NASA’s Webb telescope to explore the outer cemetery of the solar system

Once launched in 2021, NASA’s long-awaited James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will spend the first few months of operations focusing in part on Pluto, its moon Charon, and a panoply of other bizarre frozen worlds in the planetary graveyard of our outer solar system. .

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft’s magnificent 2015 flyby of the dwarf planet Pluto and its moon Charon revealed that these objects are far more active and far more interesting than previously thought. In fact, Pluto and Charon likely act as guardians of an outer region of our solar system that is made up of thousands of dwarf planets and other relatively small objects.

“These are objects found in the cemetery of the formation of the solar system,” Jonathan Lunine of Cornell University, a Webb interdisciplinary scientist who will use Webb to study some of these objectives, said in a statement. “They’re in a place where they could last billions of years, and there aren’t many places like that in our solar system. We’d like to know what they are like.”

The so-called Kuiper belt objects, objects that lie in a circumstellar disk of planetary leftovers extending beyond Neptune to about 50 Earth-Sun distances, are inherently cold and weak. However, because they glow in infrared light, at wavelengths Webb is specifically designed to detect, the telescope should be extremely adept at detecting the wide color gamut of such bodies, NASA says. This, in turn, should provide clues to their training history.

And while JWST can’t get the very close-up images provided by New Horizons, it does provide a different way to get to the composition, Lunine told me.

These objects include Eris, the second largest dwarf planet in our solar system. Nearly the size of Pluto, at its farthest point, the mysterious Eris is more than 97 times farther from the Sun than Earth, NASA says. But as part of his time-guaranteed observations, Webb is expected to provide plenty of data on what types of ice cling to its surface. Another, Sedna, is so far away that it takes about 11,400 years to complete one orbit around our Sun, says NASA. And a strange 250 km long asteroid Chariklo is the first asteroid discovered with a mile wide ring system.

The few spacecraft that flew Kuiper Belt objects could only study these intriguing objects for a very short period of time, NASA says. With Webb, astronomers can aim at multiple Kuiper belt objects for an extended period of time, the agency says. Indeed, A Target of Opportunity will observe a Kuiper Belt object pass in front of a star, should such alignment occur during Webb’s first two years of life, NASA says. This type of occult transit can reveal the dimensions of a given object.

Lunine’s JWST Guaranteed Time (GTO) investigation covers other Kuiper belt objects, including Haumea, Quaoar, the Centaur Chiron. Haumea and Quaoar sit on opposite sides of the aforementioned division between objects large enough to hold their non-aquatic birds and those that do, Lunine says. And maybe discover something new about centaurs by observing Chiron with JWST, he says.

“What is the nature of these objects that may have been ejected from the Kuiper belt by an unknown gravitational perturbation?” Wonders of Lunine.

And what do these objects tell us about the architecture of our solar system?

These are remnants of the formation of giant planets, Lunine says. Some were too far from the Sun to be consumed by the gas and ice giants, and others survived the fray by being ejected beyond Neptune, he says.

We know that the giant planets consumed land masses worth heavy elements (elements other than hydrogen and helium), Lunine says. Hence, he says the Kuiper Belt is a collection of the unconsumed remnants of the holiday that swelled planetary cores until they became massive enough to be giant planets.

“You learn a lot about foodies by studying what they have left on their plates,” Lunine said.