Agnibha Banerjee

I am a PhD Student at The Open University, UK, studying exoplanet atmospheres with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Exoplanets are planets that orbit stars beyond our Solar System. When an exoplanet crosses in front of its host star, some starlight filters through its atmosphere, interacting with gas molecules and atoms before it reaches us on Earth. This light contains fingerprints of the gases in that atmosphere if we split it into its constituent colours (a spectrum). We can then deduce the composition of these atmospheres using computer models to compare the spectral features of known gases with the observed spectrum.