James Webb Space Telescope tagged posts

This rare overhead shot of the James Webb Space Telescope shows the nine primary flight mirrors installed on the telescope structure in a clean room at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Gunn

Inside NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center’s massive clean room in Greenbelt, Maryland, the 9th flight mirror was installed onto the telescope structure with a robotic arm. This marks the halfway completion point for the James Webb Space Telescope’s segmented primary mirror. The James Webb Space Telescope team has been working tirelessly to install all 18 of Webb’s mirror segments onto the telescope structure.

In these NASA images, the engineering team is seen using a robotic arm to lift and lower the hexagonal-shaped segment that...

A computer model reproduces the two-spiral-arm structure; the “x” is the location of a putative planet. The planet, which cannot be seen directly, probably excites the two spiral arms. Credit: NASA, ESA, ESO, M. Benisty et al. (University of Grenoble), R. Dong (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory), and Z. Zhu (Princeton University)

This idea not only opens the door to a new method of planet detection, but also could offer a look into the early formative years of planet birth. Though astronomers have cataloged thousands of planets orbiting other stars, the earliest stages of planet formation are elusive because nascent planets are born and embedded inside vast, pancake-shaped disks of dust and gas encircling newborn stars, known as circumstellar disks.

The conclusion that planets may betr...

KU Leuven researchers discovered that two out of three possible climates on exoplanets are potentially habitable. Credit: KU Leuven – Ludmila Carone

The quest for potentially habitable planets is often interpreted as the search for an Earth twin. And yet, some rocky planets outside our Solar System may in fact be more promising candidates for further research. Scientists have run 165 climate simulations for exoplanets that permanently face their ‘sun’ with the same side. They discovered that 2 of the 3 possible climates are potentially habitable.

Most exoplanets orbit relatively small and cool stars known as red dwarfs. Only exoplanets that orbit close to their 3star can be warm enough for liquid water...