Scientists haven’t found a rocky exoplanet with air. But now they have a plan.

https://mashable.com/article/james-webb-space-telescope-rocky-exoplanets-atmospheres

3 Comments

  1. My only question is how do they know wavelengths correlate to what’s in the atmosphere? Did they turn the Voyager around and look at Earth, Venus, Mars, etc to determine it?

    What about stars with slowly orbiting planets? Something like 100 earth years to orbit, are these all deemed non viable? This method surely can’t detect those since the technology hasn’t been around that long.

  2. Well yes I’m not surprised. The main method of finding exoplanets are transit and radial velocity, both which have a tendency to find larger planets close to their stars – where it’s hot and harder to hold an atmosphere or air.