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I am curious. What happens if they aim this telescope at some of the closer exo planets? Would we get images with atmospheres and such? Excuse the excitement, b

I am curious. What happens if they aim this telescope at some of the closer exo planets? Would we get images with atmospheres and such? Excuse the excitement, but that would be so cool!

elihu 4y ago
I don't think so, I think planets are just too small and far away to be much more than points of light (or shadows crossing in front of stars). In a lot of cases, we infer the presence of planets by making very precise measurements of relative velocities of stars (using red/blue shift of light) and making note of periodic wobbles that indicate that its position is being affected by planets.
ceejayoz 4y ago
The planets will still just be star-like bright dots, but we will get some useful new spectral data, and be able to image much smaller and more distant ones. https://webb.nasa.gov/content/science/origins.html https://webb.nasa.gov/content/science/origins.html > Webb will also carry coronagraphs to enable direct imaging of exoplanets near bright stars. The image of an exoplanet would just be a spot, not a grand panorama, but by studying that spot, we can learn a great deal about it. That includes its color, differences between winter and summer, vegetation, rotation, weather...How is this done? The answer again is spectroscopy.
- egfx 4y ago
  genuinely curious if the advancements of AI image generation and editing tools can assist with using this data to produce some approaching realism.
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    Not with this generation of telescopes. We’re talking about a few pixels worth of data. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HR_8799_Orbiting_Exoplanets.gif#mw-jump-to-license https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HR_8799_Orbiting_Exo...
dotnet00 4y ago
To add to what the others said, I think it was mentioned previously that one of the things being released tomorrow is spectra of an exoplanet's atmosphere.
wruza 4y ago
The size difference between our galaxy and our planet is ~14 orders of magnitude. For a planet to have the same dimensions as in the picture, it must be proportionally closer. That means if these galaxies from the image are 1e10..1e11 light years away (whether you guess to ignore the expansion or not), a planet must be 1e-3..1e-4 light years away, which barely covers the distance to Pluto. Of course the above doesn’t account for lensing and who knows what else, but you get the idea. (If my math is correct)
pkaye 4y ago
You need to mask out the bright star with a coronagraph and then the planet needs to be big/bright enough. Even then you will just see a dot as this ESO telescope image shows. However using spectroscopy they can deduce the composition of the planet atmosphere. https://www.eso.org/public/images/potw1846a/ https://www.eso.org/public/images/potw1846a/
doctoboggan 4y ago
It seems to be a common misconception that JWST will give us the best angular resolution of any existing telescope. However that is not the case. JWST was designed for lower wavelengths, and due to physics reasons you get a lower angular resolution for a given reflector diameter, as compared to higher wavelengths. So even though the JWST is a larger scope, Hubble's visible wavelength photos are higher resolution than JWST's longer wavelength photos.

I am curious. What happens if they aim this telescope at some of the closer exo planets? Would we get images with atmospheres and such? Excuse the excitement, but that would be so cool!

elihu 4y ago

I don't think so, I think planets are just too small and far away to be much more than points of light (or shadows crossing in front of stars). In a lot of cases, we infer the presence of planets by making very precise measurements of relative velocities of stars (using red/blue shift of light) and making note of periodic wobbles that indicate that its position is being affected by planets.

ceejayoz 4y ago

The planets will still just be star-like bright dots, but we will get some useful new spectral data, and be able to image much smaller and more distant ones. https://webb.nasa.gov/content/science/origins.html https://webb.nasa.gov/content/science/origins.html > Webb will also carry coronagraphs to enable direct imaging of exoplanets near bright stars. The image of an exoplanet would just be a spot, not a grand panorama, but by studying that spot, we can learn a great deal about it. That includes its color, differences between winter and summer, vegetation, rotation, weather...How is this done? The answer again is spectroscopy.

egfx 4y ago
genuinely curious if the advancements of AI image generation and editing tools can assist with using this data to produce some approaching realism.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  Not with this generation of telescopes. We’re talking about a few pixels worth of data. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HR_8799_Orbiting_Exoplanets.gif#mw-jump-to-license https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HR_8799_Orbiting_Exo...

dotnet00 4y ago

To add to what the others said, I think it was mentioned previously that one of the things being released tomorrow is spectra of an exoplanet's atmosphere.

wruza 4y ago

The size difference between our galaxy and our planet is ~14 orders of magnitude. For a planet to have the same dimensions as in the picture, it must be proportionally closer. That means if these galaxies from the image are 1e10..1e11 light years away (whether you guess to ignore the expansion or not), a planet must be 1e-3..1e-4 light years away, which barely covers the distance to Pluto. Of course the above doesn’t account for lensing and who knows what else, but you get the idea. (If my math is correct)

pkaye 4y ago

You need to mask out the bright star with a coronagraph and then the planet needs to be big/bright enough. Even then you will just see a dot as this ESO telescope image shows. However using spectroscopy they can deduce the composition of the planet atmosphere. https://www.eso.org/public/images/potw1846a/ https://www.eso.org/public/images/potw1846a/

doctoboggan 4y ago

It seems to be a common misconception that JWST will give us the best angular resolution of any existing telescope. However that is not the case. JWST was designed for lower wavelengths, and due to physics reasons you get a lower angular resolution for a given reflector diameter, as compared to higher wavelengths. So even though the JWST is a larger scope, Hubble's visible wavelength photos are higher resolution than JWST's longer wavelength photos.