A lot of people are focused on signs of alien life, but the space telescope will have a lot to say about exoplanet geology and formation.
Detecting exoplanets used to be so difficult that scientists spotted the first black hole, detected the leftover radiation from the Big Bang and took snapshots of countless distant galaxies before discovering the first planet beyond our solar system in 1992. Plenty of exoplanet astronomers began their careers before the field of exoplanet astronomy even existed.). Given the stream of discoveries, it can be easy to forget how little we still know about these distant worlds.
Most of what we know about exoplanets today comes from the eight planets in our solar system. JWST’s planned 10-year lifetime could reveal a lot, perhaps answering fundamental questions including what exoplanets are made of,Why do some rocky planets have atmospheres and others don’t? Renyu Hu, an astronomer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., says he and colleagues have settled the atmosphere question for 55 Cancri e, a planet thatof either carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide or a mix of the two with nitrogen. It’s the first detection of an atmosphere shrouding a terrestrial, or rocky, exoplanet.
“I’m really excited about this,” Kreidberg says. “Of course, I want to see the atmospheres. But I think there’s a lot you can learn from the surface also.” The magma oceans on the daysides of lava planets offer about as close to a window into the interior of a planet as astronomers could hope to find. Gases escaping from the magma might give clues to the composition of the planet’s deep interior. And learning what planets are made of can tell astronomers a lot about how these bodies form, and whether their compositions and histories are similar to or different from the way rocky planets form in our solar system.
“They seem to be incredibly common, statistically,” says exoplanet scientist Joshua Krissansen-Totton of the University of Washington in Seattle. “We also really have no idea what they’re made of.”
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