LOS ANGELES — More than 5,000 planets have been found to exist beyond the solar system, a milestone for astronomy confirmed by NASA.
The 5,000-plus planets found so far include small, rocky worlds like Earth, gas giants many times larger than Jupiter, and “hot Jupiters” in scorchingly close orbits around their stars, according to NASA, said Xinhua.
Those exoplanets have been confirmed using multiple detection methods or by analytical techniques.
According to NASA, powerful next-generation telescopes and their highly sensitive instruments, starting with the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope, will capture light from the atmospheres of exoplanets, reading which gases are present to potentially identify signs of habitable conditions.
“It’s not just a number,” said Jessie Christiansen, science lead for the archive and a research scientist with the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech in Pasadena. “Each one of them is a new world, a brand-new planet. I get excited about every one because we don’t know anything about them.”
— BERNAMA
James Webb Space Telescope
By: Asilah
James Webb Space Telescope is the next great space science observatory which was launched on 25th December 2021. Sometimes called JWST or Webb, it is the largest and most powerful space telescope ever launched. It is designed to find the first galaxies that formed in the early universe and peer through dusty clouds to see stars forming planetary systems.
The telescope formerly known as the “Next Generation Space Telescope” (NGST) but in 2002, it was renamed to James Webb Space Telescope, after a famous contributor to the space science who ran the fledgling agency from February 1961 to October 1968 named James E. Webb.
Webb will complement and extend the discoveries of the Hubble telescope, with longer wavelength coverage and greatly improved sensitivity with a 5 to 10 years span of mission. The longer wavelengths will enable Webb to look much closer to the beginning of time and to hunt for the unobserved formation of the first galaxies, as well as to look inside dust clouds where stars and planetary systems are forming today.
The Hubble Space Telescope was the first astronomical observatory to be placed into orbit around Earth with the ability to record images in wavelengths of light spanning from ultraviolet to near-infrared. Launched on April 24, 1990, aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery, Hubble is currently located about 340 miles (547 km) above Earth’s surface, where it completes 15 orbits per day — approximately one every 95 minutes. Hubble takes sharp pictures of objects in the sky such as planets, stars and galaxies. It has made more than one million observations.
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