The plan for JWST's second year of observations! | Cycle 2 successful science proposals

we now know what jwst is going to be observing in its second year of operations from July 2023 to June 2024 what's known as cycle two now analysis is still being done on data taken in cycle one this past year of operations so to be patient with that analysis to be done results are still coming out all the time but for now the next year of operations is fast approaching so like for all telescopes members of the astronomy Community just went through a round of writing science proposals to pitch for what they want to use jwst to do those are then anonymously peer-reviewed by other astronomers other experts in the fields each proposal seen by a number of different people and then a selection panel actually goes through all those reviews and then ranks them all and then the top ranked ones get awarded time on the telescope based on how much time is they're physically available in a single year there were 1006 country proposals submitted in total from astronomers across 52 different countries and collectively all of those proposals totaled 35 000 hours of observing time now some quick maths will tell you how many hours there are in a year you can either take 365 and times it by 24 or you can take that off remembered number the number of minutes in a year and you can divide that by 60 either way you get that there is 8760 hours in a year for all of those 8 760 hours not all of that time is actually available for people to actually apply to use the telescope what's called sort of like a general Observer program or a go program 16 of that time actually goes to what's known as GTO proposals or guaranteed time observations so these are for the people that actually worked on the instrument team teams themselves to actually build the instruments develop and develop more software for them as well and so for that service role some time is put aside for their science as well as like a reward sometimes also left what's known as DDT so that's director's discretionary time now in cycle one that included all that early release data so those first five images that were released for in cycle two it'll mostly be sort of time critical observations so these are things that you know like a supernova or something that will just appear and we can't predict when they'll appear and people will need to very quickly propose to use jwst um and that can be done at any point during the year they set aside some time for that and then of course they set aside a little bit of time for also like maintenance and upkeep of the telescope as well what that meant was that there was around about 5 000 hours that were up for grabs for observing time on the telescope compare that to the 35 000 hours total that were actually applied for across all the proposals that were put in to use jbristy this is seven times over subscription rate so what that means is that one in every six astronomers who applied were very very happy this month when that email dropped into their inbox telling them that they actually were successful in their proposal and had time on jwst and the other six were very very sad indeed and had to pick themselves back up and say let's try again next year now there's loads of interesting stats on all of these proposals including the countries that they came from the instruments that were applied for in the spread in astronomy topics which for all you stats nerds like me were gonna get to at the end of the video just have a little look at those but for now let's look at some of the actual proposals now all the proposals have actually been made public and I'll pop the link in the description down below so you can scroll through them too but here I just wanted to pick out three proposals that I'm particularly excited for to see the data from trying not to be biased towards my own field of like Galaxy Evolution and supermassive black hole growth plus I've also picked out some honorable mentions as well so let's start with this proposal to study boyajian star led by Massimo stiavelli now boys and star also known as tabi star after Tabitha Boykin who led the first study on it in 2016 which has also dubbed the WTF star or whatever Stars I like to call it because it is weird its brightness dims by huge amounts very sporadically with no rhythm to it that no hypothesis can still fully explain now there's lots of ideas been thrown around to explain it from a ring of dust around the star to swarms of asteroids and comets or even a disintegrating planet and of course some people who even suggested like an alien megastructure around this star now the most likely of all of those scenarios right now looks as if it's going to be this ring of dust around the star and the reason for that is one of the observations that was made in the infrared showed that there was much less dimming of the brightness of the star at infrared wavelengths compared to like Optical like visible light and UV it's the best way to explain that is because well dust doesn't block infrared wavelengths of light because they're longer they can just go around the smaller dust particles rather than getting scashed away like the shorter wavelengths of light and that wouldn't be true if you had like a solid object like a like an asteroid or a comet or something like that you would have the same amount of dimming in the infrared as you did in Optical and UV wavelengths and if you want to know more about this check out the video I've done on voyagen star before if you want a little bit of a deeper dive I'll link that video in the description below so because of all the mystery and Intrigue around this style the fact that we haven't quite explained it yet I was really excited to see this jwst proposal specifically to use the Miri instrument on board jwst which is sensitive to much longer wavelengths of light than the other infrared instruments on board and the reason for that is because Miri is actually sensitive to the wavelengths of light that the dust itself glows with so what they're actually trying to do is to get a confirmed detection of this Dusty ring around the star and then if they can get that confirmed detection they'll then take what's known as a spectrum of the light as well where you take the light split it through a prism get a trace of how much lighter each wavelength you actually receive and then from the properties of that Spectrum if there's sort of big emission or absorption at any wavelengths of light you can actually tell what that dust is made of as well and that will give you Clues to its origin and how this star ended up with a Dusty ring around it of course if they don't detect any glow from dust then you can rule out that there's a Dusty ring around this star and then that rules out that hypothesis and then you have to go back to the drawing board to consider all the other hypotheses instead so either way it's going to be a really exciting result from these observations then this proposal spotted my eye measuring the the interior composition of a terrestrial exoplanet led by Jason Wright now there's a lot of exoplanet proposals for next year's observations as you'd expect you know categorizing the atmospheres or their formation but this study caught my eye because it is so different right the plan is to observe an exoponic called K2 22 B which is orbiting a red dwarf star 801 light years away from Earth with a year like an orbit of only nine hours has a mass of around 1.4 times Jupiter's mass but it's also losing mass at around about a rate of 300 million kilograms per second this planet is literally disintegrating it's sort of like a comet and you end up with this sort of tale of debris behind it that causes a very strange dip in the brightness of its star when the planet and it's big Dusty debris tail pass in front of it every nine hours on its orbit so if you can work out what this debris tail is made of then you can work out what the interior of the planet is made of which is exactly what this proposal is aiming to do once again using the Miri instrument again getting a spectrum where you get that trace of light at every single wavelength and what they're going to do is they're going to take that Spectrum when the planet and the debris Trail are actually in front of the star so the Starlight will actually pass through that debris and if you lose any light at specific wavelengths along the way then you know that certain molecules are there absorbing that light and you can work out okay what is the debris actually made of plus they'll also observe the planet for the full nine hours in its orbit to get what's known as a phase curve and with that you get both the temperature and also the spread the distribution of the Dust where it's like located around this planet and from all of that information you can then work out okay is the debris coming from just that very outer crust of the planet or is it coming from much deeper in the planet like in the mantle and is it being dredged up somehow by like some sort of like tectonic activity you know like at least a volcanoes here on Earth and so that allow you to then say okay what is the interior composition of this planet like what must have the conditions been like to actually form it and what must have been there and what kind of star must have made those materials previously for it to been there and then most crucially does it have the ingredients for life to ever have started there and finally my third pick was this one the spectroscopic confirmation of an unexpected population of bright galaxies at Cosmic Dawn this one led by Marco Castellano now if you've been following the first year of jwst observations either in the news or with my videos like my monthly Night Sky News series wrapping up the latest space news you'll know that jwst has really been pushing the boundaries in terms of like we've been detecting galaxies at much greater distances than we ever thought were possible and therefore seeing them at much earlier times in the University's history and also that those galaxies that we found are much brighter than we expected and what that means is if you then try and work out okay well if they're that bright how heavy are they so to do that you have to assume okay I'm gonna assume I have this General Distribution of stars like I see in the rest of the universe and if those stars are giving off a certain amount of light each then to account for that light there needs to be this much mass in Stars present there which means that the number you get if you do that calculation if they're more bright than we expected is that they are also more massive than we expect as well they're actually too big it doesn't make sense in terms of our models of how quickly we think Stars can form in the early Universe there's a couple of problems with this and I've taught recently on this channel about how this brightness to mass conversion could have some problems it's known as the initial Mass function problem or IMF problem and there are also some proposals looking into this like this one led by Tanya Barone but the other issue is that the distance to these galaxies which we work out from the amount the light is redshifted by the expansion of the universe they're not estimated in the most precise way just yet they're estimated just from images the technique you can use is something called the lime and break technique and this comes from the fact that hydrogen in the universe absorbs like a very specific wavelength or the Lyman Alpha wavelength so as light from a distant Galaxy travels through the Universe on its path to us and encounters lots and lots of hydrogen on its way that very specific wavelength of light gets absorbed by that hydrogen at that wavelength but then also the universe is expanding so that light is redshifted and what you end up with is a huge drop off in the light and the easiest way to do that is with images taken through filters only letting in certain wavelengths but it also happens to be the least precise way of doing this that's what we currently have and it's how a lot of these candidate High redshift most distant galaxies have actually been identified in jwst data but ideally what you'd like to do is get a spectrum where you get that trace of how much light of each wavelength you receive so you can pinpoint that drop off much more precisely and that's exactly what this proposal aims to do using near spec the main spectroscopic Workhorse onboard jwst and they're going to do that for a lot of these high redshift candidate galaxies we have in the hope of confirming whether their redshifts are actually that high and they are actually that distant or whether maybe they're actually much closer to us they're just a very weird thing that we've never seen before but also by getting Spectra again you get these sort of emission and absorption features as well that can tell you if certain molecules are present so you can work out okay what's the gas made of in the very early universe and does that affect you know the distribution of stars that you form you know going back to this problem of converting brightness to mass as well so it's going to be a very useful person I think it was one we could all guess was gonna be in that list of observing proposals that got time but it's an exciting one nonetheless all right now for some honorable mentions purely based on title alone and if they made me giggle first up the best pop culture reference that I could find was this proposal called The Last of Us led by Manuel salimano studying Lyman Alpha Halos what I'm going to say is just too good now time for the best acronym and that goes to bees black hole extended emission search which is led by Anna Christina eilers and then of course if you've got a best acronym award you've got to have the most convoluted acronym award because that's what astronomy is freely known for and that goes to this proposal the merry survey for exoplanets orbiting white dwarfs or Meow led by Mary Ann limbach and finally and I give this one with so much love but at the same time like a it's the came so close but just missed and that goes do this proposal called all the little things led by joret mati studying dwarf galaxies all the little things the little things like I'm just like the Blink 182 reference it was right there for the taking and they just they just completely missed it [Music] and of course minus points goes to everybody for no Taylor Swift references I'm I'm frankly disappointed in you all and now for those fun stats I promised at least I think it's fun and really quite interesting firstly that over subscription rate of the number of hours available versus the number of hours proposed for that increase from the previous cycle to the previous year up from four times to a seven times over subscription rate that's not exactly surprising that it's increased although it may be surprising it's increased that much because I mean now the community is much more aware of what's possible with jwst what it's capable of what its limitations are and then of course with all the early release science data as well that triggered a lot of ideas for people in terms of how it could apply to their research as well so the first year of observations really just gave people a lot of ideas and all of those ideas have manifested in a much larger over subscription rate for using jwste and then one thing I found really interesting was that proposals led by people who are based at these 26 institutions were collectively awarded 50 five percent of the time available on jwst so like if you're a student and you're thinking about doing a PhD in astrophysics and you really want to use jwst data this list would be a really good place to start if you're wondering where you should even apply to now if you look at the breakdown of proposals from different research Fields across astrophysics most proposals were either for Galaxy Evolution or exoplanet studies that is not surprising to me at all but it was cool to see the breakdown that it come out like that because I mean the telescope was designed specifically with those science goals in mind to detect the most distant galaxies and categorize them and then also to try and work out the atmospheres of exoplanets plus as well again the early release science data a lot of it was in those fields to Showcase what jwst could do so it's unsurprising that it's therefore triggered a lot more ideas for people in their own research another thing I found interesting was this breakdown of proposals by the instrument stay requested as well so Most Wanted near spec that spectroscopic Workhorse that I was talking about before or Mary that observes a longer wavelengths poor nearest here look it needs to more love people again I thought this was really interesting because it feels like a lot of the data that came out last year was Imaging data rather than spectroscopic data that came from the near cam instrument so it's interesting to see how in cycle too it feels like there might be quite a lot of follow-up going on like things have been found in imaging and now we get spectroscopic data now we know where to look for it a slightly depressing and yet interesting statistic was that the acceptance rate for male lead proposals was higher than female-led proposals despite the apparent Anonymous reviewing that takes place you know if the anonymous review process is working as it should be then gender shouldn't come into this at all so it's interesting to think what could be going on here perhaps some sort of like sexist bias in terms of judging people's different writing styles in terms of a more assertive style or more descriptive style and then finally this distribution of the country that the lead astronomer on each proposal is currently based in I find this very interesting to you despite how unpleasant this table is to pass information from and she got so annoyed I had to remake this table that's much better I can actually see now the countries where the lead astronomer was based put the most proposals in and also got the most accepted and of course can we please get a moment of silence and respect for the lead astronomers on proposals based in Austria Brazil the Czech Republic Finland Greece Israel Mexico Norway Poland Taiwan Thailand and Vietnam that unfortunately had a very cruel zero percent acceptance fraction on the proposals that they submitted this cycle zero points [Applause] again that document with all the statistics in it is publicly available online so I'll link that in the video description down below if you want to scroll through yourself maybe see the breakdown by US state as well but for now we once again have to be patient while this data is taken while it's analyzed and the results eventually published and in the meantime we can't speak for anybody else but I'm gonna start thinking about what I want to do for my daily breadstick proposal in the next cycle before we get to the bloopers a big thank you to this week's video sponsor brilliant brilliant.org is a website and an app that helps you to learn science and maths interactively time and time again Studies have shown that Interactive Learning is six times more effective than passive learning like watching a lecture or a YouTube video so if you want to truly learn something and get to grips with the concept then brilliant can help you reach those goals with thousands of lessons and new ones added each month the buzzword at the minute is a I but maybe you might feel like you don't quite understand how the algorithms behind sites like chat GPT actually work well then you should check out brilliant's introduction to neural networks course and whatever level you're at brilliant will help you ramp up your understanding so to try everything brilliant has to offer free for 30 days head to brilliant.org forward slash Dr Becky or you can click on the link in the description down below plus the first 200 of you will get 20 off an annual premium subscription so thanks so much to brilliant for sponsoring this video and now roll those bloopers questions from July 2023 to June 2020 2024 I mean he did it too many times Rude the bees Oprah GIF that's just like bees you're gonna be and you're gonna be Che Valley comma is attack accepting my generous tea proposal me and Karma Vibe like that

Channel: Dr. Becky

Views: 168,407

Keywords: drbecky, JWST, james webb space telescope, astronomy, astrophysics, science, cosmos, cosmology, galaxies, planets, stars, exoplanets, redshift, universe

Id: qVW3IT0B4gI

Length: 20min 56sec (1256 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 08 2023