Latest news with #8799
Yahoo
23-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
James Webb Space Telescope Captures Images of Individual Planets in Distant Star System
Astronomers using the mighty James Webb Space Telescope have captured direct images of four planets in a star system 130 light years from Earth — an astonishingly eagle-eyed feat of cosmic photography. The planets, all young gas giants, were spotted in HR 8799, a system that's only around 30 million years old. Though already extensively probed, these latest observations, as detailed in a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal, provide compelling evidence that the nascent worlds are rich in carbon dioxide — a promising sign that they formed in a similar way to the gas giants of our solar system, Jupiter and Saturn. "By spotting these strong carbon dioxide features, we have shown there is a sizable fraction of heavier elements, like carbon, oxygen, and iron, in these planets' atmospheres," lead author William Balmer, an astrophysicist at John Hopkins University, said in a NASA statement. It's rare that astronomers capture a direct glimpse of exoplanets. Generally, they produce little to no light of their own, and are vastly outshone by the light of their host star, plus the untold number of luminous objects in the night sky. As such, even detecting an exoplanet is rare; so far, only 6,000 worlds outside our solar system have been discovered, and they're usually spotted by searching for dips in the light of a star they cause when they pass in front of one from our perspective. In their work, Balmer and his team used a special instrument, known as a coronagraph, built into the James Webb's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) specifically designed to blot out the light of stars while searching for exoplanets. "It's like putting your thumb up in front of the sun when you're looking up at the sky," Balmer told Agence France-Presse. That allowed the astronomers to see the "light that is emitted from the planet itself, as opposed to the fingerprint of that light from the host star," Balmer added. The incredible snapshots provided astronomers with a clear look at the presence of CO2 in the distant exoplanets, which could lead to key insights on gas giant formation throughout the cosmos. It's widely believed that Jupiter and Saturn were born by first forming heavy, solid cores that pulled in lighter elements nearby — like carbon dioxide — slowly accreting mass over time. But another theory known as disk instability — which is pretty controversial — holds that gas giants can also spawn in the massive protoplanetary disk that surrounds a star shortly after it's born. Clumps of matter in this circumstellar cloud, the theory holds, could rapidly collapse into protoplanets. Balmer and his team's findings suggest that the traditional "core accretion" is the one in evidence in the young star system. It's too early to declare that this is the prevailing way that gas giants form throughout the universe, but it's a valuable clue. "We have other lines of evidence that hint at these four HR 8799 planets forming using this bottom-up approach," said coauthor Laurent Pueyo, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, in the NASA statement. "How common is this for planets we can directly image? We don't know yet, but we're proposing more Webb observations to answer that question." "We want to take pictures of other solar systems and see how they're similar or different when compared to ours," Balmer added. "From there, we can try to get a sense of how weird our solar system really is — or how normal." More on astronomical quartets: Scientists Discover Four Intriguing Planets Around Closest Single-Star Solar System to Earth
Yahoo
19-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Webb telescope just snapped direct image of worlds many light-years away
You don't see this every day. It's rare for any observatory to directly image a planet beyond our solar system, called an exoplanet, but the powerful James Webb Space Telescope has captured four of them in the stellar system HR 8799. These large, gaseous worlds are located 130 light-years away in the Milky Way galaxy (a light-year is nearly 6 trillion miles). Importantly, viewing these worlds also revealed major parts of their composition, and how they likely formed. "Our hope with this kind of research is to understand our own solar system, life, and ourselves in the comparison to other exoplanetary systems, so we can contextualize our existence," William Balmer, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University who led the new research, said in a statement. "We want to take pictures of other solar systems and see how they're similar or different when compared to ours. From there, we can try to get a sense of how weird our solar system really is — or how normal." The research recently published in The Astrophysical Journal. SEE ALSO: NASA dropped a new report. It's a wake-up call. It's tremendously challenging to capture direct images of exoplanets — as opposed to common observational methods like watching them transit in front of their stars — because their nearby stars are profoundly luminous, engulfing the exoplanets in light. But Webb blocked out much of the star's intrusive light with an instrument called a coronograph. What's more, these four worlds are large, young, and hot, and orbit relatively far from their star. "From there, we can try to get a sense of how weird our solar system really is — or how normal." You can see four of these planets below. "The closest planet to the star, HR 8799 e, orbits 1.5 billion miles from its star, which in our solar system would be located between the orbit of Saturn and Neptune," NASA explains. "The furthest, HR 8799 b, orbits around 6.3 billion miles from the star, more than twice Neptune's orbital distance." A star symbol covers the star HR 8799, whose light has been blocked. No, they don't contain the stunning detail we see on the closeby planets in our solar system. Even so, you're seeing far-off worlds in another part of the galaxy. The four visible planets of the multi-planet system HR 8799. Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA / STScI / W. Balmer (JHU) / L. Pueyo (STScI) / M. Perrin (STScI) Crucially, directly viewing these planets allowed astronomers to analyze the unique light signals emanating from these worlds; these wavelengths match certain elements or molecules. Of note, the researchers detected the gases carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. These planets are extremely young, at some 30 million years old, so astronomers suspect they formed like Saturn and Jupiter, wherein they forged dense solid cores and then gravitationally pulled plentiful surrounding gases like carbon dioxide around them. (Alternatively, sometimes planets might form when they rapidly fuse together inside the rapidly spinning disk of dust and gas around a new star, meaning they're largely composed of the same stuff as their star.) As Balmer noted above, we need to spy what's transpiring in other corners of the galaxy to better grasp how strange, or not, our solar system neighborhood truly is. Already, we know that many other solar systems contain curious super-Earths — which are bigger than Earth but smaller than Neptune — but there's no such world in our system. The Webb telescope captured clear "spectral fingerprints" of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide in the planet HR 8799 e's atmosphere. Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA / STScI / J. Olmsted (STScI) Featured Video For You NASA video shows stunning scene from extremely volcanic world Io The Webb telescope — a scientific collaboration between NASA, ESA, and the Canadian Space Agency — is designed to peer into the deepest cosmos and reveal new insights about the early universe. It's also examining intriguing planets in our galaxy, along with the planets and moons in our solar system. Here's how Webb is achieving unparalleled feats, and may for years to come: - Giant mirror: Webb's mirror, which captures light, is over 21 feet across. That's over two-and-a-half times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope's mirror, meaning Webb has six times the light-collecting area. Capturing more light allows Webb to see more distant, ancient objects. The telescope is peering at stars and galaxies that formed over 13 billion years ago, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. "We're going to see the very first stars and galaxies that ever formed," Jean Creighton, an astronomer and the director of the Manfred Olson Planetarium at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, told Mashable in 2021. - Infrared view: Unlike Hubble, which largely views light that's visible to us, Webb is primarily an infrared space telescope, meaning it views light in the infrared spectrum. This allows us to see far more of the universe. Infrared has longer wavelengths than visible light, so the light waves more efficiently slip through cosmic clouds; the light doesn't as often collide with and get scattered by these densely packed particles. Ultimately, Webb's infrared eyesight can penetrate places Hubble can't. "It lifts the veil," said Creighton. - Peering into distant exoplanets: The Webb telescope carries specialized equipment called spectrographs that will revolutionize our understanding of these far-off worlds. The instruments can decipher what molecules (such as water, carbon dioxide, and methane) exist in the atmospheres of distant exoplanets — be they gas giants or smaller rocky worlds. Webb looks at exoplanets in the Milky Way galaxy. Who knows what we'll find? "We might learn things we never thought about," Mercedes López-Morales, an exoplanet researcher and astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics-Harvard & Smithsonian, previously told Mashable.
Express Tribune
17-03-2025
- Science
- Express Tribune
Webb telescope directly observes exoplanet CO2 for first time
The James Webb Space Telescope has directly observed the key chemical of carbon dioxide in planets outside of our solar system for the first time, scientists announced Monday. The gas giants are not capable of hosting extraterrestrial life, but do offer clues in a lingering mystery about how distant planets form, according to a study in The Astrophysical Journal. The HR 8799 system, 130 light years from Earth, is only 30 million years old -- just a baby compared to our solar system's 4.6 billion years. A US-led team of researchers used Webb to directly detect carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of all four of the system's known planets, according to the study. They used Webb's coronagraph instruments, which block the light from bright stars to get a better view of the planets revolving around them. "It's like putting your thumb up in front of the Sun when you're looking up at the sky," lead study author William Balmer, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University, told AFP. Normally, the Webb telescope only detects exoplanets by glimpsing them when they cross in front of their host star. This "transiting method" was how Webb indirectly detected CO2 in the atmosphere of the gas giant WASP-39 in 2022. But for latest discovery, "we're actually seeing the light that is emitted from the planet itself, as opposed to the fingerprint of that light from the host star," Balmer said. This is not easy -- Balmer compared the process to using a torch to spot fireflies next to a lighthouse. While these gas giants may not be able to host life, it is possible that they had moons that could, he added. There are missions currently under way to find out if there could be life in the vast oceans underneath the icy shells of several of Jupiter's moons.
