![]() Some gas and dust features become a bit wispy as you start to edge into the infrared light part of the spectrum, Pontoppidan explained. "The stars themselves fade away they get fainter and fainter go to longer wavelength, but interstellar clouds go brighter and brighter and brighter." "It will look very, very different than Hubble," Pontoppidan said. "I think it'll be fantastic," Pontoppidan said, "but it's very difficult to predict what it will look like," as this will be the first space telescope mission of its kind. ![]() Kornmesser)īy observing in infrared, Webb will capture uniquely beautiful images. Beauty in infraredĬomparison of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope's respective mirrors. While Hubble observes light at primarily optical and ultraviolet wavelengths, Webb is designed to detect primarily infrared light. But, while better in ways, Webb's images will also be fundamentally "different, because it's different wavelengths," Pontoppidan said. "It will take amazing images they will be better than what Hubble did," Klaus Pontoppidan, Webb project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said during a news conference in May. Hubble is pretty close to us in low Earth orbit, but Webb will travel out much farther, to a gravitationally stable spot 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth known as the Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2 (L2).Īdditionally, while both Hubble and Webb are large space telescopes (though Webb is considerably bigger), the two actually "see" the universe very differently. But despite a handful of glitches over the years, Hubble's science instruments are still going strong, and the two big scopes are set to observe together (albeit far apart from one another) in space. "We're going to have to go back to the drawing board," she adds, "to understand why the planet is as shiny as it is.Webb is often described as Hubble's replacement or successor. "I certainly didn't expect the atmosphere to be so shiny. "It's great to finally see some of the secrets revealed," says Kreidberg. She called this planet the "white whale" for scientists who study planets outside our solar system, just because it's been so difficult to characterize. The new findings fascinated planet researcher Laura Kreidberg, with the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, who wasn't part of this research team but who has used the Hubble Space Telescope to peer at GJ 1214b in the past. She says the James Webb Space Telescope should be looking at more planets in this size range, which will reveal whether this one is an oddball or truly representative of this class of planets. "We're pretty confident that there is water there," says Kempton, who notes that the planet is too hot for water to exist as a liquid. The telescope also saw signs that the planet's atmosphere is not hydrogen-rich, suggesting it's not just a scaled-down Neptune, and there was evidence of water vapor and methane. "That tells us something about what these clouds or hazes in the atmosphere are made of, and that's really the new big question now," she says, adding that scientists will likely start trying to create chemical hazes in the lab that have similar properties, to see what might be happening. Scientists had previously thought the clouds might be made of some kind of dark, sooty haze, she says, but that doesn't fit with all the light being reflected. "We didn't expect the planet to be so reflective, and we actually kind of expected the opposite," says Kempton. ![]()
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