Sunday 24 December 2023 / 18:19
The $10 billion Webb Telescope launched on Christmas Day 2021.
The James Webb Space Telescope consists of a 6.5-meter gold-plated mirror, a sunshade the size of a tennis court, and a set of complex instruments that are cooled to temperatures just a few degrees above absolute zero. These features allow the telescope to observe the sky in infrared and detect Details of the universe and images of stars being born in dust clouds.
Astrophysicist Dr Hannah Wakeford, from the University of Bristol, said: “It took 6 months to get the telescope up and running its systems correctly, meaning 2023 was the first full calendar year of operation. The results have exceeded all our expectations.”
Planets outside the solar system
However, the James Webb Space Telescope offers another gift to science, as infrared light has also been shown to be ideal for studying extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, as worlds orbiting other stars are known. Thus, the telescope creates an unprecedented astronomical revolution.
For centuries, the only planets known to humans were the few planets we could see in our solar system. But was the Sun family typical, scientists wonder? Were planets abundant elsewhere in the galaxy or were they rare? These questions were of crucial importance because the latter scenario – the scarcity of cosmic planets – means that extraterrestrial life is also likely to be rare.
The problem astronomers faced was the simple fact that stars are very bright, but planets are much smaller and very faint, and cannot be detected next to their bright celestial parents. It was not until the end of the last century that a new generation of highly sensitive cameras, equipped with telescopes and orbiting observatories, was able to determine the slight dimming caused by exoplanets as they passed in front of the stars.
Observing thousands of planets
After these first transit observations were made, discoveries began to multiply exponentially. Today, the total number of observed exoplanets is 5,566, according to NASA’s Exoplanet Archive.
Astronomers say that several hundred of these planets are relatively close to Earth, and are now ready for study using the James Webb Space Telescope. Wasp-107b, the quartz clouds and rogue worlds of the Orion Nebula, have already been examined, along with a host of other exoplanets.
Astrophysicist Professor Jane Birkby from the University of Oxford said: “Having found all these worlds, we are now in the fortunate position of being able to study them in detail, analyze their atmospheres, and even map their features, while we did not know for sure whether they existed on Earth.” Launched 3 decades ago.
Life outside Earth
An early target for astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope was Trappist-1, a small, dazzling star of the type known as a red dwarf. Forty light-years from Earth, it includes a family of 7 small rocky worlds, three of which lie within a region known as In the name of the habitable zone. Astrobiologists say that conditions here are neither too hot nor too cold to prevent water from existing as a liquid, which is a basic requirement for life to flourish.
However, analyzes using the James Webb Space Telescope of two of the inner planets of Trappist-1b and Trappist-1c have revealed that they have no atmosphere, or only a very thin atmosphere. Further studies are now being planned for the rest of the system.
Ultimately, astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope search for signs of extraterrestrial life across a group of biological markers known as the Big Four: oxygen, carbon dioxide, water and methane. Its presence in the atmosphere of an exoplanet would be a strong sign that some kind of life exists there, according to a newspaper The Guardian British.
