Webb has just brought us beautiful pictures and a lot of us were awestruck.
But some of its most amazing observations won't come from beautiful pictures.
Recently, Webb captured the most detailed spectrum of an exoplanet's atmosphere ever.
You have probably heard about Wasp-96 b by now. It's a gas giant about 1,150 light-years away
in the southern-sky constellation Phoenix. This hot, puffy gas giant is like no other planet
in our solar system. It has a mass less than half that of Jupiter and diameter 1.2 times greater.
WASP-96 b orbits astonishingly close to its Sun-like star, just one-ninth
of the distance between Mercury and the Sun, completing one orbit every 3.4 Earth-days.
That's so close that its parent star is boiling away its atmosphere.
Temperatures here are greater than 1000°F. So what's crazy about the recent observation
is that the Webb telescope has detected the distinct signature of water on Wasp-96 b,
along with evidence for clouds and haze. This is not the first time a telescope
detects water molecules on another exoplanet, but Webb's super powerful 21-foot mirror over
2.5 times larger than Hubble's, gives us the most detailed analysis to date.
Webb's Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS) measured light
from the WASP-96 system for 6.4 hours as the planet circled its star, and brought us this
light curve of the brightness of WASP-96 b's parent star over time. As the planet
transits the star’s disk, its light dims. Another result of this observation was the
transmission spectrum which reveals the brightness change of individual wavelengths
of infrared light between 0.6 and 2.8 microns. Thanks to this transmission spectrum we now have
access to previously hidden details of the atmosphere: the distinct signature of water,
indications of haze, and evidence of clouds that we never thought existed before.
Astronomers make transmission spectrums by comparing starlight filtered through
a planet's atmosphere as it moves across the star, to the unfiltered starlight.
Then, absorption patterns - the locations and heights of peaks on the graph - will
enable scientists to detect and measure the gases in a planet's atmosphere.
The blue line on the graph takes into account the data, the known properties of WASP-96 b and its
star, like the size, mass, and temperature, and the characteristics of the atmosphere.
Only Webb's advanced design can make such exceptional observations.
Its 270-square-foot gold-coated mirror collects infrared light efficiently.
The precision spectrographs spread light out into rainbows of thousands of infrared colors.
And the sensitive infrared detectors measure extremely subtle differences in brightness.
Also, Webb is extremely stable and orbits around the second Lagrange Point about a
million miles away which keeps the telescope away from the polluting effects of Earth's atmosphere.
Thus, Webb has an uninterrupted view and clean data that can be analyzed very quickly.
Such observations will help us understand the birth of gas giant
planets like Saturn and Jupiter, clock climate patterns sweeping around them,
and maybe enable searches for signs of life.