9/2/2023 0 Comments Webber telescopeIf that sunlight passed through a planet's atmosphere on its way to Earth, then there will be telltale signs in the spectrum of that light. It works by collecting sunlight that passes around a nearby planet and splitting this light into a spectrum-just like how a prism splits white light into a rainbow. The method scientists will use to work out whether or not the TRAPPIST-1 planets have atmospheres is called transit spectroscopy. "In terms of information content, we're pretty much going from listening to the radio, to having television," he said. And James Webb is exactly what I'm talking about."įor de Wit, the technological step forward made with Webb can hardly be overstated. He told Newsweek: "You really need a very big telescope that is far from Earth, that you can monitor for hours or for days if required, and that operates in a large wavelength range in the infrared, because this is where all the molecular spectroscopic features that we are searching for are located. "The question we will want to answer now is do they have an atmosphere? If they have an atmosphere, then things will become very exciting," said Michaël Gillon, an exoplanet researcher at the University of Liège in Belgium who led the team that discovered the TRAPPIST-1 system. That is, until Webb stepped onto the scene. However, due to technological limitations we've so far been unable to ascertain a critical characteristic of these planets: whether they have atmospheres or not. Read more New, Huge Sunspot Triples in Size in 24 Hours "So these are the only windows that we have into, possibly, the atmosphere of other terrestrial habitable planets, and that's what's really special about them." "There are other planets that are terrestrial or temperate or both, but they're usually too far or around a star that is too big to really allow us to study them," Julien de Wit, assistant professor in the Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and part of the team that discovered the TRAPPIST-1 system, told Newsweek. What's more, initial observations suggested that some of the planets might have temperatures low enough to hypothetically support the presence of liquid water. That's because TRAPPIST-1 was found to have at least seven rocky exoplanets-planets that exist outside of the solar system-orbiting it with sizes and masses similar to that of Earth. TRAPPIST-1 is a red dwarf star located around 12 parsecs (39 light-years) away from our sun and has interested astronomers ever since it was discovered in 2017. NASA/JPL-CaltechĪlmost immediately after it was capable of carrying out scientific observations, Webb began studying the TRAPPIST-1 system as a matter of priority. TRAPPIST-1 is one of the most tantalizing group of exoplanets-planets outside of the solar system-that we know of. An artist's impression of the TRAPPIST-1 system, posted online by NASA in 2017.
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