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Moroccan Scientists Advance Exoplanet Research Using James Webb Telescope
Tuesday 5 May 2020, by
A team of researchers from the Cadi Ayyad University (UCA) in Marrakech has just taken an "important new step" in research on the characterization of the atmospheres of exoplanets. This is a study on the potential of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to detect and characterize the atmospheres of sub-Neptunian exoplanets of TOI-270.
This is an important step for this team from the UCA, part of the Laboratory of High Energy Physics and Astrophysics (LPHEA) and the Oukaïmeden Observatory (OUCA), in collaboration with the NASA NExSS Virtual Planetary Laboratory and the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. This study has just been accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS), according to a press release from the UCA.
The results of this research have shown that "SubNeptunes are more likely to be aquatic worlds than gaseous dwarfs." "We expect these results to provide useful predictions for the scientific community that could propose to use JWST to detect the atmosphere of these planets," the same source specifies.