NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is a million miles from Earth and has two new targets.
NASA’s $1 billion telescope will study two hot “super-Earths” in its first year of operation, due to their size and rocky composition.
One is the lava-coated 55 Cancri e and the other is the airless LHS3844b.
Researchers are training Webb’s precision instruments on these planets to understand the geological diversity of galactic planets and the evolution of rocky planets like Earth.
55 Cancri e is less than 1.5 million miles from a Sun-like star. This is 25 times the distance between Mercury and the Sun, so a year is only a few hours long.
It has been proposed that planets orbiting close to this star rotate and lock on, with one side locked in constant scorching sunlight and the other locked in endless darkness. ..
NASA believes that planetary “lava rain clouds” are possible because the surface temperature is much higher than the melting point of typical stone-forming minerals.
It is not uncommon for the Milky Way galaxy to be rocky for Earth-sized planets that are extremely hot and close to stars. The James Webb Space Telescope is tasked with exploring these planets.
The hottest spot on 55 Cancri e is where the star is seen most directly, but observations with NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope have shown that this is not the case.
“55 Cancri e may have a dense atmosphere dominated by oxygen or nitrogen,” explained Reniu Hume of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. ..
If there is an environment [Webb] “It has the sensitivity and wavelength range to detect it and determine what it’s made of,” Hume added.
55 Cancri e may not be rotationally locked, but like Mercury, it rotates three times in each of two orbits, causing a daily cycle.
“This can explain the movement of the hottest parts of the planet,” said Alexis Brandeker, a researcher at Stockholm University who leads another group studying the planet.
Brandker’s team plans to use NIRCam to test this hypothesis and measure the heat radiated from the sunlit side of 55 Cancri e at four different orbits.
The second planet, LHS3844b, also rotates in the immediate vicinity of the star, completing one revolution in 11 hours. However, the planet is relatively small and cold, so it is not hot enough to melt its surface.
Webb can’t directly capture the surface of LHS3844b, but it doesn’t have a fuzzy atmosphere, so it can be examined spectroscopically.
Laura Kreidberg of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy explains: “You can see that different types of rocks have different spectra.”
“Granite is lighter in color than basalt. There are similar differences in the infrared light emitted by rocks.
Kreidberg’s team will study the thermal radiation spectrum of the dayside of LHS 3844b and compare it to the spectra of known rocks such as basalt and granite to determine their composition. If the planet is volcanic, the spectrum can also detect the presence of trace amounts of volcanic gas.
This discovery is expected to open new perspectives on planets like Earth and help us understand what early Earth was like when these planets were as hot as they are today. ..
Detailed science on Webb is expected to begin as soon as the first observations are made this summer.
Source: Metro
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