New Worlds: Analyzing the Atmospheres of Exoplanets with the James Webb Space Telescope

Over 6000 planets have now been found around other stars, but we only have information about what their atmospheres are like for a few dozen.  NASA's powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which features a 20-foot mirror in space, is currently being used to understand atmospheres.  We can look for atmospheres around rocky planets the size of the Earth, and we can measure the abundances of molecules like water, methane, ammonia, and carbon dioxide, in larger planets, of sizes similar to Neptune and Jupiter.  In this talk Professor Fortney will describe the latest exoplanet results from JWST as we seek to understand these new worlds.

Speaker: Jonathan Fortney is the Department Chair of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz.