A detailed spectroscope scan compiled by a group of astronomers shows that water vapor and carbon monoxide are present in the atmosphere of a giant alien planet that is situated beyond our solar system.
The researchers employed a method that they say can be used in future investigations to sample air of an alien Earth light-years away.
And the scientific feat even stunned one of the researchers who said he could not believe what was accomplished by the team of astronomers.
"The big surprise was actually that we could do it," said Travis Barman from the Lowell Observatory in Arizona.
"We can actually see the individual lines of these molecules...I personally felt like we would not be able to do what we have done."
But this is not the first time researchers analyzed the atmosphere of the planet dubbed HR 8799C that is about seven times larger than Jupiter and orbits a star 130 light-years from Earth.
The HR 8799 system has been of special intrigue to astronomers because the light that is emitted from giant planets in its orbit can be detected outside the glare of the parent star.
This ability allows scientists to detect a "chemical fingerprint" of the planet's atmosphere like a team of researchers accomplished three years ago using a special instrument on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile.
There was also another report this week involving the HR 8799 system where a separate team of researchers said they accomplished the same feat with four planets in the system by using an instrument called Project 1640 on the Palomar Observatory's Hale Telescope in California.
But in this most recent study, outlined in the journal Science, researchers used the spectrograph known as OSIRIS on a Keck II telescope in Hawaii and said that the findings help shed light on how the system was formed.
"For the first time, we can actually make a statement, a suggestion about the way the system might have formed, which is an extremely difficult thing to do observationally," said Quinn Konopacky, the study's lead author and an astronomer at the University of Toronto's Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics.