The James Webb Space Telescope has detected carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet outside the solar system, a discovery researchers already hope will revolutionize the study of exoplanets, NASA said in a statement.

The discovery was made by the James Webb Telescope during its first series of exoplanet observations, when researchers aimed the telescope at a hot gas giant called WASP-39 b, which is about 700 light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo.

The planet is about as massive as Saturn, but larger than Jupiter, and has also previously been observed by the Hubble Space Telescope and the now-defunct Spitzer Space Telescope.

Previous observations have shown the presence of water vapor, sodium and potassium in the atmosphere of WASP-39 b, but the detection of carbon dioxide is the first for any exoplanet studied.

“As soon as the data appeared on my screen, carbon dioxide caught my eye,” said Zafar Rustamkulov, a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University and a member of the team that studied the exoplanet. “It was a special moment of crossing an important threshold in exoplanet science,” he added.

Astronomers have discovered carbon dioxide on a planet with an extreme orbit

Astronomers now hope that the new discovery will help them better understand the history and evolution of planets and where they formed.

“This unequivocal detection of carbon dioxide is an important milestone for the characterization of exoplanet atmospheres,” said Laura Kreidberg, director of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany and co-author of the paper describing the discovery.

“Carbon dioxide helps us measure the total supply of carbon and oxygen in the atmosphere, which is very sensitive to the conditions in the disk where the planet formed,” she explains.

The temperature on WASP-39 b reaches 900 degrees Celsius because, unlike the gas giants in our solar system, the planet orbits its star extremely close, much closer even to the Sun than Mercury, completing an orbit in just 4 days.

The discovery of carbon dioxide on WASP-39 b comes after astronomers announced last month that the James Webb Space Telescope may have found the most distant galaxy ever observed.

On July 12, NASA unveiled the first image taken by this telescope, designed to replace the Hubble Space Telescope as a pioneer in the study of the universe.