After 15 years, yesterday was my last at #ESTEC as an ESA staff member*, & as is my longstanding habit, it ended with me cycling home late at night 🌖🚴♂️
Well, I am an astronomer, after all 🔭🤷♂️🙂
It has been a privilege, & there is much & there are many I will miss 🙇♂️
But I’m not retiring: next, a move to Germany 🇳🇱➡️🇩🇪, science with #JWST, talks & tours, writing a book, & many Space Rocks events & projects in development 🖖🤘
Sometimes, things just come together perfectly 🍻🙇♂️
There’s also a #JWST connection here – we visited the Ayinger Brauerei south-east of Munich almost 20 years ago, when there for a Science Working Group meeting at the EADS Astrium facility where NIRSpec was built 🚀🛰️🔭📷
We‘re back with #atmospheres and #interiors, kicked off by Stefan Pelletier on a gas giant planet that formed with more ices than rocks.
Stefan reminds us that back in the days we did not think we would be able to understand the composition of stars, but here we are, studying planetary atmospheres. Though forming planets is more complex because so many mechanisms contribute to the end product.
Nowadays, we can point at Jupiter + study its composition, right? No, we only got volatiles! #ExSSV
Next up, we‘ve got Louis-Philippe Coulombe talking a reflected light and thermal emission phase curve of an exo-Neptune.
Depending on the wavelength, we probe different chemistry, temperature, etc. regimes in the atmospheres of planets, see eg Jupiter. Often we need to observe at least twice or we just ignore reflected light, BUT #JWST can do both!
They looked at the full phase curve of the planet LTT 9779 b, sitting in the Neptune Desert. 🏜️
Last night's Asimov Debate at the American Museum of Natural History covered the latest cosmic findings from JWST. A few highlights:
Early results from JWST show a lot more bright galaxies & massive black holes than expected in the very early universe. Cosmologist Rachel Somerville admitted that her galaxy-formation models turned out to be way off. We still have a lot to learn!
We’re back with a session on planets around white dwarfs 🪐
Ryan MacDonald reminds us that in a very long time this will be the fate of our sun too. Jupiter and Saturn will probably fine but closer in… nah likely not.
This is basically what we can test by looking at white dwarf planetary systems. Killing planets in this way means there are polluted white dwarfs with planetary material in their stellar atmosphere. But for the ones that survive we can do a study of what could be.
This planet cannot have been where it is today, so it went on a journey after the death of its star: rapid spiralling inwards or a high-eccentricity migration. But we don’t know which one happened.
This is where #JWST comes in. But little me cannot share more 🚫🤫Stay tuned! #ExSSV
While this was an idea already 15 years ago, instrumentation has advanced significantly. They checked plenty of systems and found one candidate with colour excess. This candidate will be observed with #JWST (hopefully) soon.
Ground-based spectra show that the host is a fast-rotating WD that used to be a massive star. Future observations will tell what we’re looking at! #ExSSV
We’re back after coffee, and jump right into star-planet interaction with Babatunde Akinsanmi talking to us about the tidal deformation and atmosphere of WASP-12 b.
WASP-12 b is one of the ultra-hot Jupiter orbiting close to the Roche limit, being tidally deformed by the host star.
One can measure the tidal deformation with light curves because the shape affects the shape of the curve.
Also, the phase-curve varies! This is super cool 🥹
They observed WASP-12 b 45 times with #CHEOPS and used #TESS and #Spitzer data to study the phase curve including tidal deformation.
Why is tidal deformation important? If you don’t account for the shape, you’ll overestimate the density of your planet.
The phase curves allow to calculate the Love number which should tell us about the core mass fraction. Sadly not very well constrained, so we need #JWST for that instead. They’ll be doing that for WASP-103 b.
We’re back with direct imaging with Masayuki Kuzuhara.
They used the #Subaru#telescope to observe nearby accelerating stars and search for substellar companions.
They discovered 4 substellar companions, one of which is the brown dwarf HIP 21152 B. The spectrum reveals water and methane. They further modelled the orbit, giving them a dynamical mass of around 28 Mjup.#ExSSV
Deuterium is more detectable at colder temperatures, in particular at 4.5 micron. HDO may be observable if CH4 is absent.
They looked at WISE 0855, the coldest known brown dwarf (gas giant analogue) They detected deuterium in this object using #JWST at high significance, consistence with proto-solar.
For Luis, WASP-39 b is a well-chosen target because of comparing it to the Solar System.
A plethora of molecules have been discovered with #JWST, and Luis is aiming to combine these spectra taken with the different instruments. A large team is working together to produce reliable and reproducible results. #ExSSV
For the first time, researchers, including Naman Bajaj from the University of Arizona and Dr. Uma Gorti from the SETI Institute, have captured images of winds emanating from an aging yet still young planet-forming disk, offering vital clues on the dispersal of gas crucial for the formation of planets.
Want to know what #Hubble and #JWST are observing right now? Check out real-time updates on Space Telescope Live.
Important to note: The images here are from ground-based surveys and are not live feeds from the telescopes. The images show the area of the sky Hubble and Webb are currently observing.
Still, it's fun to see all of the cool science observations the telescopes are doing every day.
Last night I did a tutorial for my #introductory#astronomy class looking at stellar evolution and how the chemical composition of the #stars has changed over the history of the #universe. Then I wake up to hear Prof Catherine Heymans (Astronomer Royal for Scotland) talking about one of the youngest and most distant #galaxies ever found, thanks to #JWST and why it might be so bright. Here’s the story: https://esawebb.org/news/weic2406/?lang