The James Webb's successor Could Find A Second Earth!
Today’s modern day astronomy heavily relies on Telescopes. Because our planet's atmosphere causes
light to distort before it reaches land-based telescopes, establishing observatories in space
may provide us with better views of distant objects. That is why we have been so keenly
focused ons space telescopes. The Hubble telescope has been the most powerful telescope for humanity
for decades and has taught a lot about the universe and now is being replaced by an even more
powerful space observatory, the James Webb space telescope which was launched in december 2021
and has now finally reached its destination. The hubble telescope has been our civilization’s
biggest accomplishment. Even though it has been operating for the last 31 years, Hubble has been
able to only see about 10 percent of the galaxies out there and is limited in many ways. James Webb
is capable of doing even more cooler things and looking at 13 Billion years into the past
to answer questions of our origins. But there are still many aspects that James Webb cannot answer.
Another aspect and a very important question of our existence is- Whether we are alone
in this universe or not? Is Life rare? Is our planet the only one that harbors life?
These are the questions only one telescope can answer. The Luvoir telescope, that is going
to be even better than the James Webb and look for exoplanets that can find a “Second Earth”.
Despite the current enthusiasm surrounding the quest for faraway exoplanets,
the 4,000-plus verified planets have remained unnoticed players on the cosmic stage.
Except for a few extremely big things photographed by ground-based telescopes, almost all exoplanets
have been discovered only when they momentarily shade the light from their host stars or cause the
star to wobble in a peculiar fashion. Scientists can calculate an exoplanet's orbit, radius, mass,
and possibly density by seeing these patterns and utilizing a few other methods—but not much else.
The planets are still, in the words of one field researcher, "small dark shadows." Scientists
are looking for much more. They want to discover the chemical makeup of the planets' atmospheres,
if liquid water exists on their surfaces, and, eventually, whether these worlds are habitable.
NASA faces a difficult choice now- Which telescope to select as the
next big space telescope that will shape scientific research in the coming decades?
Answering those questions will need the use of space telescopes that do not yet exist.
NASA commissioned two major studies that took four years to complete and involved enormous teams of
(mainly volunteer) scientists and engineers. The National Academy of Sciences is currently
reviewing the findings as part of its Decadal Survey for Astronomy and Astrophysics, which will
suggest government funding priorities through the 2030s. From the Hubble Space Telescope,
which launched in 1990, to the James Webb Space Telescope, which is set to launch this year, all
NASA mega-projects have gone through this similar screening procedure. The Decadal Survey is slated
to complete its work and offer recommendations this spring. Among the four potential projects,
NASA has to select one. This puts four ideas in the race for NASA's next "Great Observatory" in
space: the Lynx X-ray telescope, the Origins Space Telescope for investigating the early cosmos, and
two telescopes devoted mostly, but not entirely, to exoplanets. One of them is called HabEx,
which stands for Habitable Exoplanet Observatory. The third proposal, LUVOIR, stands for Large
UV/Optical/IR Surveyor. It is the most ambitious, sophisticated, costly, and innovative of all.
Luvoir is a telescope that, if built, would be capable of handling a wide range of scientific
challenges, but its primary goal would be to provide scientists with the most accurate image
yet of exoplanets that look to be like Earth on the surface but no one knows what they are like
on the inside. The decadal survey has resulted in some of the most important missions and advanced
science like nothing else. If scientists truly want to know if life exists on faraway Earth-like
planets, they'll need LUVOIR—or something very similar. But what actually is LUVOIR and what
are some of the features of this space telescope that make it stand out from its counterparts.
Imagine the largest ground based optical telescope we have today, like the keck observatory and
outfitting it with some of the best instruments that the current technology has to offer and
send thai telescope to space. That’s Luvior in a nutshell for you. The LUVOIR concept study argues
for a huge telescope mirror with a diameter of up to 15 meters (almost 50 ft). That's six times the
size of the Hubble Space Telescope mirror and more than twice the size of the 6.5-meter Webb
telescope. The most ambitious LUVOIR would feature a mirror the size of a carnival Ferris wheel.
According to the study report, the observatory's primary purpose is to accelerate the search for
tiny, dim, Earth-like exoplanets circling sun-like stars in the hope that some of them
could be habitable. No globe of that size and kind has ever been directly seen by a telescope,
and doing so will necessitate the placement of a massive light-collecting "bucket" outside Earth's
obscuring atmosphere. Direct imaging of such a weak object necessitates specific technological
advances, most notably the use of a strong coronagraph—a screen that blocks off the
planet's host star's dazzling light. To discover tiny, stony planets like our own, a sophisticated
image camera inside the coronagraph equipment is required. Then, an extremely sensitive
spectrograph is required to identify components in a planet's atmosphere, like oxygen or methane,
that may indicate the presence of life. The LUVOIR study team concluded in its final report
that the deluxe version of the observatory, as opposed to a scaled-down option that reduces
the mirror size almost by half, could identify and study 54 potentially Earth-like planets,
as well as hundreds of larger planets, over a five-year observing period.
This figure is calculated by comparing the telescope's technical parameters to the number
of tiny, rocky exoplanets projected to exist in our cosmic neighborhood
based on data from NASA's Kepler survey mission over the previous decade. The inbuilt coronagraph
and the massive size of the telescope itself, which has 40 times the light-gathering power of
Hubble and can record photos far faster, will be critical to accomplishing the 54-planet objective.
In one important manner, LUVOIR is reminiscent of Hubble. Webb and the multifunctional Nancy
Grace Roman Space Telescope, both planned for the 2020s by NASA, will observe predominantly
in the infrared. LUVOIR, like Hubble, will be sensitive throughout a wider range of wavelengths,
from ultraviolet and visible light to near-infrared. This enables it to observe
the spectral fingerprints of a diverse range of chemicals, which may indicate biological processes
at action on a faraway globe. Astronomers hope that this multi-purpose telescope will be able to
achieve a variety of astronomical research aims, such as studying Jupiter's cloud tops with a 15
mile or 25 kilometer resolution and hunting for biosignatures in the atmospheres of other planets.
According to the study report, the observatory's major purpose is to speed up the search for small
faint Earth-like exoplanets circling sun-like stars in the hopes of locating ones that may
potentially support life. Another objective is to make astrophysics research more accessible,
including topics such as the reionization period, galaxy creation and development,
and star and planet formation. It would also be capable of doing high-resolution imaging
and spectroscopic examinations of solar system planets, with one of its key scientific goals
being to identify and characterize Earth-like planets circling adjacent stars. luvoir would
provide answers to the most pressing questions we have about our universe, from things in our
solar system to exoplanets, stars, galaxies, and the most massive cosmic structures of all.
If LUVOIR would have been proposed a decade ago, it would have been a fishing expedition.
Today after the Launch of James Webb,scientists are confident it will produce solid results.
What's exciting is that the questions of our origins and search for life outside earth are
slowly gaining more pace and popularity. We have important suggestions to the Decadal [Survey] in
the context of knowing for certain that there are Earth-size planets in our reasonably close
neighborhood that get Earth-type energy from their suns. This is the first generation of
conceptions to include that knowledge and make it a fundamental component of their scientific case.
The other exoplanet observatory under consideration for future financing, HabEx,
would likewise be able to image tiny, Earth-like planets directly. However, its four-meter mirror
would pick up on considerably fewer of them. In comparison to the 54 exoplanets
predicted by LUVOIR, HabEx is projected to locate eight during the next five years.
In terms of spatial resolution (the capacity to perceive details), LUVOIR can provide pictures
that are six times sharper than Hubble and four times sharper than HabEx. As a result,
it may be able to offer photographs similar to the iconic "Pale Blue Dot" image of Earth acquired by
Voyager 1 in 1990 from a distance of 3.7 billion miles, but for planets 100,000 times further away.
In these photographs, the planets will span only a few pixels, which may not seem like much. However,
the hue of those few precious pixels holds a remarkable amount of information.
The Extreme Coronagraph for Living Planetary Systems (ECLIPS) would allow scientists to
read the contents of planetary atmospheres like never before, detecting molecules such as oxygen,
ozone, water vapor, carbon dioxide, and methane that might represent biosignatures.
Because neither Hubble nor JWST can detect Earth-like planets around sun-like stars,
LUVOIR marks a significant advancement in astrobiology. Exoplanets would be seen as
members of distant solar systems rather than solitary worlds by the telescope. We would be
able to calculate the atmospheric compositions of numerous planets in a solar system,
given their orbits, masses, and temperatures, and to do so for planets orbiting a variety of suns.
Although exoplanet science would be the observatory's primary goal,
its massive mirror and wide range of wavelengths might be utilized to examine everything from
distant galaxies to things in our own solar system. LUVOIR, for example, would view
Jupiter in roughly the same detail as cameras on the Juno probe, which is presently in orbit around
the planet. The goal of LUVOIR is to build an observatory that can narrate the narrative of the
cosmos from its inception through the ubiquitous presence—or absence—of life. So we prefer to
suggest that LUVOIR is a concept or an idea, rather than a set of numbers that will be created.
If these initiatives are successful, they will provide LUVOIR with a technological advantage.
However, given its goals, the observatory will be costly, with lifetime costs estimated
to range between $18 billion and $24 billion for the proposed 15.1-meter LUVOIR-A variant.
To prevent price shock, the LUVOIR team has developed back-up plans for an eight-meter
version named LUVOIR-B, which would cost $12 billion to $18 billion. Either version of
LUVOIR will cost NASA a lot of money, but team members say it's equivalent to what
the Hubble Space Telescope spent throughout its lifespan. The capability difference between the
15.1-meter LUVOIR-A and the eight-meter LUVOIR-B generally corresponds to their size difference.
LUVOIR-A could discover 54 "habitable planet prospects," however LUVOIR-B could only find 28.
For the time being, if approved, LUVOIR-A is the largest space telescope we can create. Its
15.1-meter mirror is the largest that can fit into the next generation of heavy-lift rockets,
including NASA's Space Launch System and SpaceX's Starship. The observatory, folded up within the
rocket during launch, would be launched into cold, dark space, away from Earth's
warmth and brightness, to a gravitationally stable location known as Lagrange Point 2.
No matter which variant of LUVOIR is chosen by NASA, one thing is sure that it is the
next Big space telescope that will shape the scientific research of the coming decades.
So what do you think about this Insane next big space telescope?
How will it shape up the future of space telescopes and astronomy? Let us know what
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