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What does the future of photographing exoplanets look like?
Is JWST going to be good enough? I think there's more promise in telescopes at the moment while we are unable to physically travel beyond the solar system feasibly. Developing better "eyes" for the entirety of humanity seems pretty crucial to me. This photo is great, by the way. That there is an exoplanet. Here's an accompanying article: http://www.space.com/31497-exoplanets-direct-imaging-next-big-thing.html
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>>8610892
Maybe we'll see a few more direct photographs of exoplanets in the future, but certainly not most of them. The problem is that you can't do it for every planet. The star needs to be close enough, the planet needs to be far enough from the star and it needs to be very large (>Jupiter). If that's not the case, you don't stand a chance.
So yeah, it's a nice benchmark to test the capabilities of your telescope, but probably not the best way to detect exoplanets. We might be able to make some spectroscopic analyses if we can indeed see them though.
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>>8610912
How powerful can these telescopes theoretically be? Is it limitless to how advanced they can get?
I'm just imagining seeing an image like this in this quality.. but of an exoplanet. One day.. how far away do you think that'd be?
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Seems to me like the JWST is specifically tailored for seeing older, red-shifted objects, and not specifically exoplanets, though it will probably be better at it than Hubble given the fact that it's from 1990.
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>>8610922
Not in our lifetime.
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>>8610922
Honestly, the only practical limit is how much light pollution there is in space.
Most exoplanet's apparent magnitude will be dwarfed substantially even by their nearest start you know.
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>>8610930
star*
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>>8610930
We really do live on a piece of debris, don't we? So tiny. That makes the OP image even more astounding.
That image is fantastic. Would we at least feasibly see these galaxies in higher and higher resolutions in the future? What about an image like this but of a distant star?
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>5. It could find water on exoplanets
One of the JWST’s most notable abilities is that it will be able to detect planets around nearby stars by measuring infrared radiation, and it will even be able to measure the atmospheres of exoplanets by studying the starlight that passes through. By doing this it will be able to determine if an exoplanet has liquid water on its surface.
https://www.spaceanswers.com/astronomy/if-the-universe-is-finite-what-would-we-see-at-the-edge/
This is interesting if true.
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>>8610940
http://images.ipac.caltech.edu/stsci/stsci-prc-2011-31-e/stsci_stsci-prc-2011-31-e_15516.jpg
https://cdn.spacetelescope.org/archives/images/large/heic0901a.jpg
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>>8610940
>What about an image like this but of a distant star?
Well, it sure doesn't look pretty, but for very large, near stars we can actually resolve the stellar disk with HST. I think this has so far only been done with few stars and it's just VERY rough, you'd probably disappointed with it. But yeah, sure, that's something that might be possible with JWST. It's very interesting too, imo, as then we can directly observe the plasma dynamics of a distant star. In the case of Betelgeuse it's particularly interesting as that star is a likely candidate for the next supernova in our neighborhood.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stars_with_resolved_images
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