Closer looks at everything from Mars to distant galaxies.
Despite the debates over the telescope’s naming and history, one thing has become abundantly clear this year — the scientific ability of JWST is remarkable. Beginning its science operations in July 2022, it has already allowed astronomers to get new views and uncover mysteries about a huge range of space topics.
The most pressing aim of JWST is one of the most ambitious projects in the recent history of astronomy: to look back at some of the first galaxies, which formed when the universe was brand new.As light takes time to travel from its source to us here on Earth, by looking at extremely distant galaxies, astronomers can, in effect, look back in time to see the earliest galaxies forming more than 13 billion years ago.
JWST was able to detect carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of an exoplanet for the first time and recently discovered ain the atmosphere of planet WASP-39b as well, including water vapor and sulfur dioxide. That not only means that scientists can see the composition of the planet’s atmosphere, but they can also see how the atmosphere is interacting with light from the planet’s host star, as sulfur dioxide is created by chemical reactions with light.
Learning about exoplanet atmospheres is crucial if we ever want to find Earth-like planets and search for life. Previous generation tools can identify exoplanets and determine basic information like their mass or diameter and how far they orbit from their star. But to understand what it would be like to be on one of these planets, we need to know about their atmospheres. With data from JWST, astronomers will be able to look for habitable planets far beyond our solar system.
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