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The Cosmos, As Viewed By The James Webb Space Telescope

The iconic “Pillars of Creation” image, on left, was taken in visible light by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2014. A new, near-infrared-light view from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, at right, helps us peer through more of the dust in this star-forming region. The thick, dusty brown pillars are no longer as opaque and many more red stars that are still forming come into view. The pillars of gas and dust seem darker and less penetrable in Hubble’s view, and they appear more permeable in Webb’s. (NASA)

The James Webb Space Telescope was developed to allow us to see the cosmos in a new way — with much greater precision, using infrared wavelengths to piece through dust around galaxies, stars and planets, and to look further back into time and space.

In the less than four months since the first Webb images were released, the pioneering telescope has certainly shown us a remarkable range of abilities. And as a result, we’ve been treated to some dazzling new views of the solar system, the galaxy and beyond. This is just the beginning and we thankfully have years to come of new images and the scientific insights that come with them.

Just as the Hubble Space Telescope, with its 32 years of service and counting, ushered in a new era of space imagining and understanding, so too is the Webb telescope revolutionizing how we see and understand our world writ large. Very large.

Neptune as seen by Voyager 2 during a flyby more than three decades ago, the Hubble Space Telescope last year, and the JWST this summer. ( NASA/ESA/CSA))

The differences between the Webb’s image and previous images of Neptune are certainly dramatic, in terms of color, precision and what they tell us about the planet.

Surely most striking in Webb’s new image is the crisp view of the planet’s rings, some of which have not been seen since NASA’s Voyager 2 became the first spacecraft to observe Neptune during its flyby in 1989. In addition to several bright, narrow rings, the Webb image clearly shows Neptune’s fainter, never-seen dust bands as well.

Neptune is an ice giant planet. Unlike Jupiter and Saturn, which consist primarily of hydrogen and helium, Neptune has an interior that is much richer in heavier elements (“heavier is the sense of not hydrogen or helium.) One of the most abundant heavy molecules is methane, which appears blue in Hubble’s visible wavelengths but largely white in the Webb’s near-infrared camera.… Read more

The James Webb Space Telescope Begins Looking at Exoplanets

August 24, 2022 / Marc Kaufman / 0 Comments

Artist rendering of Gliese (GJ) 436 b is a Neptune-sized planet that orbits a red dwarf star. Red dwarfs are cooler, smaller, and less luminous than the Sun. The planet completes one full orbit around its parent star in just a little over 2 days. It is made, scientists say, of extremely hot ice. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCF)

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 about the presence of many chemicals in exoplanet atmospheres but little about the presence of the element most important to life on Earth, oxygen.

But it is nonetheless undertaking a broad study of many well-known exoplanets and is likely to produce many tantalizing results and suggest answers to central questions about exoplanets and their solar systems.

Many Worlds has earlier looked at the JWST “early release” program, under which groups are allocated user time on the telescope under the condition that they make their data public quickly. That way other teams can understand better how JWST works and what might be possible.

Another program gives time to scientists who worked on the JWST mission and on its many instruments. They are given guaranteed time as part of their work making JWST as innovative and capable as it is.

One of the scientist in this “guaranteed time observations program” is Thomas Greene, an astrophysicist at NASA Ames Research Center. The groups he leads have been given 215 hours of observing time for this first year (or more) of Cycle 1 of JWST due to his many contributions to the JWST mission as well as his history of accomplishments.

In a conversation with Greene, I got a good sense of what he hopes to find and his delight at the opportunity. After all, he said, he has worked on the JWST idea and then mission since 1997.

“We will be observing a diverse sample of exoplanets to understand more about them and their characteristics,” Greene said. “Our goal is to get a better understanding of how exoplanets are similar to and different from those in our solar system.”

And the JWST spectra will tell them about the chemistry, the composition and the thermal conditions on those exoplanets, leading to insights into how they formed, diversified and evolved into planets often so unlike our own.… Read more

The World’s Most Capable Space Telescope Readies To Observe. What Will Exoplanet Scientists Be Looking For?

March 28, 2022 / Marc Kaufman / 0 Comments

This artist’s concept shows what the TRAPPIST-1 planetary system may look like, based on available data about the planets’ diameters, masses and distances from the host star. The James Webb is expected to begin science observations this summer. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

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 mirrors up and running together to produce an actual scientific observation is a few months off.

Just as the building and evolution of the Webb has been going on for years, so has the planning and preparation for specific team observation “campaigns.” Many of these pertain to the earliest days of the universe, of star and galaxy formation and other realms of cosmology, but an unprecedented subset of exoplanet observations is also on its way.

Many Worlds earlier discussed the JWST Early Release Science Program, which involves observations of gigantic hot Jupiter planets to both learn about their atmospheres and as a way to collect data that will guide exoplanet scientists in using JWST instruments in the years ahead.

Now we’ll look at a number of specific JWST General Observation and Guarantreed Time efforts that are more specific and will collect brand new information about some of the major characteristics and mysteries of a representative subset of the at least 100 billion exoplanets in our galaxy.

This will be done by using three techniques including transmission spectroscopy — collecting and analyzing the light that passes through an exoplanet’s atmosphere as it passes in front of its Sun. The JWST will bring unprecedented power to characterizing the wild diversity of exoplanets now known to exist; to the question of whether “cool” and dim red dwarf stars (by far the most common in the galaxy) can maintain atmospheres; to newly sensitive studies of the chemical makeup of exoplanet atmospheres; and to the many possibilities of the TRAPPIST-1 exoplanets, a seven rocky planet solar system that is relatively nearby.

An artist’s interpretation of GJ 1214b,one of a group of super-Earth to mini-Neptune sized planets to be studied in the JWST Cycle1 observations. The planet is known to be covered by a thick haze which scientists expect the JWST to pierce as never before and allow them to study atmospheric chemicals below.

The James Webb Space Telescope And Its Exoplanet Mission (Part 1)

March 15, 2022 / Marc Kaufman / 2 Comments

This artist’s conception of the James Webb Space Telescope in space shows all its major elements fully deployed. The telescope was folded to fit into its launch vehicle, and then was slowly unfolded over the course of two weeks after launch. (NASA GSFC/CIL/Adriana Manrique Gutierrez)

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 the mission to be a success.

That process finished a while back and now the pioneering observatory is going through a series of alignment and calibration tests, working with the images coming in from the 18 telescope segments to produce one singular image.

According to the Space Telescope Science Institute, working images from JWST will start to appear in late June, though there may be some integrated “first light” images slightly earlier.

Exciting times for sure as the observatory begins its study of the earliest times in the universe, how the first stars and galaxies formed, and providing a whole new level of precision exploration of exoplanets.

Adding to the very good news that the JWST successfully performed all the 344 necessary steps to unfurl and that the mirror calibration is now going well is this: The launch itself went off almost exactly according to plan. This means that the observatory now has much more fuel on hand than it would have had if the launch was problematic. That extra fuel means a longer life for the observatory.

NASA announced late last month that it completed another major step in its alignment process of the new James Webb Space Telescope, bringing its test images more into focus. The space agency said it completed the second and third of a seven-phase process, and had accomplished “Image Stacking.” Having brought the telescope’s mirror and its 18 segmented parts into proper alignment, it will now begin making smaller adjustments to the mirrors to further improve focus in the images. (NASA/STScI)

Before launch, the telescope was expected to last for five years. Now NASA has said fuel is available for a ten year mission and perhaps longer. Quite a start.

(A NASA update on alignment and calibration will be given on Wednesday. … Read more

Findings Suggest that Red Dwarf Stars May Not Sterilize As Many Exoplanets As Feared

August 25, 2021 / Marc Kaufman / 1 Comment

An illustration of a red dwarf star with orbiting exoplanet. The question of whether this very common type of star can support habitable planets is a much debated one. (NASA)

Red dwarf suns are the most common in the universe, and many of the exoplanets officially discovered so far orbit this type of “cool” star. Red dwarfs are much smaller and less powerful than the G type stars such as our own sun, and it is easier to detect exoplanets orbiting them because of their reduced size and energy.

As a result, a number of relatively nearby red dwarf stars — in the Trappist-1 system, Proxima Centauri and Barnard’s star, for instance — are avidly studied for their potential habitability. The exoplanets of red dwarfs tend to orbit much closer than around other larger stars, but the suns have that lower radiative power and so some are considered habitable candidates. And if they are indeed habitable, they could be for a very long time because red dwarfs live much longer than most other stars.

But there have been two (at least) problems with the habitable red dwarf exoplanet scenario. The first is that many of the planets so close to their star are tidally locked, meaning that only one side ever faces the sun. Some have argued a tidally locked planet can still be habitable, but it would not be easy.

More crucial, however, is that red dwarf stars are known for sending out many, many powerful solar flares, especially during their solar infancy and childhood. These high radiation and particle flares could and would potentially kill any life emerging on a dwarf exoplanet, and the stellar flares could even sterilize the planets’ atmosphere for all time. Although direct observations have not shown this deadly scenario to be inevitable or even present, the red dwarf flaring is well documented. And so potentially the flares have seemed to rule out, or make improbable, life on an estimated 75 percent of the stars in our galaxy.

This is why there is interest in the astrobiology world about a new paper that addresses a particular kind of stellar flare that would hit red dwarf exoplanets. Such studies of how the behavior of a star effects orbiting planets is one of the less well studied aspects of the exoplanet field, and so the paper is especially welcomed.

And the results suggests that the red dwarf flares would strike orbiting exoplanets from an angle rather than straight on, and therefore would land in a way that would theoretically minimize damage to potential atmospheres and life.… Read more

A Young Planet Found That May Well Be Making Moons

July 27, 2021 / Marc Kaufman / 0 Comments

An image made by the Very Large Telescope in Chile shows a forming planet, the bright spot at right. The overpowering light of the host star is blocked out by a coronagraph inside the telescope. (ESO/A. Müller et al.)

Astronomers have many theories about how planets are formed within the gas, dust, pebbles and gradually rocks of the circumstellar disks that encircle a star after it has been born. While the general outlines of this remarkable process are pretty well established, many questions large and small remain unanswered.

One is how and when exomoons are formed around these planets, with the assumption that the process that forms planets must also give birth moons. But the potential moons have been far too small for the current generation of space and ground telescopes to identify.

Now astronomers have detected something almost as significant: a circumplanetary disk surrounding a young planet that appears to be in the process of making moons. The moon itself has not been detected, but a forming planet has been found with a ring of dust and gas that surrounds it. And within that circumplanetary disk, astronomers infer, a moon is possibly being formed.

“Our work presents a clear detection of a disk in which satellites could be forming,” said Dr. Myriam Benisty, an astronomer at the University of Grenoble and the University of Chile.

“The new … observations were obtained at such exquisite resolution that we could clearly identify that the disk is associated with {the exoplanet} and we are able to constrain its size for the first time,” she said in a release.

While the first detection of the planet was made via the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, the more granular observation of the forming planet and its moon-forming disk was made with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), also in Chile.

This ALMA image shows the young PDS 70 planetary system. The system features a star at its center and at least two planets orbiting it, PDS 70b (not visible in the image) and PDS 70c, surrounded by a circumplanetary disk (the dot to the right of the star). Image credit: ALMA / ESO / NAOJ / NRAO / Benisty et al.)

The finding, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, came via direct imaging — in effect through extremely high power photography rather through the indirect methods much more common in exoplanet astronomy.… Read more

Earth as a Transiting Exoplanet

July 16, 2021 / Marc Kaufman / 0 Comments

A view of Earth and Sun from thousands of miles above our planet. Stars that enter and exit a position where they can see Earth as a transiting planet around our Sun are brightened. (OpenSpace/American Museum of Natural History)

Exoplanet scientists and enthusiasts spend a lot of time trying to find, measure and understand distant planets that can — under specific conditions — be detected as passing in front of their host star. A majority of the 4000-plus exoplanets discovered so far were indirectly detected this way, by measuring the diminishing of stellar light as the exoplanet passes between the star and us.

In a conceptual turnaround, two researchers have now asked the question of how common it might be for beings on distant exoplanets to be able to similarly detect and measure Earth as it transits in front of our sun.

Astronomers call this special vantage point in space – the point from which Earth transits can be seen – the Earth transit zone. Because the cosmos is dynamic and ever-changing, they looked for not only stars that are in that zone now, but have also passed through over the past 5,000 years and will in the next 5,000 years.

“From the exoplanets’ point-of-view, we are the aliens,” said Lisa Kaltenegger, director of the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell University.

“We wanted to know which stars have the right vantage point to see Earth, as it blocks the sun’s light. And because stars move in our dynamic cosmos, this vantage point is gained and lost.”

Transit data are rich with information. By measuring the depth of the dip in brightness and knowing the size of the star, scientists can determine the size or radius of the planet. The orbital period of the planet can be determined by measuring the elapsed time between transits. Once the orbital period is known, Kepler’s Third Law of Planetary Motion can be applied to determine the average distance of the planet from its stars. (NASA/Ames)

How many stars (and their orbiting planets) have this proper vantage point, have had in the past and will in the future?

In Kaltenegger’s paper, published in Nature with Jackie Faherty of the astrophysics department of the American Museum of Natural History, the numbers reported are quite low.

They found that since the earliest human civilization about 5,000 years ago, only 1,715 stars among the 300,000-plus that shine within 300 light years of our sun are in the right geometric alignment for an observation of Earth passing in front of our sun. … Read more

More Weird and Wild Planets

January 13, 2021 / Marc Kaufman / 0 Comments

A world called TOI-849b could be the exposed, naked core of a former gas giant planet whose atmosphere was blasted away by its star. Every day is a bad day on planet TOI-849b. . It hugs its star so tightly that a year – one trip around the star – takes less than a day. And it pays a high price for this close embrace: an estimated surface temperature of nearly 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit (1,500 degrees Celsius) It’s a scorcher even compared to Venus, which is 880 degrees Fahrenheit (471 degrees Celsius). About half the mass of our own Saturn, this planet orbits a Sun-like star more than 700 light-years from Earth. (NASA/Exoplanet Exploration Program)

The more we learn about the billions upon billions of planets that orbit beyond our solar system, the more we are surprised by the wild menagerie of objects out there. From the start, many of these untolled planets have been startling, paradigm-breaking, mysterious, hellish, potentially habitable and just plain weird. Despite the confirmed detection of more than 4,000 exoplanets, the job of finding and characterizing these worlds remains in its early phases. You could make the argument that learning a lot more about these distant exoplanets and their solar systems is not just one of the great tasks of future astronomy, but of future science.

And that is why Many Worlds is returning to the subject of “Weird Planets,” which first appeared in this column at the opening of 2019. It has been the most viewed column in our archive, and a day seldom goes by without someone — or some many people — decide to read it.

So here is not a really a sequel, but rather a continuation of writing about this unendingly rich subject. And as I will describe further on, almost all of the planets on display so far have been detected and characterized without ever having been seen. The characteristics and colors presented in these (mostly) artistic renderings are the result of indirect observing and discovery — measuring how much light dims when a faraway planet crosses its host star, or how much the planet’s gravity causes its sun to move.

As a result, these planets are sometimes called “small, black shadows.” Scientists can infer a lot from the indirect measurements they make and from the beginnings of the grand effort to spectroscopically read the chemical makeup of exoplanet atmospheres. … Read more

Close and Tranquil Solar System Has Astronomers Excited

June 25, 2020 / Marc Kaufman / 0 Comments

An artist’s impression of the GJ 887 planetary system of super Earths. (Mark Garlick)

From the perspective of planet hunters and planet characterizers, a desirable solar system to explore is one that is close to ours, that has a planet (or planets) in the star’s habitable zone, and has a host star that is relatively quiet. This is especially important with the very common red dwarf stars, which are far less luminous than stars such as our sun but tend to send out many more powerful — and potentially planet sterilizing — solar flares.

The prolific members of the mostly European and Chilean Red Dots astronomy team believe they have found such a system about 11 light years away from us. The system — GJ 887 — has an unusually quiet red dwarf host, has two planets for sure and another likely that orbits at a life-friendly 50-day orbit. It is the 12th closest planetary system to our sun.

It is that potential third planet, which has shown up in some observations but not others, that would be of great interest. Because it is so (relatively) close to Earth, it would be a planet where the chemical and thermal make-up of its atmosphere would likely be possible to measure.

The Red Dots team — which was responsible for the first detection of a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri and also Barnard’s star — describes the system in an article in the journal Science . Team leader Sandra Jeffers of Goettingen University in Germany said in an email that GJ 887 “will be an ideal target because it is such a quiet star — no starspots or energetic outbursts or flares.”

In an accompanying Perspective article in Science, Melvyn Davies of Lund University in Sweden wrote that “If further observations confirm the presence of the third planet in the habitable zone, then GJ 887 could become one of the most studied planetary systems in the solar neighborhood.”

An artist’s impression of a flaring red dwarf star and a nearby planet. Red dwarfs are by far the most common stars in the sky, and most have planetary systems. But scientists are unsure if they can support a habitable planet because many send out more large and powerful flares than other types of stars, especially at the beginnings of their solar lives. (Roberto Molar Candanosa/Carnegie/NASA)

GJ 877 is roughly half as massive as our sun — large for its type of star — and is the brightest red dwarf in the sky.… Read more

For First Time, Tiny CubeSat Locates a Distant Exoplanet

June 8, 2020 / Marc Kaufman / 8 Comments

The image above, courtesy of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, shows the CubeSat ASTERIA as it was being launched from the International Space Station in 2017.

The size of a briefcase, ASTERIA is part of a growing armada of tiny spacecraft being launched around the world and adding an increasingly important (and inexpensive) set of new tools for conducting Earth, space and exoplanet science.

ASTERIA, for instance, was designed to perform some of the complex tasks much larger space observatories use to study distant exoplanets outside our solar system. And a new paper soon to be published in the Astronomical Journal describes how ASTERIA (short for Arcsecond Space Telescope Enabling Research in Astrophysics) didn’t just demonstrate it could perform those tasks but went above and beyond, detecting the known exoplanet 55 Cancri e.

While it was not the first detection of that exoplanet — which orbits close to its host star 41 light years away — it was the first time that a CubeSat had measured the presence of an exoplanet, something done so far only by much more sophisticated space and ground telescopes.

“Detecting this exoplanet is exciting because it shows how these new technologies come together in a real application,” said Vanessa Bailey, who led the ASTERIA exoplanet science team at JPL. The project was a collaboration between JPL and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“We went after a hard target with a small telescope that was not even optimized to make science detections – and we got it, even if just barely,” said Mary Knapp, the ASTERIA project scientist at MIT’s Haystack Observatory and lead author of the study. “I think this paper validates the concept that motivated the ASTERIA mission: that small spacecraft can contribute something to astrophysics and astronomy.” Both made their comments in a JPL release.

Artist rendering of planet Cancri 55 e. (NASA; JPL/Caltech)

ASTERIA was originally designed to spend 90 days in space. But it received three mission extensions before the team lost contact with the satellite in late 2019.

The mission was not even designed to look for exoplanets. It was, rather, a technology demonstration, with the mission’s goal to develop new capabilities for future missions. The team’s technological leap was to build a small spacecraft that could conduct fine pointing control — essentially the ability to stay focused very steadily on a distant star for long periods.… Read more

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