The Space Telescope Science Institute has announced which astronomy proposals have been selected to be given time with the James Webb Space Telescope over the next two years.
The organization on Thursday, February 29, outlined the 253 General Observer (GO) program that will use humanity’s most powerful and sensitive space telescope for a collective 5,500 hours between July 2024 and June 2025. This interval is known as Cycle 3 of JWST operations. .
Cycle 3 will build on the scientific advances made in the previous two years by this $10 billion telescope, which begins beaming data back in 2022.
Some of JWST’s third-year targets include potential exoplanets or moons surrounding exoplanets, exoplanets with their atmospheres, supermassive black holes, and even distant galaxies that existed at the beginning of time. JWST will also study large-scale structures in the universe to reveal details about the accelerating expansion of the universe and dark energy, the mysterious force driving such motion.
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Exomoon hunt continues
One of the teams lucky enough to spend time with JWST during Cycle 3 will search for moons outside the solar system. These are known as extrasolar moons, or simply “ecomoons.”
David Kipping, an assistant professor of astronomy at Columbia University, is part of the team hoping to find moons specifically around the exoplanet Kepler-167e. This gas giant is around the size and mass of Jupiter and is located 1,115 light-years from Earth.
“We are thrilled that one of our proposals was accepted!” Kipping told Space.com. “Our exomoon search around Kepler-167e has been accepted, and this is the best target we have ever had for lunar hunting.”
Until now, exoplanets have been an elusive subject for astronomers; because they are hunted using the same light-blocking technique used to detect exoplanets around stars. But this technique is difficult enough when searching for large worlds beyond Earth; It is extremely difficult to search for small echomones with this. Not only do exoplanets block much less light than the exoplanets they orbit, they also have to be in the right position at the right time.
A detectable echo must orbit its planet as it passes or “transits” across the face of its parent star to obscure some of the light from our vantage point in the universe. This obstacle will be detected by the scientists’ equipment, allowing them to reverse calculate that an exoplanet (or potentially an exoplanet) is causing it.
Kipping hopes that by focusing on Kepler-167e with JWST’s Near Infrared Imager and Slit-Free Spectrograph (NIRISS), he and his team will be able to make the first undisputed detection of an exomoon. “I hope this is just the beginning of the exomoon revolution. The new worlds are sure to contain remarkable secrets,” Kipping said.
Of course, JWST’s Cycle 3 GO projects also include a great deal of research focusing on exoplanets themselves, not just their potential moons. This includes a few who want to determine whether some exoplanets have the conditions needed to support life as we know it.
These exoplanet habitability projects include one called “Confining the atmosphere of the terrestrial exoplanet TOI-4481b.” It will use JWST’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) for 16 hours to determine whether a roughly Jupiter-mass exoplanet orbiting a star half the size of the Sun, located about 39 light-years away, might hang around. We move into the atmosphere.
The result could be a first step towards understanding the habitability of rocky planets and determining whether M-type stars, also known as red dwarfs, have terrestrial planets with significant atmospheres. This is important in the search for life beyond Earth because red dwarfs are the most common stars in the Milky Way.
Searching for supermassive black holes
Astronomers believe that the hearts of the majority of large galaxies in our universe contain supermassive black holes with masses as massive as millions or even billions of suns. Some of these supermassive black holes are actively swallowing gas and dust surrounding them in disks of material called accretion disks.
The gravitational effects of these monster black holes are thought to heat the material in these accretion disks, causing them to emit bright radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum and form regions called Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). Additionally, any matter that is not swallowed by the black hole can be channeled to the poles, where it is ejected as jets of particles moving at speeds approaching light. When this happens, the event is called a quasar.
The violent conditions of these events make AGNs and quasars the brightest objects in the universe; often bright enough to dwarf the combined light of every star in the galaxies around them. Our theoretical understanding of supermassive black holes has evolved since the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) revealed the first image of the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Messier 87 (M87) galaxy in 2019.
And JWST’s Cycle 3 missions will further contribute to this knowledge.
The JWST Cycle 3 supermassive black hole observation programs include the investigation of the nature of quasars and proto-black holes in the early universe. Scientists hope to understand how these black holes may have affected the growth of galaxies over billions of years.
JWST’s observations of supermassive black holes in the early universe may reveal how these cosmic giants grew to the enormous masses that scientists observe when the universe is not even 1 billion years old. Such a question could be answered by using MIRI to investigate whether a giant molecular cloud that existed approximately 13.2 billion years ago could have directly collapsed, giving rise to a “heavy black hole seed” that would explain a rapid growth mechanism.
Xavier Calmet is a researcher at the University of Sussex who studies the intersection between black holes and quantum mechanics. He told Space.com that he was particularly excited to see JWST focus on supermassive black holes and AGNS.
“The JWST Cycle 3 projects are very exciting,” explained Calmet. “Given my own research interests, I am particularly looking forward to seeing what we will learn about black holes.”
James Webb Space Telescope is getting bigger
One of JWST’s primary roles is to search for objects in the early universe. The powerful space telescope has this capacity because the expansion of the universe stretches the wavelengths of light from distant objects, moving them toward the “red end” of the electromagnetic spectrum as that light travels toward us.
The further the light travels to reach us, the more redshifted the light becomes. This means that light traveling for about 12 billion years has become extremely redshifted, down into the infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum and beyond the visible range we can see with the naked eye. In fact, infrared light is invisible to us. However, JWST is capable of observing this infrared light and thus helps in the study of the first stars and the oldest galaxies; This is something it will continue to do in 2025 with various Cycle 3 GO projects.
Luz Angela Garcia is a cosmologist at Universidad ECCI in Columbia who focuses on how dark energy is expanding the cosmos at an accelerating rate, which is aiding research into the evolution of the universe. He is particularly excited about GO projects that will address an era of cosmic evolution called the reionization era, which occurred approximately 500 million years after the Big Bang.
During this period, the neutral hydrogen atoms populating the cosmos were ionized by radiation, which stripped them of their electrons and left them as ionized hydrogen or hydrogen ions. Studying high-redshift galaxies can reveal more information about this important stage in cosmic evolution, including how the first galaxies acted as sources of this ionizing radiation.
“Some of the proposals that intrigued me are ‘Understanding galaxy formation at the cosmic dawn,’ ‘Galactic Winds in the Early Universe,’ and ‘Dead or alive? Uncovering the nature of massive galaxies in the Early Universe,'” Garcia told Space. com. “All of these accepted projects aim to identify and characterize the galaxies that are the drivers of the reionization era.
“Many of these proposals focus on studying the properties of the first galaxies in the universe – very high redshift systems that require spectral verification.”
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This is just the tip of the celestial iceberg when it comes to the scope of what Cycle 3 GO projects will cover. Between 2024 and 2025, astronomers will train telescopes on distant stars to better understand stellar physics and populations, as well as study the gas found between stars that could become the building blocks of next generations of stars and planets.
Although JWST was designed with the study of distant objects in mind, Loop 3 will also see the observatory used to study objects in our own solar system. These will include investigating the source of gas clouds from Saturn’s moon Enceladus, investigating the dynamics of Uranus’ rings, and characterizing icy objects in the Kuiper Belt at the far edge of the solar system.
Looking beyond JWST Cycle 3, the call for Cycle 4 GO proposals will open on 1 August 2024, with the application deadline set at 16 October this year. The Cycle 4 Telescope Allocation Committee (TAC) review will take place between February 3 and February 12, 2025, with selections to be announced around March 5 next year. The JWST Cycle 4 GO programs will then begin making observations of the universe on July 1, 2025.
A full list of accepted Cycle 3 JWST programs is available on the STScI website.