8/17/2023 0 Comments Neptune jwstThe Juno orbiter mission has provided spectacular views of Jupiter, while the Cassini spacecraft revealed details about the planet Saturn. Some of the answers to questions about far-away exoplanets might lie close to home in the Solar System, in the four largest planets – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Scientists want to know if their models can offer accurate insights. Many thousands more exoplanets will likely be discovered in the coming years – including those found using the new space telescope. Using simulated planets to run these tests is like having the answers at the back of a math’s book: tests can be run and the answers the models provide can be compared with the known characteristics. Leconte has developed a 3D simulator (as part of the Horizon-funded WHIPLASH project) to run tests on simulated planets with known characteristics, such as the presence of liquid water. Usually, when scientists make predictions about an exoplanet’s atmosphere, they assume it is homogeneous – the same conditions exist all over it. The planets exist in the habitable zone, meaning it has the right temperatures for water to remain liquid. In particular, he is interested in seven rocky planets that orbit the dwarf TRAPPIST-1 star, 40 light-years away, and especially their atmospheres. This is our best chance to characterize their atmospheres.” “We really need to look at planets around stars that are close to us. “This is really a game-changer,” said Leconte. DPA vía Europa Press (DPA vía Europa Press) The Carina Nebula captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. The presence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may indicate organic life exists on the planet. The JWST observatory allows a greater range of molecules, including carbon dioxide, to be detected in the skies of WASP-39b. Starlight passing through the atmosphere of the hot Jupiter-like planet WASP-39b gives astronomers a view into the chemistry of alien skies.įrom Earth, telescopes struggle to observe carbon dioxide on exoplanets, as they must look through the CO2 in the planets’ atmosphere. Alien skiesĮarlier this year, the James Webb telescope allowed astrophysicists to observe an exoplanet around a Sun-like star, 700 light-years away. Previous missions and observations from Earth have discovered thousands of exoplanets (those outside our Solar System) and astronomers are already taking advantage of JWST’s unique capabilities to study the building blocks of life in the Universe. “Before the James Webb Space Telescope, only a very small number of molecules could be observed, such as water, carbon monoxide and sodium,” said Jérémy Leconte, astrophysicist at the University of Bordeaux in France. JWST collects five times as much light as the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), allowing it to detect faint signals from distant worlds using its spectroscopic capabilities. This gives it a major advantage over ground-based telescopes, which must peer out to space through Earth’s hazy atmosphere. A versatile satellite observatory, JWST has a clear-eyed view from its orbital position, one million miles away from Earth in space. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) launched on Christmas Day 2021, is already transforming our understanding of planets in our Solar System and far beyond.
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