Paul Mollière explains how the James Webb Space Telescope is revolutionising the observation and modelling of exoplanet atmospheres. What new insights can we gain thanks to its advanced technology?
This zoom video begins with a wide-angle view of the sky centred on the star Eps Ind A. It ends with an image of Eps Ind Ab obtained with the MIRI imager of the JWST.More information is available in the press release: Webb images nearest super-Jupiter, opening a new window to exoplanet researchDownload CC BY-SA 4.0
This video shows schematically how Omega Cen was observed with the Hubble Space Telescope. You can see the position of the camera detector during the 800 individual images. At the end, it shows the image that the astronomers created from the exposures.More information is available in the press release Astronomers find the nearest massive black…
This zoom video begins with an overview of the sky and ends with an image of the Hubble Space Telescope in the centre of Omega Centauri. Finally, the orbits of stars around the black hole are shown.More information is available in the press release Astronomers find the nearest massive black hole, a missing link in massive black hole…
The animation shows the perceived temperature changes on the exoplanet WASP-43b during the observation, as calculated from the measured infrared phase curve. The overlay on the right shows the corresponding perspective on the planet's temperature map.More information is available in the press release Clouds blanket the night side of the hot…
There are too few exoplanets that are twice the size of the Earth. Remo Burn from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy has discovered that this is because many planets do not stay where they were formed. Rocky planets that migrate inwards lose their atmosphere and shrink as a result, whereas icy planets would form a denser atmosphere in the first…
James Webb Space Telescope: What can we learn about the atmospheres of exoplanets with the largest space telescope? How is the JWST revolutionising our knowledge of exoplanets? Eva-Maria Ahrer reports on research into the atmospheres of exoplanets and presents new results.
How can the performance of an earthbound telescope be improved? Silvia Scheithauer reports on the CIAO instrument, the adaptive optics for the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile.
Euclid is a new ESA space telescope with the participation of a scientific consortium from fourteen European countries, the USA, Canada and Japan. Euclid was launched on 1 July 2023. Over the next 6 years, Euclid will record images and spectra of a third of the entire sky. The goal: to get to the bottom of the nature of dark matter and dark energy…
Good news for Earth-like planets and for life in the Universe: planets like our Earth, including those with water, could form even in the most inhospitable star-forming environments known, flooded by energetic UV light from massive stars. María Claudia Ramírez-Tannus from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy tells us how the JWST helped her…
Astronomical (imaging) data are generally heavily post-processed, and/or analysed in a complex way. Especially high-contrast observations require specific post-processing methods to remove image residuals that remain after all the sophisticated optical suppression methods. One such method, angular differential imaging, is explained in this video…
In the beginning was light – around 13.8 billion years ago, the Big Bang marked the beginning of the history of our cosmos. How could stars and galaxies suddenly appear out of the darkness? What did the light of the first day look like? Hans-Walter Rix has been asking himself these questions for over two decades. The James Webb Space Telescope…
