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Meet the Infrared Telescopes That Paved the Way for NASA’s Webb
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By Space Force
Col. Nick Hague and his crewmates from the NASA SpaceX Crew-9 mission met with Airmen and Guardians to speak with and give thanks to representatives of military units who make manned spaceflight missions possible.
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By NASA
3 min read
Meet NASA Interns Shaping Future of Open Science
Intern Lena Young, whose work revolves around DEIA and open science, stands next to a NASA sign at NASA’s Earth Information Center in Washington, D.C. Photo courtesy of Lena Young Students at NASA’s Office of the Chief Science Data Officer (OCSDO) are working to promote open science during the summer 2024 internship session. Their projects fall across a variety of areas, including user experience, policy, and DEIA (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility).
Lena Young: Increasing DEIA Engagement
Lena Young, a doctoral candidate in the Creative Leadership for Innovation and Change program at the University of the Virgin Islands in St. Thomas, envisions equitable space societies 100 – 300 years in the future as part of her dissertation. Her NASA internship project involves researching ways to make science more accessible for different groups and interacting with NASA leadership to assess how well they are engaging historically underserved or excluded communities.
Young also worked with her mentors to find overlap between her internship project and her PhD work as a futurist. “In 30 years, once NASA has achieved their goals, what would open science look like?” Young said. “I want to see what different futures I can create for open science and DEIA engagement.”
Becca Michelson: Advancing Policy
Becca Michelson has a passion for increasing the availability of scientific information. A soon-to-be-graduate in physics and astronomy from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, she was drawn to an internship role in researching the current state of open science policy for the OCSDO. By understanding the challenges and opportunities in this area, she’s helping NASA better support researchers in making their science accessible to all.
“Open science makes this a more inclusive field, where if I’m an early career scientist, I can build on the science that other people who are experts in the field have done,” Michelson said. In the future, she hopes to implement open science principles into her own research in astronomy, drawing from the best practices she has learned at NASA.
Salma Elsayed-Ali: Bridging Science, User Experience
Salma Elsayed-Ali is on a mission to bridge the gap between science and usability. She recently completed her PhD in Information Science with a focus on Human-Computer Interaction from the University of Maryland, College Park. Her NASA internship project involves conducting UI/UX (User Interface/User Experience) research on some of the OCSDO’s scientific products, most notably the Open Science 101 online course.
Elsayed-Ali became interested in open science during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when she conducted UI/UX research on open data sites that provided the public with real-time information about the spread of the virus. This experience sparked her interest in helping users reap the benefits of open science as part of an internship with NASA.
In improving the OCSDO’s open science interfaces, Elsayed-Ali has acted as the product lead on a UI/UX research project for the first time. “I was drawn to this project as it was an opportunity to advocate for both end users and the advancement of open science,” Elsayed-Ali said. “I have really enjoyed brainstorming creative, practical solutions that enhance the user experience and simultaneously save the product team time and resources.”
By helping open science at NASA to thrive, these interns are ushering in a future of greater access to data and scientific research. Learn more about NASA internships at the NASA Internship Programs page.
Learn to navigate the principles and practices of open science with the Open Science 101 online course.
By Lauren Leese
Web Content Strategist for the Office of the Chief Science Data Officer
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By European Space Agency
An international team of astronomers using the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope have directly imaged an exoplanet roughly 12 light-years from Earth. While there were hints that the planet existed, it had not been confirmed until Webb imaged it. The planet is one of the coldest exoplanets observed to date.
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By NASA
6 Min Read NASA’s Webb Images Cold Exoplanet 12 Light-Years Away
This image of the gas-giant exoplanet Epsilon Indi Ab was taken with the coronagraph on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument). A star symbol marks the location of the host star Epsilon Indi A, whose light has been blocked by the coronagraph, resulting in the dark circle marked with a dashed white line (full image below) An international team of astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has directly imaged an exoplanet roughly 12 light-years from Earth. The planet, Epsilon Indi Ab, is one of the coldest exoplanets observed to date.
The planet is several times the mass of Jupiter and orbits the K-type star Epsilon Indi A (Eps Ind A), which is around the age of our Sun, but slightly cooler. The team observed Epsilon Indi Ab using the coronagraph on Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument). Only a few tens of exoplanets have been directly imaged previously by space- and ground-based observatories.
Image A: Exoplanet Epsilon Indi Ab
This image of the gas-giant exoplanet Epsilon Indi Ab was taken with the coronagraph on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument). A star symbol marks the location of the host star Epsilon Indi A, whose light has been blocked by the coronagraph, resulting in the dark circle marked with a dashed white line. Epsilon Indi Ab is one of the coldest exoplanets ever directly imaged. Light at 10.6 microns was assigned the color blue, while light at 15.5 microns was assigned the color orange. MIRI did not resolve the planet, which is a point source. “Our prior observations of this system have been more indirect measurements of the star, which actually allowed us to see ahead of time that there was likely a giant planet in this system tugging on the star,” said team member Caroline Morley of the University of Texas at Austin. “That’s why our team chose this system to observe first with Webb.”
“This discovery is exciting because the planet is quite similar to Jupiter — it is a little warmer and is more massive, but is more similar to Jupiter than any other planet that has been imaged so far,” added lead author Elisabeth Matthews of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany.
Previously imaged exoplanets tend to be the youngest, hottest exoplanets that are still radiating much of the energy from when they first formed. As planets cool and contract over their lifetime, they become significantly fainter and therefore harder to image.
A Solar System Analog
“Cold planets are very faint, and most of their emission is in the mid-infrared,” explained Matthews. “Webb is ideally suited to conduct mid-infrared imaging, which is extremely hard to do from the ground. We also needed good spatial resolution to separate the planet and the star in our images, and the large Webb mirror is extremely helpful in this aspect.”
Epsilon Indi Ab is one of the coldest exoplanets to be directly detected, with an estimated temperature of 35 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) — colder than any other imaged planet beyond our solar system, and colder than all but one free-floating brown dwarf. The planet is only around 180 degrees Fahrenheit (100 degrees Celsius) warmer than gas giants in our solar system. This provides a rare opportunity for astronomers to study the atmospheric composition of true solar system analogs.
“Astronomers have been imagining planets in this system for decades; fictional planets orbiting Epsilon Indi have been the sites of Star Trek episodes, novels, and video games like Halo,” added Morley. “It’s exciting to actually see a planet there ourselves, and begin to measure its properties.”
Not Quite As Predicted
Epsilon Indi Ab is the twelfth closest exoplanet to Earth known to date and the closest planet more massive than Jupiter. The science team chose to study Eps Ind A because the system showed hints of a possible planetary body using a technique called radial velocity, which measures the back-and-forth wobbles of the host star along our line of sight.
“While we expected to image a planet in this system, because there were radial velocity indications of its presence, the planet we found isn’t what we had predicted,” shared Matthews. “It’s about twice as massive, a little farther from its star, and has a different orbit than we expected. The cause of this discrepancy remains an open question. The atmosphere of the planet also appears to be a little different than the model predictions. So far we only have a few photometric measurements of the atmosphere, meaning that it is hard to draw conclusions, but the planet is fainter than expected at shorter wavelengths.”
The team believes this may mean there is significant methane, carbon monoxide, and carbon dioxide in the planet’s atmosphere that are absorbing the shorter wavelengths of light. It might also suggest a very cloudy atmosphere.
The direct imaging of exoplanets is particularly valuable for characterization. Scientists can directly collect light from the observed planet and compare its brightness at different wavelengths. So far, the science team has only detected Epsilon Indi Ab at a few wavelengths, but they hope to revisit the planet with Webb to conduct both photometric and spectroscopic observations in the future. They also hope to detect other similar planets with Webb to find possible trends about their atmospheres and how these objects form.
NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will use a coronagraph to demonstrate direct imaging technology by photographing Jupiter-like worlds orbiting Sun-like stars – something that has never been done before. These results will pave the way for future missions to study worlds that are even more Earth-like.
These results were taken with Webb’s Cycle 1 General Observer program 2243 and have been published in the journal Nature.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
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Media Contacts
Laura Betz – laura.e.betz@nasa.gov, Rob Gutro – rob.gutro@nasa.gov
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Christine Pulliam – cpulliam@stsci.edu , Hannah Braun hbraun@stsci.edu
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
Related Information
Animation: Eclipse/Coronagraph Animation
Webb Blog: NASA’s Webb Takes Its First-Ever Direct Image of Distant World
Webb Blog: How Webb’s Coronagraphs Reveal Exoplanets in the Infrared
Article: Webb’s Impact on Exoplanet Research
NASA’s Exoplanet Website
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Last Updated Jul 23, 2024 EditorStephen SabiaContactLaura Betzlaura.e.betz@nasa.gov Related Terms
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