JWST's successor: The Carl Sagan Observatory - a 12 METRE optical telescope searching for exo-Earth

the James Webb Space Telescope or jwst might seem like it's just burst on the scene providing us with the most incredible images to learn more about our universe but the first meeting to develop the idea of jwst was held in 1989. a year before its predecessor the Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990. the idea of jwst existed even before the Hubble Space Telescope had left the ground before we even knew the impact and Legacy the HST would have as the first ever Optical Space Telescope before we even knew that the Hubble Space Telescope would work it's because space telescopes take a lot of time and effort and money to develop so it might not surprise you to hear that the people in charge of jwst's development of the leaders of all the Institute shoots that manage it have already started thinking about jwst's successor which they hope will have in just 12 years time it's been dubbed the Carl Sagan Observatory after Legendary American astrophysicist Carl Sagan whose research was focused on life elsewhere in the universe a very appropriate name for a telescope that's been proposed to do just that and answer the question are we alone so for some context database tea was designed to see incredibly distant galaxies that means a big telescope mirror diameter the bigger the area of the telescope the more light it can collect at once and see fainter things it was also designed to detect infrared light not visible light like the Hubble Space Telescope because the universe is expanding light has been redshifted stretched to longer wavelengths by that expansion from visible light into the infrared so there's only so far the Hubble Space Telescope can actually see because the light from very very distant galaxies has been redshifted beyond what the Hubble Space Telescope is capable of detecting now those plans for jdst were decided on in the early 90s before the first exoplanet was discovered in 1995. since then we've discovered thousands more exoplanets and we've been able to isolate the Starlight that's passed through the atmosphere of those planets to see where the gaps in the light are due to absorption by molecules and a lot of this absorption happens in the infrared for example from carbon dioxide water and ozone so as the exoplanet community of astrophysicists grew and grew they very quickly realized well jdbst is going to be this perfect tool for them to do these studies on the absorption by molecules in exoplanet atmospheres but of course every tool has its limitations jdbst's resolution is incredibly good but it does have a limit at some point it can't resolve any smaller objects so planets close into a star get lost in the Starlight so that's an issue if you want to take a direct image of not just a single exoplanet but an exoplanet system like our own solar system we're getting to the point where we don't just want to know whether a star has you know one giant much larger than jupiter-sized Planet orbiting way out from the start anymore we want to know if stars have whole systems of planets around them like for example the trappist-1 system that has seven planets around it just orbiting a lot closer in than they do say in our solar system the size of the mirror also limits you on how faint an object you can see as well so if you want to look at the atmospheres of much smaller planets things that maybe are Earth size to find earth-like planets that also might be habitable with water and ozone and carbon dioxide and also it's in the atmosphere then there's a limit to how far away that you can actually do that and if you think about the volume of space as you get farther away you cover a bigger volume so you've got more stars in that volume to actually try and look for these exoplanet systems around so if you want to find and study earth-like planets in big exoplanet systems you're gonna need a bigger telescope you're going to need a bigger boat so the proposal for the Carl Sagan Observatory is for a 12 meter Space Telescope almost twice the size of jwst except this one will again view the universe in visible light like the Hubble Space Telescope and not an infrared like jwst that means we can get true color images of exoplanet systems around found stars with about five times better resolution than the Hubble Space Telescope and because of the sheer size of the mirror you can collect more light and therefore see much faint objects and therefore these earth-like planets at much greater distances away from us in the Milky Way it means we can hope to get images like this this is a simulated image of what the solar system planets would look like to the Carl Sagan Observatory if they were orbiting around the sun-like star beta Canim veneticonam 27.6 light years away Saturn and Jupiter are easy to spot they're nice and big they're far away from their Stars so you can isolate them easily this simulated Venus is very bright because it's nearer to the star reflecting a lot of light and then the Earth and Mars Just quite faint there almost hidden in the noise of the light from that star this is not something that jwst can do I actually talked about this in my Night Sky News video from September this year which Recaps the latest you know space news stories every month and in that I talked about jwste's First Direct image of a planet that was of hip6542b 385 light years away now this planet is seven times heavier than Jupiter and orbits 87 times further away from its star than the earth does from the Sun that first direct image of an exoplanet though from jdbst gave us a better idea of what it would actually be capable of because until it was you know launched and working up in space we could then guesstimate but we still weren't quite sure so now we know that it can do that we can then estimate what it'd be capable of uh for stars that are much closer and for planets that are much smaller we don't know yet because we've not actually taken those images yet it was still in the early days of jwst there's still a lot of science to do but it's estimated that four stars much closer to the Sun are much closer to Earth jwst would be capable of directly Imaging a planet that was five times the mass of Earth anywhere from half to two and a half times the Earth Sun distance so it's promising but that's only for the closest of stars and because that volume of space is much smaller there's not many of those or at least there's not many that are similar to the sun either so depending on how many Earth-like planets there are out there and you know how they're distributed around different stars of different types with JBS T we might be lucky if we find you know one or two of these super Earths they're just that little bit heavier than the earth and while I'm very excited to see what we do find with JBS T it still does have its limitations and therefore you can't help but look forward to the next generation of Space Telescope with the Sagan Observatory with a 12 meter diameter telescope mirror and again depending on how likely earth-sized planets are in our galaxy see we can estimate that the Sagan Observatory would find anywhere from 25 to 80 EXO Earth candidate planets around nearby ish stars in our galaxy The Milky Way in its first year of operations alone and that's with balancing taking direct images of these exoplanet systems with taking these absorption spectra as well where you split the light into its component wavelengths and see where these missing gaps are from molecules in the atmosphere if you scratched taking the Spectra you could take way more of these direct images of systems around stars and you might be able to up that number by 40 percent to 112 Canada EXO Earths in the first year of observations but it's not just X upon it that would benefit from a giant 12 meter Optical Space Telescope all of astrophysics would you're basically building the Hubble Space Telescope again but five times bigger with all the resolution gains that gives you so think about all the different areas that the Hubble Space Telescope has had an impact on over the past 30 years the Sagan Observatory would carry on that Legacy not least for studying distant galaxies right like shown in this simulated image of what a Galaxy would look like with the Hubble Space Telescope at a large distance and with the Sagan Observatory at the same distance the resolution would be so good that you'd be able to resolve objects on the surface of Pluto right this is what Pluto looked like to the Hubble Space Telescope so the Improvement would quite literally be astronomical now you're probably thinking well this all sounds amazing but are we gonna have to wait 30 years before this thing launches like we had to do do with jwst well hopefully not the proposed launch date for the Carl Sagan Observatory is 2034. 12 years from now it marks the 100th birthday of Carl Sagan so that would be very very poignant but the main reason for such an ambitious launch date that seems very very soon in terms of space exploration is because the current Workforce in the space industry contains all of the knowledge of how to build a hexagonally segmented Space Telescope which has to fold up to fit inside a rocket and then withstand the launch and fold out once it's in space all that knowledge is there and ripe for the taking like we've done it before with jwst so it should be quicker the second time round because we've already faced and overcome the majority of problems that should crop up the last thing you want is for the next project that next gen generation Space Telescope to take so long that the people who worked on jwst retire out of the workforce and take all of that expertise with them that's the proposal anyway and it's just that for now it's not secured any government funding yet to get the go ahead for development but now jdbst has launched and off the back of all of its successes that we've seen in the past year the leaders at Space Telescope and Aura who managed AWS T are doing all they can to get the green light on that next generation for now though there's a lot more science still to come with jwst that we can get excited about over the next you know 5 10 15 years and we can be especially comforted by the fact that just last week on the 9th and 12th of November jwst observed the Trappist one system that system of seven exoplanets around a red dwarf star 40 light years away three or four of which are thought to be in the habitable zone around their star JBC has taken a direct image of that system with Mary the very far infrared detector on board and also used near spec it's spectrograph that's on board to take the light and split it into its component wavelengths to characterize the composition of the atmospheres of these exoplanets essentially to ask do they contain water in this habitable zone now that data won't be made public straight away the science team who proposed for that data will get a year to work on it before it's released in November 2023 but I bet that science team has just been ready and waiting for that data to come in they'll have all of the pipeline and Analysis tools ready built they'll drop that data in and they'll just be ready to go and write up their results so I bet we'll be seeing some of that data and the results from it early next year so we do have to be just a little bit for now but I think while we wait it seems only fitting to end this video with a quote from Carl Sagan himself I think if there's a plausible argument for a few we should keep looking I even go further than that if there's a plausible argument that there isn't anybody else out there bearing in mind that we couldn't be wrong because the question is of the most Supreme importance it calibrates our place in the universe it tells us who we are [Music] before we get to bloopers a huge thank you to brilliant for sponsoring this video brilliant is a website and an app that helps you to learn complex topics across science maths and computer science with interactive courses so you can learn by doing what I particularly love about brilliant for all of you a lot that watch my videos is that a lot of their courses cover the topics that underpin the concepts that we chat about so for example their astrophysics course has a whole section on worlds beyond Earth including how we detect exoplanets and the limitations of using a telescope to take a direct image just like we talked about in this video so if that sounds like something you'd be up for head to brilliant.org forward slash Dr Becky that link is in the video description down below and you can sign up completely for free and get 20 off an annual premium subscription at that link you'll also find my curated learning path with the courses that cover the topics we chat about in my videos so thank you so much to brilliant for sponsoring this video and now this isn't technically a blueprint Shameless self-promotions let's just rip the Band-Aid off shall we it's Black Friday coming up and I have a merch store that's going to have a Black Friday sale if you want to get some cool jwst or Dr Becky merch it'll also make a great Christmas present so in the video description down below where the link to my store is I've also put the dates that you need to order merch by in order to get it shipped to you by Christmas for wherever you are in the world speaking of Christmas presents I also have a book out my latest book A Brief History of black holes it's out now World Wide it's all about essentially the history of our understanding of black holes and how that's changed over the past Century to help you better understand these enigmas and what we understand about them today it would make a great Christmas present for yourself or any space science science history black hole lover that you know Again the video description is down below if you sack off the need to take Specter then you can increase the number of Canada EXO Earth you find by 40 sent so from 80 to 112. as much like quick maths calibrates our place in the universe it tells us who we are and I got chills they're multiplying and I'm losing control

Channel: Dr. Becky

Views: 544,654

Keywords: dr becky, astrophysics, physics, space, universe, female scientist, scientist, solar system, astronomer, telescopes, james webb space telescope, hubble space telescope, aliens, first stars, first light, cosmology, NASA, ESA, becky smethurst, infrared, MIRI, NIRCam, look back in time, unfoldtheuniverse, cosmos, redshift, galaxy, technology, exoplanets, JWST, dust, carl sagan, carl sagan observatory, exoplanet systems, exo-earth, earth-like planets, alien life, search for life, atmospheres, water, ozone

Id: BIgQpXObjFI

Length: 15min 59sec (959 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 17 2022