Adam Frank: belief

Transcript context

…The kinds of exoplanets were able to direct image I guess would have to be hot. Hot, reasonably far away from the star. I think JWST is really at the hairy edge of being able to do much with this. What’s more important I think, for JWST is the spectra. And the problem with spectra is that there’s not sexy pictures. It’s like, “Hey, look at this wiggly line,” but be able to find and characterize atmospheres around terrestrial exoplanets is the critical next step. That’s where we are right now. In order to look for life, we need to find planets with atmospheres. And then we need to be able to do this thing called characterization, where we look at the spectral fingerprints for what’s in the atmosphere. Is there carbon? Is there carbon dioxide? Is there oxygen? Is there methane? And that’s the most exciting thing. For example, there was this planet K2-18b, which they did a beautiful job getting the spectra, and the spectra indicated it may be an entirely new kind of habitable world called a hycean world, hycean meaning hydrogen ocean world. And that is a kind of planet that it would be in the super earth, sub-Neptune domain we were talking about, maybe eight times the mass of the earth. But it’s got a layer of hydrogen, of an atmosphere of hydrogen. Hydrogen is an amazing greenhouse gas. So hydrogen will keep the planet underneath it warm enough that you could get liquid water, you can get a giant ocean of liquid water, and that’s an entirely different kind of planet. That could be habitable planet. It could be a 60 degree warm ocean. So the data that came out of JWST for that planet was good enough to be able to indicate like, “Oh yeah, you know what? From what we understand with the models, this looks like it could be a hycean world.” And it’s 120 light years away from earth.…

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