Webb's Exoplanet Research Sounds Like Sci-Fi—But It's Real

01You're listening to NASA's Curious Universe.

02I'm your host, Jacob Pinter.

03Imagine a movie that starts like this.

04The camera pans up and we see a spaceship.

05It's sailing toward an alien planet.

06The planet is cobalt blue and it's gigantic, bigger than any planet in our own solar system.

07It even has water vapor.

08But the explorers in the spaceship know they have to be careful because this planet's atmosphere is basically blowtorched with the rain of molten glass whipping in winds of more than 5,000 miles an hour.

09So the spaceship keeps flying.

10And as the movie continues, we see other bizarre worlds.

11There's a planet that orbits a small red star.

12It's unknown if the planet has life.

13But if it does, that red starlight could make plants here red or purple, even black.

14We also glimpse a rogue planet.

15Somehow, this one broke free from its star.

16It roams the galaxy alone and in perpetual darkness, never to see another sunrise.

17Well, here's the big plot twist.

18All of these planets are real.

19Hollywood didn't make them up.

20They're called exoplanets.

21A whole assortment of planets beyond our solar system orbiting faraway stars.

22If you go outside and you just pick a random star, chances are that star has a planet orbiting around it.

23Nestor Espinosa is an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute.

24If they have rocky planets, do the atmospheres look like, you know, the Earth or Mars or Venus or something else completely?

25We have no idea.

26We just started exploring them.

27It sounded science fiction up to five years ago.

28Now it's science.

29It's not science fiction anymore.

30It's pretty fun.

31Now, these exoplanets are too far away for our spacecraft to visit.

32But we have tools to study them, including the James Webb Space Telescope.

33Webb is a huge telescope in space a million miles from Earth, studying the cosmos in ways that we just can't from Earth's surface.

34NASA leads the international partnership that built Webb, and the Space Telescope Science Institute handles its science and operations for NASA.

35That means Nestor was there in Webb's first moments, watching engineers take Webb for a test drive.

36Nestor planned to use Webb's data to prove whether exoplanet science was something he could really do with this mission.

37And almost instantly, he got his answer from the universe.

38Like, I got that answer within, like, 15 minutes.

39It was, like, a complete yes.

40And I already knew it was going to be beyond what we were expecting.

41Like, the signal was just so much better.

42Like, nothing I have ever seen.

43From that moment, I knew, like, this is going to make everyone crazy.

44But getting that cosmic yes was only the beginning.

45Before it launched, scientists around the world knew what Webb was supposed to be able to do.

46Now they were waiting to hear how it really performed.

47Nestor sifted through the data, making sure Webb could capture as much detail as the world hoped.

48Doing exoplanet science with James Webb, it's not that straightforward.

49Typically, you just, you know, you want to look at a star with James Webb.

50Point at a star, you get, like, your data, and that's it.

51With exoplanet data, you have to massage the data a little bit more in order to extract the signals that you want.

52Because they're very tiny signals.

53So, what makes exoplanet data so tricky?

54Imagine traveling far, far away from our own solar system and trying to look back at Earth.

55From out here, the Sun is a speck.

56Just one of many.

57As we try to zoom in on the Sun, we run into a problem.

58It's really bright.

59So much brighter than Earth.

60There's just no hope of seeing the faint glow of our own home planet.

61But there is a way we can detect it.

62Whenever a planet passes in front of the Sun, the Sun would appear just a little bit dimmer.

63And since planets radiate their own energy, when they disappear behind the Sun, we could detect that too.

64That tiny bit of information may not sound like much.

65But with careful study, scientists can use it to figure out details like a planet's temperature and what chemicals are in its atmosphere.

66Since the first discovery of an exoplanet in the 1990s, scientists have cataloged thousands of these planets all across our galaxy.

67Some of them are exotic worlds, in classifications like hot Jupiters or sub-Neptune gas giants.

68Nestor's research focuses on rocky planets, like Earth.

69And if you're thinking what I'm thinking, the next step is to ask, could these rocky planets also show signs of life?

70Now, rocky planets are smaller, and that makes them harder to study.

71NASA's already planning for a future telescope called the Habitable Worlds Observatory, specifically designed to hunt for signs of life.

72In the meantime, Nestor says Webb is giving us a lot to work with.

73It's a big universe out there, and there's a lot of stuff to study.

74What made you say, this is the thing that I want to spend my life looking at?

75So from when I was a kid, I think everyone has gone through this stage in which you're kind of obsessed with aliens, right?

76Either from movies and E.T.

77and stuff like that, or Star Wars, for instance.

78I'm a big fan of Star Wars.

79I remember, I think that's when it started.

80My mom brought me to these, for some reason they redid the original Star Wars movies, episodes, you know, four through six, and they put it in the movies.

81And my mom had only one free day in her week.

82She worked a lot.

83We were basically just my mom and I.

84She had one day free in the week, and she said, we're going to spend the whole day, and we're going to see the three episodes.

85I was like, 11.

86Back to back to back?

87Back to back.

88It was nuts.

89I was like, I have no idea what this movie is about.

90Well, I'll just go.

91And it blew my mind, too, right?

92This thing of seeing, like, tattooing with two suns.

93I was like, what?

94This thing could exist out there.

95You know, planets that are covered in ice, planets that are, like, or Earth, or desert planets.

96And I thought, that was nuts.

97So that really kick-started the thing, like, that little seat.

98Yeah.

99And that just grew.

100I never thought I could actually be a scientist.

101So I come from Chile.

102And in Chile, I don't know, from science, it's not like a, it was not a thing that I knew one could do.

103From TV, I thought, you know, there's scientists out there, but it's done by folks at NASA and other places.

104But I'm, like, very far away from that.

105So at some point, my physics teacher just grabbed me, and she told me, like, you know, I've seen you, you know, with these bright eyes in physics, and you like this astronomy thing a lot.

106Like, you know you can be a scientist, right?

107This was, like, I was 15.

108And I was like, but you, really, you can get paid for, like, doing science?

109Like, for, like, discovering new things?

110Like, that sounded completely nuts.

111It's like, someone paying you to play video games, right?

112Right.

113And she was like, yeah, that's a career, and you can study it here.

114So that was, like, kind of the path to science in me, and the path to exoplanets.

115Physics teachers, moms, and Star Wars.

116So I wonder if you can fill in the blank in this sentence for me.

117James Webb is teaching us, blank, about exoplanets.

118Ooh.

119There's no single word, really, because it's, it's revolutionizing the field, really.

120We are starting to see, maybe, the first hints of evidences of atmospheres around rocky exoplanets.

121That was well beyond our capabilities three years ago, you know, before the launch of James Webb.

122This is really the next frontier.

123Like, if we want to get, and eventually detect life out there, the first question is, does this rocky planet have an atmosphere or not?

124And we can see that in our solar system, even.

125So, you know, Mercury has, like, a very thin, almost non-existent atmosphere, right?

126And that's because it's just too close to the sun, right?

127Poor planet.

128Sure.

129Maybe it had an atmosphere.

130It's getting baked all the time.

131Exactly.

132poor planet.

133You can bake a pizza and a thing if you want.

134But then, it doesn't have, like, a substantial atmosphere as, you know, the one we have on Earth, the one that Venus has.

135And stars out there are also very different.

136They, you know, we're used to this beautiful sun that we see every day.

137But there are stars of all sizes and colors out there.

138And in fact, when he, one of the things that impresses the public, I think, the most is, when you ask them, what do you think is the average star out there?

139How does it look like?

140And everyone tells you, like, ah, you know, it's like the sun.

141And the answer is no, it's not like the sun.

142It's actually a star that is like, you know, kind of 10% the size of the sun, so much smaller.

143That makes it much rather.

144And then you have to be closer to that star in order to feel the same heat, because it's smaller, it has, it's colder.

145Right.

146Just like a heater.

147So those stars really outnumber all the rest of the stars.

148Those are the majority of the stars out there.

149So we also know that rocky planets, actually most of the rocky planets live around these small stars.

150We're trying to explore how does the average rocky planet out there looks like, which orbits these small stars, which is very alien.

151Like if you imagine the sky on these things, it's completely different.

152Like you are used to this orange star coming up.

153Like imagine now, like a very small star coming up.

154It's red, like very, very red.

155So the, if there's like plants or something like that on these rocks, uh, and these planets, they, they might look completely different.

156They might observe completely different light.

157They might look completely different.

158Um, so figuring out these alien worlds, it's, it's this exciting thing that, you know, James Webb is allowing us to do.

159The thing that the James Webb space telescope, I think is the most famous for is that it is looking back to cosmic dawn and sort of the very first galaxies and so on.

160Um, and in a lot of ways, that's what it was designed to do.

161So what makes those tools that it has also really useful for studying exoplanets?

162That's an excellent question.

163So what you do is that you wait until the planet passes in front of the star from your point of view at Earth.

164And when the planet passes, if you're lucky enough to see that passage, some of the starlight passes through the atmosphere of the planet and interacts with it.

165And those little signals are the ones that we detect with James Webb.

166And we're able to extract like some sort of like cosmic detective work, right?

167Which is to see which light got absorbed by the atmosphere of the planet.

168What we're trying to do is see which part of that starlight is being eaten up by the molecules in the atmosphere.

169And different molecules like to eat different colors of light.

170They have like different diets.

171So if you want to detect sodium, for instance, you know, your classic, you know, salt, you typically go to what we call optical wavelengths.

172It's your light that we can see, like you and I can see, like the color of your shirt, the color of your pants.

173That's light, colors of light that we can see.

174But there's many other colors out there.

175Particular, James Webb is what we call an infrared telescope.

176So it's able to detect light, which is called infrared light.

177It's passed like way redder than the reddest you could see that we cannot see.

178Our eyes just can't detect that.

179In the infrared, it's exactly where the molecules that we're most excited about, like, you know, water, carbon dioxide, which is like a big thing on the rocket planets.

180And on the solar system, methane, all of these molecules, their diets of light are based on infrared light.

181So if you want to detect those molecules, you have to go to the infrared, right?

182And that's what makes James Webb so unique.

183He had this big bucket of light that is very stable and it's able to look at exactly the colors of light on which these very important molecules are absorbing.

184Do you think you could take me on a little tour of, some of the exoplanets you study?

185Like, I don't know, can, can we pretend that we're visiting and can you tell me like what we see and what it even might be like to actually go there and be on the surface or be in that atmosphere or something?

186Totally.

187Yeah, I can do that.

188So right now we don't have a solid detections, but I can make a case for this.

189And I think I'm going to put as an example case, one planetary system that is very dear to my heart.

190I've been working a lot on that and it's called the Trappist-1 system.

191So in order to travel to the Trappist-1 system, we have to take our rocket and travel like several tens, like a couple of tens of light years.

192Okay.

193That means that if we threw like a little laser, it will take like 20 to 30 years to get there.

194So the first alien thing about this system is that the star is crazy small.

195The star is the size of Jupiter.

196Okay.

197It's just like, what?

198Like a star can be that small?

199The answer is yes, they can be that small.

200And this system doesn't have, you know, one, two, or three, four rocky exoplanets going around.

201It has seven rocky exoplanets going around this star.

202The other alien thing about this system is that all these planets orbit very tightly packed together.

203So they are in orbits.

204There are in an orbit that is smaller than the orbit of Mercury.

205All these seven planets are all packed in an orbit that is very, very small.

206The other alien part about this Trappist-1 system is I told you, seven planets.

207Two or three of those planets are in what we call the habitable zone of, of this system, which is a distance from its star in which it's not too hot and not too cold, such that if they had atmospheres like we have on earth, they could sustain liquid water in their surfaces.

208Wow.

209And that's pretty exciting because it means, you know, maybe, maybe life is there.

210Even more, because the system is so tightly packed.

211If we, you know, we were traveling to this thing, if we were to go and land on one of these planets and you looked up in the sky, you could actually see the other planets as like big moons.

212So if you have a friend in this other habitable planet, you know, and the other one, you can call them and say, hey, there's a storm coming your way in like three hours, right?

213Which is nuts, right?

214The fact that it's so packed means that you can see the planets in the sky, the other planets in the sky.

215So that would be, you know, a beautiful sight.

216Even better than Tatooine, right?

217Even better, right?

218So that's, that's the whole thing with this field.

219It's like, you think you have seen cool stuff in science fiction?

220Wait until you see the science data, right?

221That's crazy.

222This is maybe going to ask you to take your scientist hat off and put your prediction hat on.

223But do you think that we'll find signs of life on an exoplanet?

224I don't know, within your lifetime?

225I surely hope so.

226Signs?

227Yes.

228I think we would be able within my lifetime, especially with what we have lined up in the future.

229So will we be able to detect these biosignatures within my lifetime, within like 30 years, 40 years from now?

230I think the answer is probably yes.

231Will we be able to claim unambiguously that that's aliens like walking on the planet?

232Probably not.

233But that's, that's where, that's where our scientific community gets together to try to figure out what alternative scenarios will produce this particular signal.

234Right.

235And I'm very confident that we will get to very good answers with that.

236Like the scientific community, once, once it focuses on a problem, it's very good at figuring out how to make that happen.

237You just mentioned, for instance, that the James Webb Space Telescope was made basically for like, you know, the deep universe trying to figure out the first galaxies and so on.

238So they really thought very hard on how to make that with James Webb.

239That is the beauty of the habitable world subservitories.

240The first time in history of humankind that we're saying, we're going to build a big mission, big telescope.

241And this is going to be based on trying to figure out this, you know, actually get the signatures of possibilities of life out there in other planets.

242And that's a very exciting, again, it's a very exciting time to be alive, to be in this era in which we are jumping and to try to figure out if there's life out there.

243It's like, it's never happened before.

244It's amazing.

245I was thinking about when you said that you grew up and didn't know that being a scientist was an option.

246What advice do you have for someone who is interested in science, but also may not realize that that is a real career path?

247Yeah.

248So what I would say, well, first of all, that it is a real career path.

249It's a thing you can do.

250So first thing is that there's not a linear career path.

251You don't have to be like a total genius that gets into physics, top grades, and then you go and do amazing discoveries.

252That's just not how it works for the majority of us.

253If you have an interest and an excitement for this, that is like 60, 70% of the way.

254That is, if you are really excited about this stuff, then this is a career path for you.

255It's not going to be easy.

256Like I can tell you that from the very beginning, but it's going to be totally worth it.

257I would also say that, and this is sometimes under underlooked that, um, yes, your excitement and for the science and so on is really important, but also having a support system is really important.

258Yeah.

259I told you that basically it was my mom and I, and that support from my mom and from my friends and so on was key for me to going through, through this.

260I mean, if it weren't for them, I would not be here.

261Yeah.

262The final advice that I have for people that want to do science is that I know people have this concept of scientists being like these white coated folks that are just in their own labs in the whiteboard, right?

263And they're alone, lone wolves.

264I've seen it in the movies.

265Right?

266Eureka!

267I saw, you know, cancer or whatever.

268That's not how science works.

269Science is a very, very collaborative environment.

270Like my, my native language is Spanish.

271So I have to learn how to speak English and how to communicate effectively and so on.

272That is also very important.

273If you're hearing all of this and you say, wow, you have to do a lot of stuff.

274You can do it.

275If you, if you're excited about this stuff, you can be that scientist.

276I have one last question for you and then we'll get you out of here.

277Since our show is called Curious Universe, what are you still curious about?

278Well, I'm curious about these atmospheres around rocky planets.

279In particular, if the atmospheres survived around the Trappist-1 exoplanets.

280Yeah.

281If they did, and we find the system that it's in the habitable zone of their stars, that has an atmosphere that we can characterize in detail, that would be such an amazing moment in humanity.

282Like, yes, we have this chance to figure out if life might be in this space.

283That is the thing that has been me the most curious.

284And, and the overreaching kind of bigger question to that is how frequent this life out there.

285The reality is that we don't know.

286Maybe life is like this very rare, very niche thing that we were very lucky to have here on Earth, right?

287In our galaxy, in the hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, is there another one that has life, not only life open, intelligent life, technology out there.

288Is there more advanced technology out there?

289Perhaps.

290That's, that has me very, very curious.

291That would be one of the questions if I had like a genie that could answer any question.

292That would be, give me the number, right?

293How many?

294And that will solve so many questions in my mind about the universe out there.

295But the very fact that we're talking about this, and you folks are thinking that you're hearing this, you're thinking, that's an interesting question.

296And that's an interesting question that we could get answered.

297Yeah.

298That is amazing.

299Because we are not in the realm of science fiction anymore.

300This is science.

301And we are putting Tosca out there to get these answers.

302Néstor Espinosa is an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute.

303And I just want to give you a quick update.

304Since I talked to Néstor, we have a little bit more information about TRAPPIST-1, the planetary system that Néstor is really excited about.

305Using the Webb telescope, scientists determined that TRAPPIST-1d, which is one of the planets in that system, does not have an Earth-like atmosphere.

306We're still learning more about that planet and the six other rocky planets orbiting the same star.

307If you liked this episode, you will love NASA's documentary, Cosmic Dawn.

308Cosmic Dawn reveals the incredible true story of the James Webb Space Telescope, with never-before-seen footage from the creation, construction, and launch of this remarkable telescope.

309See the film at nasa.gov slash cosmicdawn.

310And you can find the latest news from the Webb telescope and much more information at nasa.gov slash web.

311This is NASA's Curious Universe.

312This episode was written and produced by Emma Brambilla.

313Our executive producer is Katie Conans.

314The Curious Universe team also includes Christian Elliott and, of course, Patty Boyd.

315Christopher Kim designed our show art.

316Our theme song was composed by Matt Russo and Andrew Santaguida of System Sounds.

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