“Our hope with this kind of research is to understand our own solar system, life, and ourselves in comparison to other exoplanetary systems, so we can contextualize our existence,” said William Balmer.

What can carbon dioxide in an exoplanet’s atmosphere teach us about its formation and evolution? This is what a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal hopes to address as an international team of researchers made the first direct images of carbon dioxide in the atmospheres of two exoplanetary systems. This study has the potential to help researchers better understand the formation and evolution of exoplanet atmospheres and how this could lead to finding life as we know it, or even as we don’t know it.

For the study, the researchers used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to analyze the atmospheres of exoplanets residing in the systems HR 8799 and 51 Eridani (51 Eri) with the direct imaging method. The HR 8,799 system is located approximately 135 light-years from Earth and hosts four known exoplanets whose masses range from five to nine times of Jupiter, and the 51 Eridani system is located approximately 97 light-years from Earth and hosts one known exoplanet whose mass is approximately four times of Jupiter. Both systems are very young compared to our solar system at approximately 4.6 billion years old, with HR 8,799 and 51 Eridani being approximately 30 million and 23 million years old, respectively.