The James Webb Space Telescope has assailed yet another impressive exploration milestone. Using data collected from Webb's Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec), scientists have confirmed its first exoplanet discovery. Located in the constellation Octans, the exoplanet system discovered by the Webb telescope is nearly 41 light-years away.
[...] The planet is a few hundred degrees hotter than the Earth and completes an orbit around its red dwarf star in just two days. The close proximity with its natural sun would ideally mean an atmosphere won't be possible on the rocky planet, but there's still a small chance because the star is only half as hot as our own sun.
[...] For now, the team is looking at multiple scenarios regarding atmospheric presence on LHS 475 b. The only certainty is that this exoplanet can't possibly maintain a dense atmosphere akin to the methane-heavy conditions on Titan, one of Saturn's natural satellites. What they are certain about is the fact this is just the start of exoplanet discoveries made using the Webb telescope, especially those covering Earth-like planets beyond our solar system.
A lot more detail over at NASA
(Score: 3, Funny) by Barenflimski on Saturday January 14, @04:16AM (1 child)
Finally. A place to get away from these liberals.
(Score: 3, Funny) by pe1rxq on Saturday January 14, @10:05AM
Congratulations! You won a ticket on Ark Fleet Ship B
(Score: 3, Funny) by Barenflimski on Saturday January 14, @04:19AM
Finally. A place to go without them conservatives!
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 14, @05:09AM
A place to get away from radicals & reactionaries, extremists of any sort!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by MIRV888 on Saturday January 14, @06:09AM (7 children)
A close friend of my daughter is close to her PHD in astronomy. Just from talking to Nina it's become clear to me that the science and discoveries to be made with the Webb telescope are going radically add to the knowledge of the universe.
(Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Saturday January 14, @07:30AM
Good. That could help us with faster convergence to final knowledge "We are less then grain of dust in the Universe".
The edge of 太玄 cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design
(Score: 2) by turgid on Saturday January 14, @01:03PM (5 children)
Maybe they should build another dozen of them? They've done it once already. The others will be much cheaper and quicker.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Saturday January 14, @02:40PM (4 children)
Two more would be the optimal number, but they need to be in very different locations. Ideally something like the Neptune Trojan positions. That would let one get a decent parallax measurement on things fairly far away. (And parallax is the only really certain way of measuring distance to distant things.)
OK, there would be an advantage to one more, but this last would be well out from the plane of the zodiac. Say at the distance of Neptune's orbit, but 60 degrees above or below the plane of the zodiac. But that third one is a lot more difficult, and the additional advantage is smaller.
What would be really nice is if one could figure the distance between those telescopes accurately enough to use the pair (or trio) as a single telescope, the way is done with radio telescopes on the earth. I don't think we're up to that yet, though. (Well, actually I don't think we're up to any of this, but maybe in 20 years....)
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(Score: 2) by turgid on Saturday January 14, @03:14PM (3 children)
Optical interferrometry? That would be very cool indeed. I think having a couple of extra ones in Earth orbit would be useful. More science could get done in parallel, and one failure wouldn't be completely disappointing and set us back decades.
Putting one in the outer solar system would be very interesting. How would you get it there, and how would you ensure it stayed at its intended position? Being far away from the Sun would be very useful. You could do a lot of good infrared astronomy, for a start. The other challenge would be powering it (RTGs?) and getting the data back. I dare say it would produce a lot of data, and Neptune's very far away. How would you achieve a useful data rate over that distance?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Informative) by MIRV888 on Saturday January 14, @03:29PM
I think RTG's (radioisotope thermoelectric generator) would be the only realistic option for any deep space arrays. They are scary to launch, but once they are deployed it's essentially permanent power.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 15, @01:01PM (1 child)
> How would you achieve a useful data rate over that distance?
I don't have a clue how to implement it, but wouldn't a focused beam (laser?) be the most efficient way to send? Of course the beam is going to grow in width at Neptune distances, so a large aperture receiver (another telescope) is needed to receive. The receiver should probably be in space as well. To make the laser as visible as possible, the Neptune station should have a large, opaque shield, to block star light from "behind".
Then there is the protocol, isn't it normal for space sensors to send each block of data several times so transmissions can be reconstructed from several partial receptions? More than just parity for internal block integrity. Ability to send changes to the protocol back to Neptune so that parameters could be changed if reception quality varies--perhaps the big telescope is aimed at Earth (or the space receiver) at regular intervals to upload instructions.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 15, @08:04PM
At those distances, everything is a point source. You want to use whatever the most powerful photon generating source you can for the power budget that you have, whether those are optical or RF photons, with a secondary consideration being given to your background. So you wouldn't want to use millimeter wave because you'll be swamped by the cosmic microwave background. RF necessitates larger antenna dishes on the spacecraft, but we've got these HUGE antennas on the ground. With lasers, you have nice compact sources on the spacecraft, but we're limited on our aperture sizes on the ground, not to mention attenuation issues with the atmosphere. I don't think blocking background starlight is much of a concern, though.
Let's try a link budget off the cuff, but I'm sure I'll miss something. Let's say we want to send 1000 bits per second, so each bit is a millisecond. If we had a 1W laser on the spacecraft, that is 1 mJ of energy. Let's say that is at 632 nm (HeNe) wavelength, so somewhere in the middle of the visible band. Each photon is about 3.14E-19 Joules of energy, which give you about 3E15 photons in that millisecond laser burst.
Take the Earth-Neptune distance to be 4.3E12 meters at their closest point. If the laser has a reasonable divergence of 3 milliradians, that means that the diameter of the laser beam at Earth is 2.5E10 meters, which is an area of about 5E20 square meters. Spread those 3E15 photons out over that area and you get about 6E-6 photons per square meter.
Now you can start playing with the numbers. Make it a 10W laser and you're up to 6e-5 photons per sq meter. Point the Hubble at it (aperture about 18 sq meters) and you'll now capture about 1e-3 photons. So decrease your bit rate by 1000 and you'll capture about 1 photon per second with the Hubble. You can really appreciate why those NASA Deep Space Network dishes are so hugemongous.