Since its launch in December 2021, the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope has captured jaw-dropping cosmic images using a near-infrared camera, revealing extraterrestrial phenomena never before seen in such clarity. Other theories point to asteroids and comets that could have shot ice to the Earth, or that chemical interactions between magma and molecular hydrogen could have led to water on Earth. One theory posits that grains of ice and dust slowly accumulate to form planets, though in the Earth’s case, scientists believe it may have been too hot for water vapor to have condensed into a liquid, meaning it likely evaporated. Scientists have for decades debated how water reached the Earth, and whether it could have made its way to the planet in the same way it might have on other rocky planets or smaller exoplanets in other solar systems. That’s how many light-years PDS 70 is located from the Earth (2.175 quadrillion miles). Instead, astrophysicists use special detectors to observe gamma rays and to figure out where they come from in the sky.Giulia Perotti, an astronomer at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Astronomy who led the study told that knowledge about PDS 70 provides crucial information about how planets in the sun’s solar system likely formed, and confirms that water is present in a region where “planets similar to Earth may be assembling.” Big Numberģ70. They go straight through optics used for other wavelengths, making them impossible to reflect or refract. Gamma rays are the universe’s most energetic form of light. Engineers at NASA’s Goddard and Marshall Space Flight Centers have designed mirrors like these for missions like the X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM) and the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE). Since there’s a lot of empty space in the middle of a single paraboloid, X-ray mirrors incorporate multiple mirrors as nested onion-like shells. This is called a grazing incidence mirror. To detect them, engineers turn the mirrors on their sides so the X-rays can skip off the surface. X-rays can simply pass through the atoms that make up most telescope mirrors. X-ray mirrors use the slightly angled side of the paraboloid. The Webb mirror, for example, is coated with a thin layer of gold so that it can reflect infrared light. Telescope mirrors are coated with different materials depending on the color of the light they need to reflect. (Backyard telescopes can also have mirrors, too.)Īn X-ray Mirror Assembly built for the X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission consists of a primary and secondary mirror, each containing 812 nested foil mirror segments. Large mirrors can be made thinner and lighter than lenses of the same size, which makes reflecting scopes ideal for sending to space. Reflecting telescopesĪ telescope that uses a mirror as its primary optical element is called a reflecting telescope. The first telescopes, developed in the 1600s, were refractors, as are many backyard telescopes today.īut very large lenses make refracting telescopes large and heavy, which makes them difficult to use in space. Like eyeglasses, the lenses bend, or refract, light passing through them. Refracting telescopesĪ telescope using a lens for its main optical element is called a refracting telescope. The larger a mirror or lens, the more light it collects, and the better its ability to detect fainter objects. The size of the main mirror or lens determines how well a telescope can collect light. Astronomers observe distant cosmic objects using telescopes that employ mirrors and lenses to gather and focus light.
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