laboratory, the University of Arizona, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The work was funded by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program, the David and Lucile Packard and Alfred P. Sloan foundations, and the Penn State University Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds.

Contacts and sources:
Barbara K. Kennedy