The James Webb Space Telescope is opening an exciting new chapter in the study of exoplanets and the search for life beyond Earth. (By Astro_Jonny)
Any future historian of 21st-century space science may well divide the subject into two eras: before the James Webb Space Telescope and after. The telescope was built to transform our understanding of the cosmos by studying the first stars and galaxies, and within less than a year of operations, it has already delivered tantalizing and potentially revolutionary results from its observations of the early universe.
In August astronomers revealed they had used JWST to detect carbon dioxide on an exoplanet for the first time by watching for signs of the gas in the light of a gas giant planet’s host star filtering through the world’s atmosphere. Known as transmission spectroscopy, this technique is incredibly useful not only for studying giant planets but also for investigating smaller ones that might be more like our solar system’s retinue of rocky worlds.
In terms of studying rocky planets, JWST is largely limited to worlds that orbit red dwarfs, which are dim enough to avoid overloading the telescope’s exquisitely sensitive optics. Such stars are known to be prone to intense flaring that could blast away the atmospheres of worlds like LHS 475 b, which orbit perilously close to their host stars in comparison with the much wider star-planet separations among our solar system’s rocky worlds.
Astronomers are also excited about the exoplanet capabilities of another telescope, the European Space Agency’s Gaia observatory. Launched to space in 2013 primarily to map the motions and positions of billions of stars in our galaxy, the telescope is also expected to find thousands of exoplanets.
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