To look for atmospheres around planets outside our solar system is to look for extraterrestrial life. Astronomist Sebastian Zieba has used data from the James Webb Space Telescope to study small rocky exoplanets but found ...
Planetary Sciences
Jun 26, 2024
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If aliens modified a planet in their solar system to make it warmer, we'd be able to tell. A new UC Riverside study identifies the artificial greenhouse gases that would be giveaways of a terraformed planet.
Astrobiology
Jun 25, 2024
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Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers from the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) have discovered a new supernova. Designated SN 2023adsy, the newfound stellar explosion is the most distant Type ...
Astronomers have captured what appears to be a snapshot of a massive collision of giant asteroids in Beta Pictoris, a neighboring star system known for its early age and tumultuous planet-forming activity.
Astronomy
Jun 10, 2024
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156
Planets form in disks of gas and dust, orbiting young stars. The MIRI Mid-INfrared Disk Survey (MINDS), led by Thomas Henning from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) in Heidelberg, Germany, aims to establish a ...
Astronomy
Jun 6, 2024
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360
Thirty-four years is a long time for a telescope. Yet, that is how long the veteran workhorse of NASA's space telescope fleet has been operating. Admittedly, Hubble was served by several repair missions during the space shuttle ...
Astronomy
Jun 6, 2024
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56
Astronomers have detected carbon in a galaxy just 350 million years after the Big Bang, the earliest detection of any element in the universe other than hydrogen.
Astronomy
Jun 6, 2024
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When the James Webb Space Telescope was launched at the end of 2021, we expected stunning images and illuminating scientific results. So far, the powerful space telescope has lived up to our expectations. The JWST has shown ...
Astronomy
Jun 6, 2024
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142
There are plenty of problems that spacecraft designers have to consider. Getting smacked in the sensitive parts by a rock is just one of them, but it is a very important one.
Space Exploration
Jun 5, 2024
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As we discover more and more exoplanets—and the current total is in excess of 5,200—we continue to try to learn more about them. Astrobiologists busy themselves analyzing their atmospheres searching for anything that ...
Astrobiology
Jun 4, 2024
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The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a planned infrared space observatory, the partial successor to the aging Hubble Space Telescope. The JWST will not be a complete successor, because it will not be sensitive to all of the light wavelengths that Hubble can see. The main scientific goal is to observe the most distant objects in the universe, those beyond the reach of either ground based instruments or the Hubble. The JWST project is a NASA-led international collaboration with contributors in 15 nations, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.
Originally called the Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST), it was renamed in 2002 after NASA's second administrator, James E. Webb (1906-1992). Webb had overseen NASA 1961-68 from the beginning of the Kennedy administration through the end of the Johnson administration, thus overseeing all the critical first manned launches in the Mercury through Gemini programs, until just before the first manned Apollo flight.
Current plans call for the telescope to be launched on an Ariane 5 rocket in 2014, on a five-year mission. The JWST will reside in solar-orbit near the Sun-Earth L2 point, which is on a line passing from the Sun to the Earth, but about 1.5 million km farther away from the Sun than is the Earth. This position, which moves around the Sun in exact orbital synchrony with the Earth, will allow JWST to shield itself from infrared from both Sun and Earth, by using a single radiation shield positioned between the telescope and the Sun-Earth direction.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
