Good morning, bonjour.
We’re thrilled to join you
live from the Canadian Space Agency
headquarters on the south shore of Montreal.
I’m Sarah Gallagher,
Science Advisor to the CSA President
and astrophysicist at Western University.
And I’m Nathalie Ouellette,
the outreach scientist
for the Webb Telescope in Canada
and the coordinator for the Institute for
Research on Exoplanets at the
Université de Montréal.
Today we are so thrilled and excited
to unveil Webb’s first in-depth look
at an exoplanet and its atmosphere.
Canada’s contributions to
this epic adventure
included two critical elements:
the first is the Fine Guidance Sensor,
which enables the exquisite images
that you are seeing today.
They’re a highly precise
pair of cameras that lock
onto guide stars while the
telescope is in motion.
And keep those images
rock-solid, so we can have the
beautiful images from that beautiful mirror.
And the second is the NIRISS,
which collects infrared light.
NIRISS can observe from early galaxies,
like you’ve just seen, to exoplanets,
which are worlds that orbit
stars beyond our solar system.
But to understand how NIRISS collects this
information, it’s important to understand a key
technique called spectroscopy.
Essentially, researchers use
spectroscopy to break
apart light into individual
colours, or wavelengths, in
order to study celestial
objects in greater detail.
And for exoplanets, we use a
method called transit spectroscopy,
to unveil hidden details
about these faraway worlds
and their atmospheres.
But how does transit spectroscopy work?
So, atmospheric transmission spectroscopy
happens when you have a star,
a star like our Sun, and the planet,
the exoplanet passes in front of it.
The light from that star can pass through the
atmosphere, and all of the molecules in that
atmosphere can leave signatures on the light.
And so that allows us to
look for things like biosignatures,
or the signatures of life around other worlds.
That’s so exciting, and this is definitely why
exoplanet research is one of the most
exciting fields in astronomy today.
Over the last few decades, survey
telescopes like TESS and Kepler
have discovered and catalogued
over 5000 exoplanets in our galaxy alone!
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Now Webb is set to rewrite astronomy textbooks.
International teams of scientists from all over
the world will be able to zoom in on interesting
alien worlds and take a closer-than-ever-before
look at their hidden details and their atmospheres.
The search for life elsewhere in the universe
is definitely on, and Webb is an
incredible new ally in this search.
And now for the big reveal:
NIRISS has found definitive evidence for
water in a hot gas giant exoplanet’s atmosphere.
That exoplanet is called WASP-96 b.
It’s about 1,150 light-years away from Earth,
and this is the most detailed near-infrared
transmission spectrum of an exoplanet atmosphere
that has ever been captured.
Each white dot on this graph represents a
data point that shows how
much light was absorbed by the planet’s
atmosphere. All of those bumps and wiggles
are signatures. They carry information about
what the molecules are in the atmosphere
of that exoplanet. And we can see from
this beautiful data that there’s water in the
atmosphere. And also, there’s evidence for haze
and clouds, which couldn’t be seen before.
This is incredible work!
C’est incroyable!
I agree, this is incredible!
I have to say, looking at this data, how
clean and sharp it is – it is really amazing.
But Webb is only getting started!
WASP-96 b as an exoplanet is hot, puffy, a
gas giant that orbits very
close to its Sun-like star,
and that makes it relatively easy to
spot. But Webb and NIRISS will have the
capability to look at much smaller planets.
Nathalie, what’s next?
What can we expect?
So ultimately, in the field of exoplanet research,
the holy grail is finding an Earth 2.0,
that is, a rocky exoplanet
with an atmosphere that
contains interesting
elements and molecules,
that is just at the right
distance from its star to
have a temperature similar to Earth’s.
And that region, just at the
right distance from its star, is called the
habitable zone, or the Goldilocks zone,
because the temperature is
just right for water to
remain liquid and
potentially support life.
We know that water is essential for life as we
know it here on Earth.
So the fact that NIRISS and
Webb can detect water is a
huge step forward in the search for alien life.
But exoplanets and their host stars are incredibly
diverse, and every single planetary system that
Webb observes brings us closer to a deeper
understanding of how these faraway worlds,
and even our own solar system,
formed and evolved.
Webb and its new observations and its
beautiful instruments are opening a
new world for our researchers and young
astronomers in Canada and around the world.
A massive thank you to our partners
NASA and the European Space Agency,
and we can’t wait to see what’s next.
Go Webb go!