8/18/2023 0 Comments Neptune jwst“We finally got to see GJ 1214b in a new light.” New Sub-Neptune Planet May Be a Water World But is Likely Too Hot for Life “JWST operates at longer wavelengths of light than previous observatories, which gives us access to the heat emitted by the planet and allows us to create a map of the planet’s temperature,” Kempton said. It is a method that planet hunters have termed “phase curve observation,” and it is something that the JWST and its vast array of infrared imaging tools are uniquely suited to measure. During this orbit, the heat from the planet’s atmosphere shifts with its motion, allowing astronomers to differentiate the light coming from the planet vs. Published in the journal Nature, the team’s work involved keeping the JWST trained directly on GJ 1214b for 40 hours straight, which is a full trip for the planet around its host star. “The JWST is really delivering on its promise,” she adds. “When we received the data for this Nature paper, we could see the light from the planet just disappear when it went behind its host star.”Īccording to Kempton, this had never been seen before “for this planet or for any other planet of its class.” “I’ve been on a quest to understand GJ 1214b for more than a decade,” said Eliza Kempton, an Associate Professor of Astronomy at the University of Maryland and the lead author on the paper announcing the breakthrough discovery. Now, the team of researchers behind this latest find says that the unique tools available on the JWST have finally broken that barrier, allowing them to learn a lot about the size, composition, and even the atmosphere of a sub-Neptune-sized alien world for the very first time. Astronomers call these “sub-Neptune” planets. Of the planets discovered thus far, which include a number of smaller, rocky Earth-sized worlds, the majority appear to be larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune. This is mainly due to the limitations of previous telescopes and the brightness of a planet’s host star, which can blot out a planet’s meager light signature. However, most of those discoveries have been made by inferring the planet’s presence due to its effects on its host star instead of directly imaging them. That number is only expected to increase. Since the discovery of the first planet outside of our solar system in 1995, astronomers have discovered over 5,000 exoplanets. Sub-Neptune Planets Most Common in the Milky Way Galaxy The planet is likely too hot to sustain life but may also contain a significant amount of water. Sub-Neptune planets are larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune, meaning the JWST is finally delivering on its lofty promise to directly image and measure the light from exoplanets that are closer in size to Earth than the many massive gas giants discovered by previous telescopes. Researchers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have successfully measured the light from a sub-Neptune-sized planet named GJ 1214b, which lies 40 light years from Earth, for the first time ever.
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