[Q&A+] There Are Only 6,286 Known Exoplanets. Why Hasn’t JWST Observed Them All?

Why can't web just look at all known exoplanets? How much science will Dragonfly do and when's the next guy release? And Q&A plus what does Q&A plus actually do all this and more in this question show? It's time for the question show your questions my answers as always wherever you are across my channel if a question pops in your Brain shred it down. I'll gather them up and I will answer them here now. Obviously. I am not back at home I am in Japan right now Finding some quiet alley to be able to record the intro to this question show The intros are going very different from the rest of the episode. All right skin of the questions Eagle horn blower. I'm curious how much science can Dragonfly really do if Titan surface is just water ice What kind of geology of interest is there? So the rocks on Titan the mountains are water ice the sand on Titan is water ice but there is an enormous amount of organic molecules mixed in with that I mean we know that at the Northern Latitude there are lakes of methane and rains methane there are seas of methane rivers of methane and clouds of methane But you're gonna have a lot of organic material on the surface of Titan We saw just these this really interesting pictures that came back from the Huygens probe as it was entering the atmosphere You could see the landscape of Titan and then it landed on the surface and you could see this bizarre Surface with these weird little rocks on it meat of water ice And and so like purely like if you're not interested on the biological side and you're just interested in the geology side That alone is reason enough to send a helicopter to Titan. You're gonna be flying around You're gonna be seeing what sand dunes do on Titan you're gonna be seeing what the layers of Rock seeing ancient impact craters and all of that is gonna be really interesting Geologists but then to chemists and astrobiologists You're also seeing the interactions between these organic chemicals on the surface of this planet and how they're interacting with the very thick Atmospheric Haze so there is no shortage of science It's gonna be done from from Titan Dragonfly and I think you know with with all missions often We don't know what we don't know we don't know what is gonna be the exciting thing that people are gonna be finding there that once we actually arrive The end there is a bunch of science goals that the scientists are attempting to achieve Then they're gonna find something new something totally unexpected that is going to sort of revolutionize our understanding about Titan That's you only get that when you have boots on the ground or in this case a helicopter in the air So yeah, absolutely worth sending a helicopter to Titan to learn more Susking why can't web just rush through all the closest exoplanets and determine their atmospheres? What is it there? That's much more important They are trying You know the the question is how much time do you spend with web on an exoplanet? What if you spent all the time? What if you spent weeks and weeks and weeks of James Webb time and you weren't able to determine the atmosphere? To the level you were hoping so what happens is you know, they're really the there's only one great System that web is able to observe and give us a really good answer about whether or not they have atmospheres and Like Earth-sized worlds orbiting around red dwarf stars though a system that I'm talking about of course is the trapeze one system This is where you've got seven earth-sized worlds orbiting around a red dwarf star Several of these planets are located in the habitable zone It is relatively close to us compared to all of the other exoplanets that have similar characteristics like we know of a bunch of of Red dwarf stars with earth-sized worlds orbiting around them But the trapeze one system is the one that is the closest and the best It is the gold standard for being able to do this work and so most of the time that web has been allocated for observing potentially exoplanets atmospheres on earth-sized worlds is at the trapeze one system and The work has been really really difficult very complicated and the problem is and this is something like you know We've talked about this in space bites I've done any of you's about this the problem is is that the the star has a lot of variability that you've got granules and flares and coronal mass ejections and just small amounts of variability they call this pollution of the signal and so you're watching the planet pass in front of the star and you're getting all of this variability and pollution that's coming from the star that makes it Really difficult to figure out whether or not there's an atmosphere and originally Astronomers sort of had this overly simplistic idea of how hard this was going to be they were expecting We're just going to turn James Webb on look at the trapeze one system We're going to wait for the transits of the different planets We should detect no atmosphere around the closest one would be like Mercury will detect an atmosphere around the next one It's going to be kind of like Venus then we'll detect a bunch of Earths and then who knows what comes next and instead They didn't get a clear signal about whether or not there's an atmosphere There's probably not an atmosphere around the first two planets They don't know if there's an atmosphere around the third one Maybe not but some people think maybe and so as long as you have this this inconclusive sort of level of data then people are gonna have these arguments about it and so There's no reason to believe that web more web time will get you what you need but I you know we have reported on on Some papers that have proposed like what is the number and that you probably want Like nine transits of a planet both in across the front of the star as well as going behind the star And that's a lot of data Like it's a lot of time that you are going to be tying up James Webb to watch all those transits to steer back to look at the Trapeze one system whether this transit is happening Gather a lot of data, you know You have to watch transit after transit after transit to build up this picture to even detect the presence of the atmosphere and Web's got a lot of jobs to do It's it is trying to figure out what the first billion years of the universe look like it's trying to understand the How the building blocks of galaxies came together it's looking at objects within the solar system It's got a check when interstellar objects pass through it has a very busy schedule but there is a lot of Time in every cycle that has been set Dedicated to the trapeze one system because that is the best chance and if they find it at the trapeze one system Then they can go and look at some other red door system and go from there But yeah, it's just they're throwing tons of time at it And it's still not enough for them to get a conclusive answer and it might be that we need a different telescope So the European Space Agency is launching a telescope called Ariel which is in 2029 and that is specifically only going to be looking at exoplanetary atmospheres Although it's going to be looking at lots of different kinds of hot Jupiters Mini napkins things like that and then you've got the recent Pandora telescope that just launched and same thing It's going to be looking at 20 exoplanets measuring their atmospheres and it's going to put in like to make 10 observations of each one of these planets every Year and do like 24 hours of observations on each one of these planets over the course of the of the first year And it should operate to the year after year after year So it might not be that James Webb is going to be the right tool for the job It is a Swiss Army knife You can do a lot of stuff is the greatest telescope the humanities ever built But it is not the best possible instrument that can be imagined to do the work of Examining exoplanetary atmospheres. It might just need to be a better spacecraft to finally launch that will probably be Ariel in 2029 to 2032 It's time to show our new patrons at the $5 level and above Stephen Williams Phil Robert Paine Russell Quarles Arthur Adelberg Michael Traz Eric Starbuck Brian Chalhorn Sean and Suzette join a community at patreon.com slash universe today Nune from a technical standpoint Is there a maximum amount of time which James Webb can focus on a single target? I like technically no You've got the orbital mechanics. So James Webb is orbiting at the earth Sun L to Lagrange point And it has access to the sky except for the stuff that is blocked by its sun shield and The you know under the sun shield is the earth the Sun and the moon and so it can't look in that general direction Because then it will be blinded and the temperature will go off and it won't be able to do its job And so instead you have to wait six months for Webb to come all the way around the You know around the Sun with the earth so that now the other hemisphere of the sky is available to it and can make all those observations So but there but it can hold fast on a target for incredibly long periods of time It hasn't needed to The crazy part about web is that they've gotten observations that are equivalent to the Hubble Deep field Which took hundreds of hours of Hubble time They can do that in a couple of hours with James Webb and half and they can have done more I mean there's been some long observations some some accumulation of observations that are much deeper much more sensitive than the Hubble Deep Field and we're still waiting for Eventually in a couple of years all the different Survey groups will come together and they'll agree on what will be the James Webb Deep field and then they will do the equivalent of Hubble time Hundreds of hours on some spot in the sky and just go right to the very edge of the observable universe Which would just be amazing So really you're limited by the parts of the sky that are available to you with James Webb at the time of the year But this is kind of the same constraint that any astronomy has to deal with that like right now I can go outside And we're just entering the beginning of the summer constellations Jupiter is just you know Back in December when I would go outside Jupiter was just peeking over the mountains In the evening and now Jupiter is just about to set every night So I go outside I can look at Jupiter for an hour and then it sets And so you're always limited by which objects are up in your night sky at the time and that even is the same one You're out in space one hemisphere is available to you in the sky And then the other hemisphere is is crowded out by the Sun the Earth and the moon as very bright objects Earthling fire when can we expect Gaia data release for and are we still expecting it to provide thousands of exoplanets? So Gaia has released three data releases so far and data release for is due for June 2026 so we are just a About a month a month and a half away from data release for it'll be a sort of the provisional Early sneak peek version of it and they'll continue adding information to it And then they'll they'll solidify data release for and they'll move on to data release five There are dozens of exoplanetary discoveries in the previous data releases And so there will be more exoplanet information in data release for I don't know if it's gonna end up being 1000s of exoplanets. I mean, I've heard estimates that there could be anywhere as high as like 10,000 a hundred thousand exoplanet discoveries in the full Gaia release but We're gonna have to wait for the final data release five, which will probably be close to the end of the decade and Then we'll know how many exoplanets Gaia was able to find but it's great because it uses this Astrometry method, you know the different methods the transit method and the radio velocity Require the star to be aligned with the planet But a strometry you want to be able to see the system at some angle or face on and then you're watching the star Make this little shape in the sky Gaia was watching all these stars and watching them all make little spirals and then from that it will have been able to calculate The planets that are orbiting around them But it was never sort of fully intended to do that like it was it was designed to detect the motions and the positions of all these stars It wasn't it was able to detect exoplanets causing these little wobbles around their stars But that wasn't its primary scientific objective So the fact that you can do it is just because Gaia is amazing Page Potter since adding the bonus questions and promoting it and such have you seen notably more traffic on patreon? I have no idea. Um, I don't really think about that so we the the big jump in Patreon that we got was like a year ago when I decided to remove all the ads from the universe today website and the newsletter and the podcast and go ad-free as much as possible and instead just fund universe today purely on patreon and that was a huge response we We got like an extra 1500 patrons and it just completely closed the revenue gap made made advertising unnecessary I don't have to worry about search engines. I have to worry about a I slop. I don't worry about advertisers anything It's crazy. I've taken it too far. Maybe which is that I just don't even think about How many people traffic marketing any of that Anton thinks about that. It's my producer and the editor on spacebites He likes to think about that kind of stuff, but I have just Wiped my mind clean of any thought about how the business is to the business is fine We are covering the cost. I'm able to pay everybody salaries. We're able to pay for our server expenses I'm able to take a salary which I hadn't been doing for a couple of years I am no longer wondering when I have to start laying off people like everything is great and is great in this way that is supported by 20,500 individuals So I don't have to you know, like I need all of those individuals to wake up one morning and go I don't want space news from universe today anymore for me to lose my business Right, so that is very unlikely in it when instead I could I could wake up with a with a bad email from Google saying We've kicked you out of our advertising program or I could I could have a message from YouTube saying you violated our content policies In your you're out of YouTube. Well, that would suck. But anyway, um, there's just no single points of failure anymore And so I just don't think about it. Okay, I literally Don't care anymore. I just focus on what stories am I curious about? What things do I want to learn more about and how can I communicate this stuff better to you and? That's it. That's it. It's great. I love it. Thank you. I really appreciate it All right, so those are all questions that we had in this episode. Thank you everyone who asked your questions in the YouTube comments everybody who joined me for the last live show that I did Just before I left for Japan. So I think everyone now I'm gonna talk just about traveling in Japan But first I'd like to thank our patients. Thanks to Abe Kingston and Ray Pardrety Brian Bodie Karen truck Hawkins commander Bailock dorkfinger David Guildman David Matt's and thrallery reading and math for toddlers Eric Lindstrom Evan dot pro James Clark during matter Jim Burke Jordan young Josh Schultz Marcel sets Mike Purcell Nord space once if animals dog Please follow my nephew at VBrick 699 for rain kairi Richard Williams Shawn Sargent See you in front of the Monday team 49 till so Canada Vlad Chiplyn Wolfgang Klotz and Zelda more galactic to feather who support us at the master of the universe level and all our patrons all your support means universe to us So once again, I am traveling in Japan now those of you who are fans of the channel might remember that I did this two years ago With my son and this was sort of his dream Location to go and travel in the world and it was amazing and we had a great time It kind of really opened up both of our eyes about this whole part of the world And I came home and was raving about it to my wife and she's like well What if we're not when do I get to go to Japan? And so that time is now and so I am sort of retracing roughly The route that I took with my son doing Tokyo Kyoto probably Osaka I'm not sure and some other places and then we will be back in about a week and it's still it's a wonderful wonderful place It's definitely busier than it was I think when we were here a couple of years ago was like just about a year after the COVID had sort of settled down and So the there was a lot less Travelers and things were a lot easier to get into this time around I can feel what sort of normal tourist Japan Probably is more like and it is definitely a lot busier streets are very crowded But still it's an incredible place and just this place where because so many people live so close to each other they have to be able to be efficient and disciplined and Considerate of everybody else's needs and it's just a really kind of wonderful place and I enjoy the food and All all of the anime references and everything so it's great So if you ever you know and I think you know before I came to Japan the first time I really sort of felt like it was gonna be a really difficult place to travel in I didn't speak the language. It's just a Totally different culture, you know beyond like you know sushi and you like you watched anime We don't really know what it's like, but it's such an easy country to travel and everybody is so polite so nice Everything is available in English if you need it the translation apps are there You can use Google Maps to organize and take yourself around and the prices are very reasonable Unfortunately, you know their economy has been stalled for for quite a while and so you can find your way around Japan and really experience the culture and the food and just everything is to see and I put it up there unless it's one of the best places to travel in the world next time I want to use for business next time I want to come back and go to Jackson and go watch some rocket launches and things like that But still sort of scouting out and getting my my my sea legs. All right. We'll see you next time