[HN Gopher] JWST's first spectrum of a TRAPPIST-1 planet
___________________________________________________________________
JWST's first spectrum of a TRAPPIST-1 planet
Author : wglb
Score : 106 points
Date : 2023-10-02 13:33 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (phys.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (phys.org)
| seventytwo wrote:
| Does this technique only work with systems that are edge-on so
| that the star light passes through the exoplanet atmosphere? Or
| can this work with reflected star light for systems that have
| orbits that face us?
| rburkej wrote:
| NGL, my first thought was a planet full of beer and cheese.
| [deleted]
| mrec wrote:
| And nobody talking. Heaven.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| The combination of beer and nobody talking doesn't exist.
| marmakoide wrote:
| Naturally occurring lakes of algae tasting like wheat and
| similar sugar content, and metabolized by fermentation from
| micro organism.
| baud147258 wrote:
| Drinking alone? As long as you don't start talking to
| yourself and/or to your imaginary friends
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| ... imagine all that beer at the pub, and no one is joining
| in...
| wlesieutre wrote:
| If anyone's curious, the name comes from planets around the
| star having been discovered using the TRAnsiting Planets and
| PlanetesImals Small Telescope
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRAPPIST
| none_to_remain wrote:
| The name comes from Trappist beer. Belgian university
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| So they are confident it is just a dumb rock, and it's time to
| move onto another planet. Good but very boring news.
| malfist wrote:
| A planet is hardly "just a dumb rock"
| [deleted]
| echelon wrote:
| > cloud-free, hydrogen-rich atmospheres were ruled out with high
| confidence. This means that there appears to be no clear,
| extended atmosphere around TRAPPIST-1 b
|
| I will never not be amazed that we can read the atmospheric
| spectra of exoplanets.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Spectroscopy. [1] The most amazing thing about it is how simple
| it really is. Each element has a unique absorption/emission
| scheme for 'light' / electromagnetic radiation. So light
| radiated from a body will have tell tale missing segments when
| broken down into its spectrum, absorbed by the atmosphere it
| passed through.
|
| Think about how light passed through a prism splits from white
| light into its rainbow colored components. It's the exact same
| thing. All you need to do is see what's missing, and you can
| discern the elemental composition of the atmosphere[s] that
| said light passed through. And it all started with Newton
| playing with a prism, and thinking beyond 'my, what pretty
| colors.'
|
| The really cool thing about this is that it also can tell you
| some things that defy 'common knowledge.' For instance the Moon
| actually has a persistent atmosphere, and it's made out of
| sodium! It's exceptionally thin, but it's there - and can be
| picked up by spectroscopy.
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_spectroscopy
| [deleted]
| amriksohata wrote:
| Does this change theories around how gaseous clouds eventually
| formed stars and solar systems?
| malfist wrote:
| No, not at this time (and not expected to).
| jug wrote:
| Too bad the star is going to make observations within the
| habitable zone hard!
|
| This problem also sounds like one that can be extrapolated into
| more systems as those planets are going to be close to the star
| by necessity...?
|
| Frustrating that the resolving power of JWST is there even for
| those, but the star completely dominates the observations.
|
| I wonder if they could perform analysis over time and apply
| statistical models to subtract solar output from the data,
| knowing the orbital periods etc. But that's just me being a
| layman here.
| perihelions wrote:
| - _" I wonder if they could perform analysis over time and
| apply statistical models to subtract solar output from the
| data, knowing the orbital periods etc. But that's just me being
| a layman here."_
|
| They do that in the paper. That's the "secondary eclipse",
| where the planet goes behind the star and they subtract the
| difference.
|
| https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/acf7c4
| [open access]
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Given how much we know now about how inhospitable red dwarf star
| systems are, why are we continuing to focus on planets in such
| systems instead of planets in sun like stars?
| brookst wrote:
| Is it really zero sum? Is there a backlog of planets in sun-
| like systems that we're ignoring in favor of this?
| blincoln wrote:
| As the article mentions, this system is unusual, in that it has
| three Earth-sized planets in its habitable zone.
| outworlder wrote:
| What makes them inhospitable? Tidal locking?
| shagie wrote:
| There's also the possibility of super flares from red
| dwarves.
|
| https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/superflares-from-
| yo...
|
| https://earthsky.org/space/red-dwarf-stars-superflares-
| red-d...
|
| https://www.space.com/red-dwarfs-activity-bad-news-alien-
| lif...
|
| https://interestingengineering.com/science/red-dwarfs-
| superf...
|
| From the last one:
|
| > The magnetic fields' arrangement and intensity are
| responsible for areas of intense activity on the solar
| surface. For our Sun, these areas appear darker and are
| called sunspots, which have been found to occur in areas
| where solar flares are released.
|
| > Solar flares from red dwarfs previously measured can be
| 100-1,000 times more potent than those released by our Sun.
| In 2019, Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf, let out a flare
| 14,000 times brighter than its pre-flare brightness.
|
| > Solar flares are sometimes followed by hot plasma sent out
| from the star called coronal mass ejections (CMEs). Its
| scorching temperatures can blow strip away the atmospheres of
| planets and even boil away liquid water from the planet's
| surface, reducing the likelihood of it hosting life.
|
| (Tangent to the tangent - https://youtu.be/FF_e5eYgJ3Y is a
| neat video - Close Encounter with a CME (Coronal Mass
| Ejection) :: On Sept. 5, 2022, NASA's Parker Solar Probe was
| about to make its 13th close approach to the Sun when a
| coronal mass ejection (CME) -- a powerful explosion of
| magnetic fields and plasma -- erupted right in front of it.
| ... )
| marricks wrote:
| Baja has a great point, but I think another one beyond the
| transit time is relative size.
|
| Unless there's a jovian planet with life out there your best
| bet at measuring a regular sized planet is around a small
| stars. Dwarfs.
|
| When we had our massive planet surveys measuring transits we
| found a shit ton of jovian's around stars and some earth sized
| planets around smaller stars.
|
| Time to measure transit and relative size are king.
| dmbche wrote:
| "The discovery of the TRAPPIST-1 planets drew widespread
| attention in major world newspapers, social media, streaming
| television and websites.[302][303] As of 2017, the discovery of
| TRAPPIST-1 led to the largest single-day web traffic to the
| NASA website.[304] NASA started a public campaign on Twitter to
| find names for the planets, which drew responses of varying
| seriousness, although the names of the planets will be decided
| by the International Astronomical Union.[305]"
|
| From the wiki on Trappist 1 -
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRAPPIST-1
|
| I think the public interest in it might be driving it? 40 light
| years is also kinda near to us, which might make it more
| interesting than Sun like systems if these are 100+ light years
| for example, if we were to want to do something about a
| possible detection.
|
| Edit0: We don't know much of what conditions drive the genesis
| of life or where it might survive, so I'm not entirely sure
| that looking at red dwarves are a waste of time in a search for
| life.
|
| They are also doing fundamental work in clearing up the
| influence of the star on their measurements!
| icapybara wrote:
| Life doesn't revolve around the search for life- there are
| interesting things to learn from such planets even if those
| planets cannot host alien life.
| TheBlight wrote:
| I don't get the impression there's currently a bandwidth
| problem here that needs optimizing. It's also not completely
| clear how inhospitable to life they truly are. Being the most
| abundant type of star in the galaxy by far, it makes sense to
| study them very closely to at least rule out the potential for
| life.
| radicalbyte wrote:
| The habitable zone is very close to the star; this results in
| a high probability of the planet being tidally locked and a
| high probability of being affected by solar flares.
| standardly wrote:
| A tidally locked planet would be neat if civilization could
| exist there. One side would be constantly hot, and the
| other would be frozen, but there would exist a temperate
| climate zone in a longitudinal ring connecting the poles.
| Almost like a ring planet from Halo.
|
| I remember an interesting astrobotany paper hypothesizing
| that if plants were to evolve on a red dwarf planet, there
| would be selective pressure for them to be black rather
| than green (for maximum light absorption, as most light
| would be infrared).
| api wrote:
| You could also put solar up along the edge and even on
| the hot side and have tons of energy with no need for
| storage. It'd be like a poor man's Dyson sphere.
| standardly wrote:
| Neat idea. Imagine getting solar/thermal energy from one
| half of the planet, and housing supercomputers and
| genetic databanks on the cold side, with population
| centers living in the temperate ring.
|
| Or, the rich people could live in the temperate zone
| while the poor people choose between burning and
| freezing. Brb, writing a dystopian sci-fi.
| TheBlight wrote:
| Some recent research suggests these stars may flare
| primarily at the poles, unlike our sun:
| https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/red-dwarfs-
| arent-...
| jl6 wrote:
| Regular solar flares could be bad for any lifeforms trying to
| get a stable civilization together, but on the other hand,
| all that energy arriving in the atmosphere could trigger some
| very life-conducive chemistry, similar to how we theorize
| that lightning was involved in our own primordial soup.
| adampwells wrote:
| I suspect we are 'looking for the keys under lamp posts' - ie
| looking where we have the most / easiest to get data.
| baja_blast wrote:
| because you need 3 transits for a positive detection of a
| exoplanet. And given that the habitable planet around a sun
| like star is anything from 250 - 700 days the observation time
| is too expensive so they focus on red dwarfs instead. I also
| find it pretty annoying as well, especially when science
| communicators try and extrapolate observations on red dwarfs on
| what is typical extrasolar system.
| zardo wrote:
| Red dwarf systems _are_ the typical extrasolar system though.
| The vast majority of stars in this galaxy are red dwarfs.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| Most stars are red dwarfs.
|
| Of the 131 stars and sub-stellar objects within 20 light years
| of the Earth, 101 are red or brown dwarfs. JWST/NIRISS has
| limited resolution, it's not going to be shooting spectra of
| exoplanet atmospheres of systems 50,000 light years away.
| They're just measuring every exoplanet system.
| ck2 wrote:
| Now I can't wait for European Extremely Large Telescope with
| several times the resolution (also the space Wide-Field Infrared
| Survey Telescope)
|
| btw PBS Nova has an awesome episode on JWST, how hard it was to
| get built and how it almost didn't get built because massively
| over budget ($10 Billion!)
|
| https://www.pbs.org/video/ultimate-space-telescope-gunryt/
|
| This is kind of a "part 2" follow-up after it was launched and
| "first light"
|
| https://www.pbs.org/video/new-eye-on-the-universe-zvzqn1/
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Ooooh thanks for this! I always forget about Nova then like
| almost all of their programs, think I should watch more then
| promptly forget!
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-10-02 23:01 UTC)