![]() ![]() But there are only eight planets in our solar system. A slim chance that the subsurface oceans of outer-solar system moons might teem with exotic microbes. There are thin hopes of finding traces of life from Mars’s warmer, wetter past. Venus’s clouds don’t shroud a humid jungle but a surface so greenhouse-hot it can melt lead. Mars has no vegetation, let alone canals. Yet the more we’ve learned about the solar system, especially in the past century, the rarer life has started to seem to be. Courtesy NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScIįor centuries, we’ve seemed to be on the verge of finding life beyond Earth – from Galileo’s first observations of Venus through a telescope and his realisation that planets were other worlds, to Percival Lowell’s observations of ‘canals’ on Mars, to the hopes of every NASA rover and SETI search. But I knew that other planets JWST could ‘see’ might be possible homes to life.Ĭomposition of the atmosphere of exoplanet WASP-96b. I didn’t care about this particular gas giant. Not because it was beautiful, but because of what it meant: it was the portrait of an atmosphere of a planet 1,120 light years away. But it was that plain graph I was most excited to see. Writing in The New York Times in July 2022, Joshua Sokol described the secretive process behind selecting these first images, full of visual splendour and scientific promise – the ‘early highlight reel’ that would, as the US president Joe Biden put it, ‘remind the world that America can do big things’. It is an image so unremarkable that NASA presented it over an artist’s impression of an exoplanet and star. Four peaks of the blue wiggle are labelled ‘Water H 2O’, marking the wavelengths of light absorbed by water molecules in an atmosphere. The fifth image is a graph of a wiggly blue line, studded with white data points. These images were chosen to impress: a stellar nursery, a galactic dance, the Universe’s first aeons, the death shroud of an exploded star. The JWST image of the interacting galaxies known as the ‘Stephan’s Quintet’ group. Nascent stars were unveiled the most distant galaxies ever seen, recorded In the telescope’s infrared vision, dust is transparent. ![]() Under JWST’s gaze, the rusty crags of the Carina Nebula were translucent to the countless stars being born within. ![]() In one image, four large galaxies held for a breath in their cosmic dance, a moment in a long gravitational embrace that will end with their eventual merging. Some radiated a six-point star, the signature artefact of JWST’s hexagonal mirrors. Some stretched like gummy candies from gravitational lensing. That’s what the galaxies look like, tiny and distant, resplendent in false-colour contrast: red, gold, and white-blue. Comets typically follow long elliptical orbits in which they spend most of their time far from the Sun.Ī small Sun-orbiting rock or particle less than about 3 feet (1 meter) in size.Ī light phenomenon that results when a meteoroid enters the Earth’s atmosphere and disintegrates popularly known as a “shooting star.” A larger object, such as a small asteroid, produces a very bright meteor called a fireball or bolide when entering the atmosphere.Ī leftover piece of meteoroid or asteroid that survives its passage through the Earth's atmosphere and lands on Earth's surface.The first images beamed back from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) were filled with jewels and fire. Most orbit within the main asteroid belt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, but some follow paths that circulate into the inner solar system (including near-Earth asteroids), while others remain outside the orbit of Neptune.Ī relatively small Sun-orbiting body that contains ices that vaporize when it gets close to the Sun and heats up, forming a large visible atmosphere (coma) around the object and, sometimes, a diffuse tail that can be millions of miles long. Asteroids are typically composed of rocky, dusty, and metallic materials. What are the differences between an asteroid, comet, meteoroid, meteor, and meteorite?Ī relatively small, inactive body orbiting the Sun.
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