[HN Gopher] Webb confirms its first exoplanet
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Webb confirms its first exoplanet
Author : perihelions
Score : 84 points
Date : 2023-01-12 20:30 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.esa.int)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.esa.int)
| mikeInAlaska wrote:
| Interesting choice for the first Webb exoplanet at 41 light years
| distance. There are 11 stars within 10 light years of us. Does
| their choice mean that none of the closer stars have systems that
| are edge-on to us?
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Perhaps the closer stars are too bright to analyze what's near
| them?
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Do the sun/earth also limit where the Webb can point? It
| might have to wait until the earth goes around the sun more
| to look some directions
| kibwen wrote:
| https://webb.nasa.gov/content/forScientists/faqSolarsystem.
| h...
|
| _" What can Webb look at?"_
|
| _" Anything more than 85deg from the Sun as viewed from
| L2, which includes Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, their satellites,
| the asteroid belt, and all outer Solar System objects. JWST
| also can't look farther from the Sun than 135deg (i.e.
| within 45deg of the anti-sun position) but outer solar
| system objects will all be observable some of the time. The
| field of regard limitations are a fundamental consequence
| of the observatory thermal design and the sunshield design
| that keeps the telescope and instruments cold. This means
| that the Sun, Earth, Moon, Mercury, and Venus, and of
| course sun-grazing comets and many known NEOs cannot be
| observed."_
| twawaaay wrote:
| You not only need a system that has exoplanet transiting its
| star, you also need to have it happen at right time (it happens
| at most once per exopelanet's orbit) and also at right time for
| Webb to look at (remember, it is severely restricted in where
| it can point).
| kokanee wrote:
| Theoretical question: if spectrography advanced to the point that
| we could see individual organisms and their behavior from
| lightyears away, and then we placed a very large mirror very far
| away from our planet, could we aim a telescope at that mirror and
| watch ourselves going about our lives in the past? Could we use
| this technology to solve crimes, answer historical questions, see
| dinosaurs, etc?
| pixl97 wrote:
| I don't think it's possible. R squared pretty much means that
| no light from an individual organism will ever reach you. The
| number of photons reflected from a planet is a staggeringly
| large number, but the distances involved mean that the faction
| that actually hit your spectrograph are so incredibly tiny that
| its impossible to tell what they are from.
|
| Now, that's just in one way travel. In two way reflected travel
| it gets even worse. Only some tiny fraction of our light will
| hit the mirror due to R2. There is no such thing as a perfect
| mirror so only a tiny percent of the tiny percent will be
| reflected back.
|
| Distances in space are stupid. Our minds cannot comprehend
| them.
| sockaddr wrote:
| > see dinosaurs
|
| Only if you had the ability to outrun a photon that has been
| traveling for 65,000,000 years, park, set up camp, and build a
| mirror. But then, if you can do that why are you building a
| mirror?
| scrumper wrote:
| What if you could avoid the travel? Perhaps some chance
| alignment of distant black holes creating something like a
| gravitational mirror? Bend the light, bend it some more, bend
| it so it reaches earth today. A 65 million light year round
| trip.
| ChainOfFools wrote:
| Or we have discovered aliens have already done this for us,
| perhaps to amuse themselves at the chaos that will ensue
| once we figure out what it is we're looking at and what it
| means for all of our civil, social, and religious
| institutions.
| alanbernstein wrote:
| Practical answer: with this method, the absolute bound on how
| far back in time you can see is _today_.
| heisenzombie wrote:
| It's so cool how far we've come with exoplanet discovery in such
| a short time! The first one was only in 1992 and it's so neat
| seeing us go from only picking up giants to being able to detect
| smaller and smaller planets. Now to get chemistry from a rocky
| planet?! Awesome.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| I remember when I talked to my parents and others telling them
| it's obvious exoplanets exist - since our Sun is a star and
| there are many stars, it seemed logical that at least some of
| them do have their planets. They would laugh and say, "Yes,
| it's not impossible, but for now it's just science-fiction."
|
| Again, since life developed on our planet, it seems logical
| that it also exists at some of the exoplanets. We are just
| lacking an efficient method of communicating with them.
| rnk wrote:
| Yes, of course. It must be life is present in other places
| because of the vast number of suns with planets. We are
| starting to see that planets are forming around stars in some
| ways similar to us, other ways different (it's hard to see
| earth like planets bc of limits of our technology). We
| already know rocks can get ejected from one planet in our own
| solar system, and thus have certainly the possibility to
| spread small bits of dna from earth to mars (and it could go
| the other way). We have seen the 4 dna bases (plus the one
| that is different is rna) in space. We have the extremely
| suggestive but not certain possibility that methane detected
| on mars is coming from biological processes. There is
| certainty on life in the universe elsewhere - at least
| microbial but I think it's certain that higher level life
| forms are there.
|
| We don't know nearly as much about advanced life, like say
| animals, plants over bacteria, much less intelligent life.
| But the universe is so huge, I think it's likely there are
| other places with intelligent life.
| chrsw wrote:
| Both things can be true: the universe can be
| incomprehensibly vast and life can be incalculably rare.
| est31 wrote:
| 1992 was 30 years ago. You should probably add _for a project
| with limited military potential_. The time between Sputnik 's
| launch and the first manned Moon landings was only 12 years,
| but there you had the military component. Of course it's still
| amazing progress and there is a lot of engineering involved in
| it. I'm definitely a fan.
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