see whether they’re rocky or gaseous planets.measure their color at different wavelengths to better understand their composition.find exoplanets for the first time (most exoplanets are currently found using the transit method or the radial velocity method).This kind of direct imaging will allows scientists to: “You block out the parent star-in the same way you would block out the sun with your hand if you wanted to look at a bird in the sky next to the sun-and then with very sophisticated optical control instruments you can make a sharp enough image to actually see the planets as little sources of light orbiting around their parent star,” said Bernstein. Photographing exoplanetsĮventually the Giant Magellan Telescope will be able to produce short videos of exoplanets orbiting their parent stars. “Glowing hot exoplanets are visible to infrared telescopes, but for cooler exoplanets you really need telescopes that can study them in the light they reflect from their parent stars,” said Bernstein. Potentially habitable exoplanets must be cool. There’s another, more basic reason why optical telescopes are important in the study of exoplanets.
“JWST is made to do infrared science-the study of long wavelengths of light that you can’t do from the Earth well-but there’s so much important science that requires optical visible light wavelength.” Visible light spectra of the atmosphere of Proxima Centauri b-and other potentially habitable exoplanets-will allow scientists to be more confident that the chemistry of an exoplanet atmosphere could be produced by biological or geological sources. “We’ll be able to directly image it with Giant Magellan Telescope and also take spectra of that planet to look for biosignatures in its atmosphere,” said Bernstein. Giant Magellan Telescope – GMTO Corporation Examining exoplanetsĪ good example of how it will work with JWST is with observations of Proxima Centauri b, the closest known exoplanet to Earth at just four light-years. “It’s got two instruments perfectly positioned to do direct imaging of planets like our own Earth to find potentially habitable planets.”Ī rendering of what the Giant Magellan Telescope will look like. “This telescope will compound the science being done with both JWST and the Vera Rubin Observatory,” said Rebecca Bernstein, Chief Scientist for the Giant Magellan Telescope. The Giant Magellan Telescope won’t see “first light” until the early 2030s, but it-and its flagship “Large Earth Finder” and “Near-Infrared Spectrograph” in particular-should be worth waiting for. From 2025 its 3.2-gigapixel CCD imaging camera-the largest digital camera ever constructed-will survey the entire visible sky in just three nights, effectively producing a motion picture of the universe. Here, the Vera Rubin Observatory is being constructed. To make it possible, Goddard scientists and engineers had to invent a new technology microshutter system to control how light enters the NIRSpec.Together these extremely large telescopes will help extend a golden age of space and ground-based observing.Įveryone knows about JWST and its ability to see the universe in infrared in high resolution for the first time, but equally important is what’s being built just 150 miles south of Las Campanos Observatory at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO).
The NIRSpec is the first spectrograph in space that has this remarkable multi-object capability. In order to study thousands of galaxies during its 5 year mission, the NIRSpec is designed to observe 100 objects simultaneously. Many of the objects that the Webb is studying, such as the first galaxies to form after the Big Bang, are so faint, that the Webb's giant mirror must stare at them for hundreds of hours in order to collect enough light to form a spectrum.
Spectroscopy and spectrometry (the sciences of interpreting these lines) are among the sharpest tools The atoms and molecules in the object actually imprint lines on its spectrum that uniquely fingerprint each chemical element present and can reveal a wealth of information about physical conditions in the object. Analyzing the spectrum of an object can tell us about its physical properties, including temperature, mass, and chemical composition. A spectrograph (also sometimes called a spectrometer) is used to disperse light from an object into a spectrum. The Near InfraRed Spectrograph (NIRSpec) operates over a wavelength range of 0.6 to 5 microns. NIRSpec operates over a wavelength range of 0.6 to 5 microns.
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