What are you, SIMP 0136?
Astronomers used the powerful James Webb Space Telescope to peer into this object flying by itself through our Milky Way galaxy. It's rapidly spinning, and at some 13 times the mass of Jupiter, it could be a rogue planet speeding around the cosmos, or possibly a failed star, called a brown dwarf.
An instrument on Webb called the Near-Infrared Spectrograph collects light from distant objects and then separates them into different wavelengths, or colors, like a prism. These colors, representing different materials, have begun to reveal what's in SIMP 0136's atmosphere, and might truly reveal its identity.
"Imagine watching Earth from far away. If you were to look at each color separately, you would see different patterns that tell you something about its surface and atmosphere, even if you couldn’t make out the individual features," Philip Muirhead, a scientist from Boston University who co-authored the new study, said in a statement. "Blue would increase as oceans rotate into view. Changes in brown and green would tell you something about soil and vegetation."
SIMP 0136 spins fast — a full rotation lasts just 2.4 hours — allowing Webb to capture a full view of light observations in a short amount of time. They suggest a truly exotic atmosphere with deep clouds composed of iron particles, and loftier clouds made of silicate material grains (silicates are primary ingredients in rocks on Earth). What's more, large pockets of carbon monoxide and dioxide could be present on SIMP 0136, perhaps forming during chemical reactions.
It's a wild world, in the galactic Wild West.
"We haven’t really figured out the chemistry part of the puzzle yet," Johanna Vos, an astrophysicist at Trinity College Dublin who led the study, explained. "But these results are really exciting because they are showing us that the abundances of molecules like methane and carbon dioxide could change from place to place and over time. If we are looking at an exoplanet and can get only one measurement, we need to consider that it might not be representative of the entire planet."
SIMP 0136 is relatively nearby in space terms, at some 20 light-years away from us (a light-year is some 6 trillion miles). If it's a brown dwarf, it never grew dense and hot enough to stoke nuclear fusion and become a luminous star. If it's a rogue world, it may have long ago been gravitationally kicked out of its alien solar system, and now wanders alone and starless through our galaxy.
The Webb telescope's powerful abilities
The Webb telescope — a scientific collaboration between NASA, ESA, and the Canadian Space Agency — is designed to peer into the deepest cosmos and reveal new insights about the early universe. It's also examining intriguing planets in our galaxy, along with the planets and moons in our solar system.
Here's how Webb is achieving unparalleled feats, and may for years to come:
- Giant mirror: Webb's mirror, which captures light, is over 21 feet across. That's over two-and-a-half times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope's mirror, meaning Webb has six times the light-collecting area. Capturing more light allows Webb to see more distant, ancient objects. The telescope is peering at stars and galaxies that formed over 13 billion years ago, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. "We're going to see the very first stars and galaxies that ever formed," Jean Creighton, an astronomer and the director of the Manfred Olson Planetarium at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, told Mashable in 2021.
- Infrared view: Unlike Hubble, which largely views light that's visible to us, Webb is primarily an infrared telescope, meaning it views light in the infrared spectrum. This allows us to see far more of the universe. Infrared has longer wavelengths than visible light, so the light waves more efficiently slip through cosmic clouds; the light doesn't as often collide with and get scattered by these densely packed particles. Ultimately, Webb's infrared eyesight can penetrate places Hubble can't.
"It lifts the veil," said Creighton.
- Peering into distant exoplanets: The Webb telescope carries specialized equipment called spectrographs that will revolutionize our understanding of these far-off worlds. The instruments can decipher what molecules (such as water, carbon dioxide, and methane) exist in the atmospheres of distant exoplanets — be they gas giants or smaller rocky worlds. Webb looks at exoplanets in the Milky Way galaxy. Who knows what we'll find?
"We might learn things we never thought about," Mercedes López-Morales, an exoplanet researcher and astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics-Harvard & Smithsonian, told Mashable in 2021.
Topics NASA
