![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/The-Identification-of-CS2.png\")
<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\n The retrieved transmission spectrum using the results from the free retrieval plotted as a black line, along with the transmission data from NIRCam F322W2, F444W, and MIRI LRS plotted as black dots with 1 sigma error bars. Contributing absorption is plotted in various colors to show where gas species contribute the transmission spectrum. From the gas contributions we can see by eye that the absorption of CS2 matches the features at 4.6 \u00b5m and 6.5 \u00b5m nicely. \u2013astro-ph.EP <\/p>\n
Transmission spectroscopy with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is revealing growing chemical complexity in giant exoplanet atmospheres. Of particular interest is sulfur, which had essentially no observational constraints before JWST.<\/p>\n
Recent work has shown that a planet\u2019s atmospheric sulfur content traces its refractory budget and is therefore a sensitive indicator of formation pathways. But despite the growing library of JWST data, the sulfur inventory of giant exoplanets remains poorly constrained: sulfur-bearing species are governed by disequilibrium chemistry and by kinetic networks that are still being revised.<\/p>\n
Here we present a transmission spectrum of the warm giant planet WASP-80 b obtained with JWST\/NIRCam and MIRI over 2.4,\u03bcm\u201310\u03bcm in three transits. We find evidence for H2O, CH4, CO2, NH3, and CS2 in the atmosphere and place upper limits on CO and SO2. Our atmospheric retrievals yield log10XCS2=\u22122.25+0.33\u22120.32.<\/p>\n
This CS2 abundance is substantially higher than predicted by earlier sulfur-chemistry schemes for H2-rich atmospheres in WASP-80 b\u2019s temperature range, but is consistent with recent chemically validated networks that include efficient carbon-sulfur coupling through CH2S.<\/p>\n
These results identify CS2 as an observable tracer of sulfur disequilibrium chemistry and provide observational support for theoretically predicted carbon-sulfur chemical coupling in giant exoplanet atmospheres.<\/p>\n
Anastasia Triantafillides, Thomas G. Beatty, Matthew C. Nixon, Taylor J. Bell, Everett Schlawin, Luis Welbanks, Thomas P. Greene, Melinda Soares-Furtado, Jonathan J. Fortney Michael R. Line, Nishil Mehta, Sagnick Mukherjee, Matthew M. Murphy, Kazumasa Ohno, Vivien Parmentier, Yoav Rotman, Lindsey S. Wiser<\/p>\n
Comments: 33 pages, 9 figure, 5 tables
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Cite as: arXiv:2604.13168 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2604.13168v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
https:\/\/doi.org\/10.48550\/arXiv.2604.13168<\/a>
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Submission history
From: Anastasia Triantafillides
[v1] Tue, 14 Apr 2026 18:00:05 UTC (8,996 KB)
https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2604.13168<\/a>
Astrobiology, exoplanet,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The retrieved transmission spectrum using the results from the free retrieval plotted as a black line, along with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":385282,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[162684,28195,5964,30684,7142,18278,111,139,199879,69,147,606],"class_list":{"0":"post-385281","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-astro-ph-ep","9":"tag-atmosphere","10":"tag-exoplanet","11":"tag-gas-giant","12":"tag-jwst","13":"tag-miri","14":"tag-new-zealand","15":"tag-newzealand","16":"tag-nircam","17":"tag-nz","18":"tag-science","19":"tag-spectroscopy"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=385281"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385281\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/385282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=385281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=385281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=385281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}