Another one of the big goals of the James Webb Space Telescope is to see how
planetary systems got their start. So that would be akin to thinking about
how our solar system was several billion years ago. So looking
at the big disks of gas and dust that eventually
form stars and planets. Another really great thing about
Webb being an infrared telescope is the fact that a lot of the really interesting
components in a planet's atmosphere happen to fall in the infrared part
of the spectrum. When a star has a planet that goes in front of the star
and blocks some of the starlight we can say ah, now we know how big that planet was
and also we can begin to explore the light that goes through the planet's atmosphere on its
to our telescope. We spread that out into a spectrum as well and we can see can now
now what chemical in the atmosphere of another planet. So for
example we can look for things like water vapor or carbon dioxide
those types of things. So the Webb telescope is definitely our next
step in our search for life in the universe.