Astronomers are leveraging the James Webb Space Telescope — the most powerful space observatory ever built — to investigate the fascinating TRAPPIST-1 solar system.
This solar system, located some 40 light-years away, contains a whopping seven rocky, Earth-sized planets. It also contains a red dwarf star (TRAPPIST-1), a star much smaller but way more volatile than the sun. This red dwarf shoots out powerful explosions of energy, called solar flares, into this distant solar system several times a day. Similar solar flares from our sun happen about once a month.
To truly understand the TRAPPIST planets, and discern whether any might harbor conditions suitable for life, planetary scientists need to understand these solar flares. In new research released online and soon to be available in the peer-reviewed publication The Astrophysical Journal, researchers used the Webb telescope to record four of these solar explosions.
"If we want to learn more about exoplanets, it’s really important to understand their stars," Ward Howard, the lead author of the research and a NASA Sagan Fellow in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences at CU Boulder, said in a statement.
The four solar blasts occurred over just 27 hours. Crucially, these intense bursts of light can obscure or change the light the Webb telescope is observing from the TRAPPIST planets — and that's a big problem. From our fortunate vantage point in space, we can view (with strong telescopes) the TRAPPIST planets transit in front of their star as they orbit around. The Webb telescope carries instruments (spectrographs) that analyze how this distant starlight passes through an alien planet's atmosphere, and the resulting spectrum of colors reveals a planet's atmospheric composition — such as water, carbon dioxide, and beyond.
In the new research, Howard and his team created a way to filter out the light from these disruptive and frequent solar flares, ultimately providing a much clearer view of these distant worlds beyond our solar system, called exoplanets.
"Each one of these planets is truly precious."
"There are only a handful of stellar systems where we have the opportunity to look for these sorts of atmospheres," Howard explained. "Each one of these planets is truly precious."
Three of the seven TRAPPIST planets lie in the solar system's "habitable zone," a temperate region in space where water could exist on an object's surface. They are especially enticing places for Webb to further investigate. So far, scientists have used Webb to peer into the atmospheres of the two closest planets to the red dwarf star (not in the habitable zone), but haven't found evidence of significant atmospheres, or habitability.
But as Webb closely inspects the remaining TRAPPIST planets, this new model, which separates the star's normal light from intense solar explosions, may become a crucial asset.
"If you don’t account for flares, you could detect molecules in the atmosphere that aren’t really there, or get the amount of material in the atmosphere wrong," Ward said.
Stay tuned for looming views into the TRAPPIST worlds...
The Webb telescope's powerful abilities
The Webb telescope — a scientific collaboration between NASA, the ESA, and the Canadian Space Agency — is designed to peer into the deepest cosmos and reveal new insights about the early universe. But it's also peering at intriguing planets in our galaxy, along with the planets and moons in our solar system.
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Here's how Webb is achieving unparalleled feats, and likely will for decades:
- Giant mirror: Webb's mirror, which captures light, is over 21 feet across. That's over two and a half times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope's mirror. Capturing more light allows Webb to see more distant, ancient objects. As described above, the telescope is peering at stars and galaxies that formed over 13 billion years ago, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.
"We're going to see the very first stars and galaxies that ever formed," Jean Creighton, an astronomer and the director of the Manfred Olson Planetarium at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, told Mashable in 2021.
- Infrared view: Unlike Hubble, which largely views light that's visible to us, Webb is primarily an infrared telescope, meaning it views light in the infrared spectrum. This allows us to see far more of the universe. Infrared has longer wavelengths than visible light, so the light waves more efficiently slip through cosmic clouds; the light doesn't as often collide with and get scattered by these densely packed particles. Ultimately, Webb's infrared eyesight can penetrate places Hubble can't.
"It lifts the veil," said Creighton.
- Peering into distant exoplanets: The Webb telescope carries specialized equipment called spectrographs that will revolutionize our understanding of these far-off worlds. The instruments can decipher what molecules (such as water, carbon dioxide, and methane) exist in the atmospheres of distant exoplanets — be they gas giants or smaller rocky worlds. Webb will look at exoplanets in the Milky Way galaxy. Who knows what we'll find?
"We might learn things we never thought about," Mercedes López-Morales, an exoplanet researcher and astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics-Harvard & Smithsonian, told Mashable in 2021.
Already, astronomers have successfully found intriguing chemical reactions on a planet 700 light-years away, and as described above, the observatory has started looking at one of the most anticipated places in the cosmos: the rocky, Earth-sized planets of the TRAPPIST solar system.
