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James Webb Telescope

theprestige said:
Why on earth would newspapers have a vested interest in justifying government expenditure to their readers?
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Science journalists tend to have an interest in science, in my experience. My own interest in science makes me want to justify the expense of this extraordinary instrument by pointing to its remarkable discoveries, maybe theirs does too. The more remarkable (and especially unexpected) the discovery the greater the justification, and of course the better the story/number of clicks. So a little exaggeration is to be expected.
 
RecoveringYuppy said:
I am not disputing that the planet is as far as they say. I'm assuming that's correct*. I am asking what direction it is from the star so that I can break that distance down in to radial and perpendicular components.

And that is so that I can understand what valid information about size, distance, and other things can be obtained from this.

* BTW I said that to keep things simple. At the moment I can't rule out that the distance cited is the radial distance and the absolute distance may not be stated or even known.
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I'm thinking the answer to discrepancies I was asking about is Airy disk issues making the planet appear bigger than it is. Mostly a guess at this point.
 
Darat said:
Will the telescope be able to look for the reluctant planet 9?
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JWST has a pretty small field of view (I think the largest instruments are around 2' x 2'). and lot of known targets already lined up. LSST will have a much larger field (3.5 deg diameter). I think outer solar system searches have been proposed for it.
 
Darat said:
Will the telescope be able to look for the reluctant planet 9?
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BowlOfRed said:
JWST has a pretty small field of view (I think the largest instruments are around 2' x 2'). and lot of known targets already lined up. LSST will have a much larger field (3.5 deg diameter). I think outer solar system searches have been proposed for it.
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It would be very hard for any telescope to find planet 9. To detect it they will need to take two photos taken some time apart (maybe a year) and then compare them to look for a very faint object that has moved a little (this would be very hard). Then try to work out the orbit. Most of the objects found this way would be other things. They might have to take a third photo to make sure that they are right.

Doing this will involve taking 100's of photos and then comparing that set with another set of photos.
 
Anything we haven't found yet is going to be hard to find. :D. Although the idea that there would be other things found that way is also intriguing.

One of the LSST projects seems to be on characterizing the Kuiper Belt and TNOs (distribution, extent, characteristics, etc.). So looking for planet 9 would seem to fit right in (although its proposed distance might require different techniques).

ETA: from https://www.inverse.com/science/planet-nine-vera-rubin-telescope
According to Jurić, there are about 4,000 known objects in the outer Solar System. Within the first two years of LSST’s mission, he thinks that number will likely grow to at least 40,000 — even 100,000 objects isn’t out of the question.
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And if you find something interesting, should be able to point JWST at it and get some spectra from it.
 
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rjh01 said:
It would be very hard for any telescope to find planet 9. To detect it they will need to take two photos taken some time apart (maybe a year) and then compare them to look for a very faint object that has moved a little (this would be very hard). Then try to work out the orbit. Most of the objects found this way would be other things. They might have to take a third photo to make sure that they are right.

Doing this will involve taking 100's of photos and then comparing that set with another set of photos.
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BowlOfRed said:
Anything we haven't found yet is going to be hard to find. :D. Although the idea that there would be other things found that way is also intriguing.

One of the LSST projects seems to be on characterizing the Kuiper Belt and TNOs (distribution, extent, characteristics, etc.). So looking for planet 9 would seem to fit right in (although its proposed distance might require different techniques).

ETA: from https://www.inverse.com/science/planet-nine-vera-rubin-telescope


And if you find something interesting, should be able to point JWST at it and get some spectra from it.
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As I understand it (ISFers are encouraged to correct me if I am wrong), much of the speculation regarding Planet 9 has to do with the orbital patterns of more distant known objects in the Solar System - like trans-Neptunian and Kuiper Belt things. Orbits that suggest there is something fairly big out there having influence on the orbits of the smaller objects.

So cataloging those objects along with determining their orbits could contribute to the search for the planet, or at least towards the science of determining if it exists at all. Searching for a direct image of the thing might not be in the cards, but it still "searches" for in a different sort of way, maybe narrowing down its potential location and orbit.
 
Darat said:
Will the telescope be able to look for the reluctant planet 9?
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RecoveringYuppy said:
Don't think we know where Planet 9 is expected to be well enough yet. I'd expect that to be considered a waste of time.
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I concur. Planet 9 may not even exist, and even if it does, they don't know where to point the telescope to see it. Time on this telescope is so valuable that I would imagine that they will only point it where they know reasonably well that something interesting will be in the field of view.

I personally think the likelihood that Planet 9 is real is rather low. The evidence seems too circumstantial and could possibly be explained by something else, such as a close encounter with a passing star or rogue planet in the past. Or something that they just haven't thought of, or just random chance.
 
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Puppycow said:
I concur. Planet 9 may not even exist, and even if it does, they don't know where to point the telescope to see it. Time on this telescope is so valuable that I would imagine that they will only point it where they know reasonably well that something interesting will be in the field of view.
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Like Mars.

NASA's James Webb Telescope captures its first pictures of Mars despite challenges posed by 'extreme brightness'

Months after dazzling the world with the deepest view of the cosmos ever captured, NASA's James Webb Telescope has turned its gaze to something much closer to home — Mars.

NASA has published the first round of images of Mars captured by the $13 billion telescope, a collaboration with ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency), with more research to come.

Featuring the Huygens Crater, Hellas Basin and the Syrtis Major, the batch of images was taken on September 5.

The James Webb Telescope is orbiting around the Sun at a distance of about 1.5 million kilometres from Earth.

This unique position means the telescope can study short-term phenomena like dust storms and weather patterns, NASA said in a blog post.

However, there were some challenges...
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TBH, we already have lots of great images of the planets in our own solar system from other missions. Cassini for Saturn, Juno for Jupiter, New Horizons for Pluto. JWST will not be able to produce higher resolution images of those objects than we already possess from other missions that studied them from up close.
 
I guess the difference is the telescope can look at the planets at any time, probes have a limited observing time. So if something particularly interesting happened whilst there was no orbiting probe - if Jupiter's red spot suddenly disappeared or something - we could still observe it.
 
crescent said:
As I understand it (ISFers are encouraged to correct me if I am wrong), much of the speculation regarding Planet 9 has to do with the orbital patterns of more distant known objects in the Solar System - like trans-Neptunian and Kuiper Belt things. Orbits that suggest there is something fairly big out there having influence on the orbits of the smaller objects.

So cataloging those objects along with determining their orbits could contribute to the search for the planet, or at least towards the science of determining if it exists at all. Searching for a direct image of the thing might not be in the cards, but it still "searches" for in a different sort of way, maybe narrowing down its potential location and orbit.
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That's why I was wondering if the Webb could be used once we think we know where it should be with more certainty then we currently have. It was seeing the images from Jupiter and Mars that made me think about it. I don't know why but I had thought the local planets would have been "too bright" i.e. too hot for the Webb to get good images.
 
Darat said:
That's why I was wondering if the Webb could be used once we think we know where it should be with more certainty then we currently have.
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BowlOfRed said:
JWST has a pretty small field of view (I think the largest instruments are around 2' x 2'). and lot of known targets already lined up. LSST will have a much larger field (3.5 deg diameter). I think outer solar system searches have been proposed for it.
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That roughly translates to dividing the sky up in to 40 million "pixels". If you want to look at something specific you have to know which of those pixels it's in.
 
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