Target880 t1_iue7kj7 wrote
James web have looked at exoplanets. But it will at best see them as a few pixels what can be done is to analyze the spectrum of the atmosphere. That way we can detect what gases are there and we live free oxygen is an indicator of life. https://www.sciencenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/090122_lg_jwst_feat-1030x580.jpg is a exoplanbet it observe. It is a gas gignat 20x the mass of Jupiter. This is the resolution it can get of a expolnaet
Planets are tiny and very far away. Here can you see Pluto from Hubble and New Horizons The max resolution of an optical system depends on the diameter of the aperture. For Hubble, it is 2.4 meters, and James Webb has 6.5 meters let's call that 3x the diameter. So Jamers Webb could only manage 3x the resolution of Pluto and compared to any exoplanet Pluto is large in the sky. This is ignoring any effect of the longer wavelength light that James Webb observe that reduces the increase relative to Hubble. New Horizons was very close to the Plut so it can have a lot higher resolution
The image from Jamew Webb and another telescope you see in the sky are surprisingly large. An extreme example is https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0612/m31abtpmoon.jpg the moon and the Andromeda galaxy to scale. It might be 2.4 million lightyears from us but is a galaxy of billions of stars. It is the second largest thing in the sky after out own galactic core, the milky way. The sun are the same size of the moon in the sky. You can see the center of it with your naked eye as a white fuzzy area. It is hard to see because it is dim not because it is small.
IF you look at a image https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2022/nasa-s-webb-reveals-cosmic-cliffs-glittering-landscape-of-star-birth it is not the size of planets is is a gas cloud man
>Called the Cosmic Cliffs, Webb’s seemingly three-dimensional picture looks like craggy mountains on a moonlit evening. In reality, it is the edge of the giant, gaseous cavity within NGC 3324, and the tallest “peaks” in this image are about 7 light-years high.
The closes star to earth, except for our sun, is 4.3 light years. Pluto is 0.00055041 light years from us. Our solar system would be in around 1 pixel in that image. The image width is enough to include another star system
The Cosmic Cliffs is a part of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGC_3324 that is 11 arcmin in size 1 degree = 60 arcminute so 11 arcmins =11/60 =0.18 degrees wide The moon is 0.5 degrees.
If it was bright enough you would see it as more than a dot with your naked eye, you would see some structure. The angular resolution of a human eye is around 1 arcminute = 0.02 degree. It is not too small to see with a nake eye in the sky, it is just too dim for your naked eye
Pluto is 0.06 to 0.11 arcseconds. 1 arcminut = 60 arcsecond so when closed to earth it is 0.11/60/60 = 0.00003 degrees
This mean NGC_3324 is =0.18/0.00003=6000 times larger in the sky the Pluto
Humans have resolved a few stars to more than a single do look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stars_with_resolved_images where 1 mas =0.001 arcsecond. Pluto is 110 mas in size when larges resolved star except for out sun is 50 mas.
So James Webb has and will observer more exoplanets. The are at best a few pixels in size. The stuff you see it the image that fills the frame is surprisingly large in the sky, we talk about lighyear across. it is just dim and the telescope is very good at collecting light
NolosRTX OP t1_iue8m8f wrote
Wow, Thank you so much for the detailed answer and the links will definitely check them out and give it a read. Really interesting.
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