Hmm, I dunno, 2.73 million light-years away? I’ll have to pack a few more snacks for that trip.
Webb Finds Water Vapor, But From a Rocky Planet or Its Star?
https://webbtelescope.org/contents/news-releases/2023/news-2023-120
Amazing powers of observation
Astronomers used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to image the warm dust around a nearby young star, Fomalhaut, in order to study the first asteroid belt ever seen outside of our solar system in infrared light. But to their surprise, the dusty structures are much more complex than the asteroid and Kuiper dust belts of our solar system. Overall, there are three nested belts extending out to 14 billion miles (23 billion kilometers) from the star; that’s 150 times the distance of Earth from the Sun. The scale of the outermost belt is roughly twice the scale of our solar system’s Kuiper Belt of small bodies and cold dust beyond Neptune.
The belts encircle the young hot star, which can be seen with the naked eye as the brightest star in the southern constellation Piscis Austrinus. The dusty belts are the debris from collisions of larger bodies, analogous to asteroids and comets, and are frequently described as debris disks
As I understand it, our own asteroid belt is a (relatively) well-defined ring due to shepherding from the planets (mostly Jupiter). Are planets known and/or ruled out in the Formalhaut system?
From the announcement linked above:
“The belts around Fomalhaut are kind of a mystery novel: Where are the planets?” said George Rieke, another team member and U.S. science lead for Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), which made these observations. “I think it’s not a very big leap to say there’s probably a really interesting planetary system around the star.”
“We definitely didn’t expect the more complex structure with the second intermediate belt and then the broader asteroid belt,” added Wolff. “That structure is very exciting because any time an astronomer sees a gap and rings in a disk, they say, ‘There could be an embedded planet shaping the rings!’”
One year anniversary picture:
Info here – Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2023/webb-celebrates-first-year-of-science-with-new-image
Brian
Amazing stuff.
You can get the full hi res image here. (right click and select “save link as”)
Just kidding, it’s actually a dragon perched on a mountain crag.
More good stuff from JW …
Images of the Ring Nebula … and it’s green !
Hi res image not available yet, but some cool images of El Gordo which includes
gravitational lensed views of La Flaca & El Anzuelo can be found here.
It may or may not actually be green, but images from JWST can’t be used to say one way or another. Like many images from professional telescopes, and all of them from JWST, the images are in false color. That is, they’ve mapped different wavelengths to the visual spectrum. That is, the shortest wavelength in the image is shown as blue, an intermediate wavelength is in green and the longest wavelength is in red. They do this because most of the spectrum that JWST looks at is invisible to the human eye. In fact, JWST can’t see in the green part of the spectrum. It can see in part of the red and deep into the infrared.
Yeah. Here is an actual image from JWST as perceived by the human eye.
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I’m just impressed they found Cthulhu
JuMBO
I like this quote …
To give a sense of scale, it would take a spaceship travelling at light speed a little over four years to traverse the entire scene.
So … it’s about 4 light years across.
That ESA sky viewer is fun !
In Melbourne there is a scale model of the solar system at a scale of one-billion to one, 1mm = 1,000km, 1cm = 10,000km. The sun is 139cm in diameter and earth 1.28cm 150 meters away. They included Pluto so it’s a 5.9km walk to find it, 2.5mm in diameter. Neptune is 4.5km and 4.9cm in size. Jupiter is listed on the site as being 1.43cm but they slipped the decimal; it should be 14.3.
They also included a model of the closest neighbor’s star, Proxima Centauri, near the sun’s model, but to get the distance right you’d have to circumnavigate the earth, pass by it, and keep going another 700km.
JWST inches ever closer to confirming extraterrestrial life.
The telescope has detected carbon dioxide on the mysterious Jupiter moon Europa, believed to have a vast ocean under its ice cover that may harbour life:
And it has found both carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere of K2-18b, a large exoplanet in the habitable zone of a dwarf star 120 light-years away, along with indirect evidence for a possible water ocean:
CO2 and methane occur naturally. They aren’t in any way indicative of life.
Carbon dioxide and methane (CO2 and CH4) are found on every planet and most large moons of gas giant planets in our solar system, which is unsurprising because they are the most stable carbon-oxygen and hydrocarbon compounds in chemistry. While the fact that the Webb telescope can identify these compounds from their infrared spectral signature is technically impressive (and a justification for the size and complexity of this telescope versus a less complex and cheaper orbiting observatory), it would be more surprising to look for these signatures and not find them.
Stranger
Regarding the previous two posts, I agree that the detection of CO2 and CH4 is not even remotely conclusive about the presence of life, but it’s consistent with it and as this table shows, the presence of these carbon compounds is far from universal.
It’s not correct to say that methane is among “the most stable carbon-oxygen and hydrocarbon compounds in chemistry”. Mars, for instance, has trace amounts of localized methane which is considered to be of significant interest because UV radiation and chemical reactions in the atmosphere would quickly oxidize it, so there must be an ongoing source. The same thing happens to methane in the earth’s stratosphere.
One of the researchers involved in the Europa CO2 detection had this to say:
“We now think that we have observational evidence that the carbon we see on Europa’s surface came from the ocean. That’s not a trivial thing. Carbon is a biologically essential element,” added Samantha Trumbo of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, lead author of the second paper analyzing these data.
And from the article about K2-18b:
The abundance of methane and carbon dioxide, and shortage of ammonia, support the hypothesis that there may be a water ocean underneath a hydrogen-rich atmosphere in K2-18 b. These initial Webb observations also provided a possible detection of a molecule called dimethyl sulfide (DMS). On Earth, this is only produced by life. The bulk of the DMS in Earth’s atmosphere is emitted from phytoplankton in marine environments.