What NASA’s 10 billion dollar space telescope is hoping to find

The James Webb Space Telescope, recently launched by NASA, a European space agency, and the Canadian Space Agency, is an extraordinary piece of kit. According to NASA, his origami-style construction includes a mirror consisting of 18 segments made of beryllia ultra-light. It has a large sunlight of the size of a tennis court consisting of five layers to keep the telescope safe from the intense heat heat. And it is armed with four instruments, both cameras and spectrometers, which are very sensitive and can take vague signals from space. They work in infrared wavelengths, allowing telescopes to peek through the dust clouds that will obscure their views if they look at the visible wavelength.

But for what all that? What did you do with the most powerful room telescope in the world? The answer is you use it for all types of research, and may help us answer some of the biggest questions in astronomy.

One of the most interesting topics in astronomy today is a planetary search outside our solar system, which is called exoplanets. It is difficult to detect the planet because it is much smaller and less bright than stars, but using several ingenious methods of astronomers can identify more than 4,000 of these exoplanets to date.

However, we don’t know much about these planets. Usually, you might only tell the estimated size or mass of the planet, and maybe how far from the star orbit it. It is amazing for information from other star systems, and can tell you if the planet is rocky, like Earth or Mars, or gas giants, such as Jupiter and Saturn. But beyond that, we don’t know much about these planets. Are they covered in water? Do they have a thick atmosphere? Maybe humans can survive there? We just don’t know.

The next big step in understanding exoplanets – especially if we hope to find the second earth, or another planet that we can live on one day – is to see whether the exoplanet given has an atmosphere. Think of the difference between the earth, which has a rich atmosphere, and Mars, who has a very thin atmosphere. Know what the composition of the atmosphere, and how thick it, is the key to understanding what the exoplanet environment is.

James Webb will be able to detect the exoplanet atmosphere using its infrared instruments (through digital trends). By pointing directly to a distant star and not moving at all, the instrument will be able to detect small changes in brightness when a planet passes between stars and telescopes. These small dip-sauces can be analyzed to learn more about distant planets, including whether there is a gas atmosphere around the planet and how thick they are. It can tell us more about whether exoplanet has the potential to be habitable than the current instrument.