Finding planets around other stars used to be extremely difficult. In fact, scientists found the first black hole and countless distant galaxies before spotting any worlds beyond our solar system. The first exoplanet wasn’t discovered until 1992.
Now, astronomers have identified well more than 5,000 distant worlds. But we still know little about these exoplanets. Many illustrations show them with colorful volcanoes, oceans and cloud-streaked skies. Yet these features are still only guesses based on what scientists know about the worlds they’re studying. And often, the only data scientists have on those planets is their mass, width and distance from their star.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, is now unveiling dazzling new detail about these exoplanets. By collecting light from distant solar systems, JWST can pick out some of the specific gases in planets’ atmospheres. That includes water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane and other molecules.
Since JWST launched in 2021, it has peered at the atmospheres of hundreds of such worlds. Its targets range from gas giants to rocky orbs about the size of Earth.
“There’s a lot of excitement about finding signatures of alien life,” says Laura Kreidberg. She’s an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy. That’s in Heidelberg, Germany. Like others, Kreidberg is excited about the prospect of finding hints of alien life. But, she adds, scientists have a lot to learn about planets before they can detect life on other worlds with confidence. JWST could help with that.
Most of what we know about planets today comes from the eight in our solar system. Over the next decade, JWST could collect data on a whole zoo of planets across the galaxy. These could include rocky worlds and gas giants like those in our solar system.
They might also include strange lava worlds or water worlds. Planets like these don’t exist in our solar system at all.
This wealth of…
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