Recent reports about the detection of carbon-based organic molecules on Mars by the instruments of the Perseverance rover included suggestions that some of the organics may well have fallen from space over the eons, and were then preserved on the Martian surface. Given the cruciality of organics as building blocks of life --or even as …
The James Webb Space Telescope Begins Looking at Exoplanets
The James Webb Space Telescope has begun the part of its mission to study the atmospheres of 70 exoplanets in ways, and at a depth, well beyond anything done so far. The telescope is not likely to answer questions like whether there is life on distant planet -- its infrared wavelengths will tell us …
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The World’s Most Capable Space Telescope Readies To Observe. What Will Exoplanet Scientists Be Looking For?
The decades-long process of developing, refining, testing, launching, unfurling and now aligning and calibrating the most capable space telescope in history is nearing fruition. While NASA has already released a number of "first light" images of photons of light moving through the James Webb Space Telescope's optical system, the jaw-dropping "first light" that has all …
The James Webb Space Telescope And Its Exoplanet Mission (Part 1)
The last time Many Worlds wrote about the James Webb Space Telescope, it was in the process of going through a high-stakes, super-complicated unfurling. About 50 autonomous deployments needed to occur after launch to set up the huge system, with 344 potential single point failures to overcome--individual steps that had to work for …
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What The James Webb Space Telescope Can Do For Exoplanet Science and What It Cannot Do
When the James Webb Space Telescope finally launches (late this month, if the schedule holds) it will forever change astronomy. Assuming that its complex, month-long deployment in space works as planned, it will become the most powerful and far-seeing observatory in the sky. It will have unprecedented capabilities to probe the earliest days of the …
Why Does Our Solar System Have No Super-Earths, and Other Questions for Comparative Planetology
Before the explosion in discovery of extrasolar planets, the field of comparative planetology was pretty limited -- confined to examining the differences between planets in our solar system and how they may have come to pass. But over the past quarter century, comparative planetology and the demographics of planets came to mean something quite different. …
New Insights Into How Earth Got Its Nitrogen
Scientists have long held that many of the important compounds and elements that make life possible on Earth arrived here after the planet was formed and was orbiting the sun. These molecules came via meteorites and comets, it was thought, from the colder regions beyond Jupiter. But in a challenge to that long-accepted view, a …
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How to Predict the Make-Up of Rocky Exoplanets Too Small and Distant to Directly Observe
In trying to tease out what a planet is made of, its density is of great importance. Scientists can use that measure of density -- the amount of matter contained in a given volume -- to determine what ratio of a planet is likely is gas, or water, or rocks, or rocks and iron and …
The Giant Moon That Might Be the Heart of a Jupiter
Artist’s impression of the exomoon candidate Kepler-1625b-i, the planet it is orbiting and the star. (NASA/ESA/L. Hustak, STScI) “Moons are where planets were in the 1990s,” predicted René Heller from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research a few years ago. “We’re on the brink.” Heller was predicting that we were close to the …
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The Planets Too Big for Their Star
Artist rendering of a red dwarf , with three exoplanets orbiting. About 75% of all stars in the sky are the cooler, smaller red dwarfs. (NASA) Two giant planets have been found orbiting a tiny star, defying our theories for how planets are formed. To be entirely truthful, there is nothing new in an exoplanet …
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