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The James Webb Space Telescope, the most powerful space observatory ever built, is set for launch in late December from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana after decades of waiting. An engineering marvel, the telescope is expected to beam back new clues to the origins of the Universe and Earth-like planets beyond our solar system.
There is only one Earth… that we know of. But outside our own solar system, other stars give warmth and light to planets and, possibly, life. The discovery of exoplanets, meaning planets outside the solar system, is one of the major missions of NASA’s James Webb telescope. It will also investigate the potential for life on those worlds by studying their atmospheres.
The first exoplanet observed — 51 Pegasi b — was discovered in 1995 and since then nearly 5,000 others have been noted, from gas giants similar to our solar system’s Jupiter or Neptune to rocky planets like Earth.
Some are a habitable distance from their suns, in a range fancifully named the Goldilocks Zone.
But beyond being neither too close to, nor too far from the stars they orbit, little is known about these planets or what they are made of.
They are too far away to be observed directly and rocky planets, which are more susceptible to be capable of sustaining life as we know it, tend to be even smaller and harder to observe.
So far, astronomers have detected them as they pass in front of the stars they orbit, capturing tiny variations in luminosity.
This has allowed astronomers to determine their size and density but the rest — their atmospheric composition, what goes on on their surfaces — is left to discover.
‘To get a look at their innards’
Astrophysicists hope the Webb telescope will help fill in some of these gaps.
Equipped with a new piece of technology called the…
Source : france24
