BLOGS

Topics: Astrobiology, Biology, Instrumentation, James Web Space Telescope, Research, SETI

"The Secret Life of the Universe" by Dr. Nathalie Cabrol, the SETI Institute's chief scientist and Director of the Carl Sagan Center at the SETI Institute, is coming out this week, both in the US (August 13, 2024) and in the UK (August 15, 2024). Scriber/Simon & Schuster publishes both editions. Cabrol articulates an overview of where we stand today in our search for life in the universe, what's coming, and how looking out for life beyond Earth teaches us about our place on our planet.

Here is an excerpt to inspire you:

On July 11, 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) returned its first images, penetrating the wall of time to show us the universe just a few hundred million years after its formation. In a marvelous cosmic irony, this immersion into the depths of our origins propels us into the future, where a revolution looms large in astronomy, in cosmology, and in astrobiology—the search for life in the universe. JWST comes after a few decades of space and planetary exploration during which we have discovered countless habitable environments in our solar system—for (simple) life as we know it, but also thousands of exoplanets in our galaxy, some of them located in the habitable zone of their parent stars.

We are living in a golden age in astrobiology, the beginning of a fantastic odyssey in which much remains to be written, but where our first steps bring the promise of prodigious discoveries. And these first steps have already transformed our species in one generation in a way that we cannot foresee just yet.

Copernicus taught us long ago that the Earth was neither at the center of the universe nor the center of the solar system, for that matter. We also learned from the work of Harlow Shapley and Henrietta Swan Leavitt that the solar system does not even occupy any particularly prominent place in our galaxy. It is simply tucked away at the inner edge of Orion’s spur in the Milky Way, 27,000 light-years from its center, in a galactic suburb of sorts. Our sun is an average-sized star located in a galaxy propelled at 2.1 million kilometers per hour in a visible universe that counts maybe 125 billion such cosmic islands, give or take a few billion. In this immensity, the Kepler mission taught us that planetary systems are the rule, not the exception.

This is how, in a mere quarter of a century, we found ourselves exploring a universe populated by as many planets as stars. Yet, looking up and far into what seems to be an infinite ocean of possibilities, the only echoes we have received so far from our explorations have been barren planetary landscapes and thundering silence. Could it be that we are the only guests at the universal table? Maybe. As a scientist, I cannot wholly discount this hypothesis, but it seems very unlikely and “an awful waste of space,” and for more than one reason.

The Secret Life of the Universe, ?ETI Institute

The galaxy observed by Webb shows an Einstein ring caused by a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing.  Credit: S. Doyle / J. Spilker

Topics: Astrobiology, Biology, James Webb Space Telescope, Space Exploration

Researchers have detected complex organic molecules in a galaxy more than 12 billion light-years away from Earth—the most distant galaxy in which these molecules are now known to exist. Thanks to the capabilities of the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope and careful analyses from the research team, a new study lends critical insight into the complex chemical interactions that occurred in the first galaxies in the early universe.

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign astronomy and physics professor Joaquin Vieira and graduate student Kedar Phadke collaborated with researchers at Texas A&M University and an international team of scientists to differentiate between infrared signals generated by some of the more massive and larger dust grains in the galaxy and those of the newly observed hydrocarbon molecules.

The study findings are published in the journal Nature.

"This project started when I was in graduate school studying hard-to-detect, very distant galaxies obscured by dust," Vieira said. "Dust grains absorb and re-emit about half of the stellar radiation produced in the universe, making infrared light from distant objects extremely faint or undetectable through ground-based telescopes."

In the new study, the JWST received a boost from what the researchers call "nature's magnifying glass"—a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. "This magnification happens when two galaxies are almost perfectly aligned from the Earth's point of view, and light from the background galaxy is warped and magnified by the foreground galaxy into a ring-like shape, known as an Einstein ring," Vieira said.

Webb Space Telescope detects the universe's most distant complex organic molecules, Lois Yoksoulian, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Researchers detected carbon dioxide in WASP-39b’s atmosphere when the exoplanet crossed in front of its star. The data plot shows a telltale blip where infrared wavelengths from the star’s light were absorbed by carbon dioxide on the exoplanet. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Leah Hustak (STScI), Joseph Olmsted (STScI)

Topics: Astrophysics, Chemistry, ESA, Exoplanets, James Webb Space Telescope, NASA

The James Webb Space Telescope — already famous for its mesmerizing images of the cosmos — has done it again. The telescope has captured the first unambiguous evidence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet outside the Solar System.

The finding not only provides tantalizing hints about how the exoplanet formed but is also a harbinger for what’s to come as Webb studies more and more alien worlds. It was reported in a manuscript posted on the preprint server arXiv¹, ahead of peer review, and is expected to be published in Nature in the coming days. (Nature’s news team is independent of its journals team.)

The discovery is presented in a data plot with none of the luster of Webb’s previous images — which showed galaxies locked in a cosmic dance and radiant clouds in a stellar nursery. But Jessie Christiansen, an astronomer at the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, describes the data as “gorgeous”.

The plot, or spectrum, reveals detailed information about the atmosphere of the exoplanet WASP-39b, called a hot Jupiter by scientists because it has a diameter similar to Jupiter’s but orbits its star much more closely than Mercury orbits the Sun, making it incredibly hot. The planet, which is more than 200 parsecs from Earth, was initially discovered during ground-based observations² and later detected by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, which operated between 2003 and 2020. Data from the latter suggested³ that WASP-39b’s atmosphere might contain carbon dioxide, but they were inconclusive.

Webb telescope spots CO2 on exoplanet for first time: what it means for finding alien life, Sharron Hall, Nature

Topics: Astrobiology, Astronomy, Astrophysics, Carl Sagan, James Webb Space Telescope, SETI

The relief was as deep as the stakes were high. At 7:20 A.M. (ET), the rocket carrying the largest, most ambitious space telescope in history cleared the launchpad in French Guiana, and the members of mission control at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore roared their elation.

The suspense was not quite over. Half an hour postlaunch, the telescope still needed to decouple from its host rocket, after which it had to deploy solar panels to partly power its journey. Only after that first deployment proved successful, said a NASA spokesperson in a statement to Scientific American, would “we know we have a mission.”

Astronomers have more riding on the rocket than the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Also at risk is the viability of NASA’s vast space-science portfolio, if not the future of astronomy itself. As the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), JWST is one of those once-in-a-generation scientific projects that can strain the patience of government benefactors, as well as the responsible agency’s credibility, but also define a field for decades to come—and possibly redefine it forever.

The telescope that would become JWST was already under discussion even before HST launched in April 1990. By orbiting Earth, HST would have a line of sight free of the optical distortions endemic to our planet’s atmosphere. It would therefore be able to see farther across the universe (and, given that the speed of light is finite, farther back in time) than any terrestrial telescope.

The James Webb Space Telescope Has Launched: Now Comes the Hard Part, Richard Panek, Scientific American