Actually I don't think oxygen has been detected in any exoplanet atmosphere. And typically the atmospheres in which water has been detected are large Jovian exoplanets. My sense is that we don't yet have the telescopes/instrumentation to detect things like oxygen in the atmosphere of an Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone.
At least in astronomy, this is pretty standard when publishing in Nature or Science. Typically all the press releases are coordinated together with the release of the actual publication.
I use supercomputers which only have a terminal interface. I found it was easier to do most of the development of the code on my machine with a GUI (e.g. Pycharm or VSCode) and then push code to the cluster for production runs. I use vim for minor adjustments, but it seemed way easier to just push code rather than configuring vim when something like VSCode is so much easier to get set up.
I recently learned that some of the density waves in Saturn ( shown in the top picture in the article) are due to pressure waves in the interior of Saturn itself, so the rings can actually be used to study the composition of the interior of Saturn. I thought that was pretty remarkable.
Oh yeah, those do cover the same wavelength range. The atmosphere of the Earth absorbs a lot of the light and has a strong thermal background though. The sensitivity of JWST is orders of magnitude better than ground/airborne observatories [1], so things that JWST want to do will be basically impossible from the ground.
We currently have the 80 cm Spitzer telescope in space that covers the same wavelength range, and the 3.5 m Herschel telescope also recently finished its mission at slightly longer wavelengths. So really to make breakthroughs in science to justify the cost of a space mission, we need the full 6.5 m telescope.
I believe the initial estimates for the budget were extremely optimistic. I believe after Congress almost cut funding on it, they came up with a very realistic budget and schedule and have been following it very closely since. I know people who are working on the testing, and it seems like they aren't cutting corners. So I wouldn't worry more than normal for deploying a 6.5 m telescope in space.
This is probably unlikely as JWST is designed to fly in L2 and not in a geosynchronous orbit. Additionally, at the wavelengths it is operating at (mid-infrared), if it pointed towards Earth, it'd just see the heat of the Earth's atmosphere. Probably not very great for spying.
Actually, us astronomers will never have to script anything with JS. They'll give us a GUI which will limit what we can do to strictly valid commands: e.g. point the telescope at this position in the sky and observe using this instrument for this much time.
Not an expert in this, but you would need a lot of eigenfaces to capture the variance (i.e. a lot of upfront cost storing all the eigenimages). It might be good for something that is very standardized (e.g passport photos where everyone is in the same position) but otherwise I think there probably is too much variance to keep the number of eigenimages to a reasonable number.
Basically, dark matter is something that has gravitational pull, but shows no other evidence of its existence. We have seen evidence for dark matter in galaxy rotation curves, galaxy cluster interactions, and the cosmic microwave background fluctuations, so we know it's not a mistake (each of these measurements are independent and do not share common systematic errors). We know it's not normal matter (e.g. black holes), because we at least somewhat understand the physics of how normal matter works, and we would expect to see something observationally if it is just normal matter. Since it is not normal matter, using Occam's razor, we can only postulate it is something that has gravitational pull but doesn't interact otherwise. Perhaps once we figure out how to study dark matter, we can tease out some of its properties and it won't just be all lumped together as "dark matter".
This. It important to note that there are SO many factors that we don't know that can prevent habitability (for Earth definitions of habitability). We will need detailed study of its atmosphere to really understand habitability, and even then there are many mechanisms (e.g. volcanism) that can produce false positive biosignatures. For all we know, this planet could still have a hydrogen atmosphere (i.e. more akin to a Hot Neptune). Still, this is a really exciting discovery and will prompt a lot of follow-up studies in the future to really understand the system.
NASA actually did do a feasibility study on the Terrestrial Planet Finder (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrestrial_Planet_Finder) as a space-based telescope to find terrestial planets orbiting other stars, and one of the versions is an infrared interferometer flying in formation in space. Unfortunately, they never followed through with it (I'm guessing due to technical challenges).
To add on to this, adaptive optics systems can be used to correct for atmospheric turbulence. The latest adaptive optics instruments have been able to achieve diffraction-limited imaging (i.e. comparable to if the telescope was in space) with 8 meter telescopes in the near-infrared (1-2 microns), resulting in ~2e-7 radian resolution. Pushing this to larger telescopes and shorter wavelengths will improve this resolution.
The bigger problem is actually blocking out the glare of the host star. Especially for a planet this close in angular separation to its host star, blocking out the light from the host star is challenging and requires sophisticated instrumentation (e.g. coronagraphs). The problem with the more sophisticated instrumentation is that you also lose throughput (when trying to block out stellar light, you also end up blocking a lot of light from the planet), meaning we will need a lot of telescope time in addition to sophisticated instrumentation to eventually image this planet.
The most promising technique at this point is to use optical interferometry to resolve the surface of the planet. In this case, you will need two telescopes (likely in space) separated by a baseline distance, "d". The two telescopes will require extremely precise synchronization in both spatial position and timing so that the light they collect will interfere at precisely the right phase, but if this can be achieved, the angular resolution of such a telescope in radians is wavelength/d. An earth sized planet has a diameter of ~13,000 km. To "resolve the planet", we would need to be able to distinguish one half of the planet from the other, meaning we need to see at a resolution of ~6000 km on the surface. Proxima Centauri is ~4 light years away, meaning that this requires an angular resolution of 1.5e-10 radians or 30 microarcseconds. That's over 30,000 times smaller than the angular size of a human hair held at arms length!) To achieve 30 microarcsecond resolution with our optical interferometer operating at 600 nm (visible light), we need the two telescopes to be 4 km apart, which practically doesn't sound unfeasible.
Alternatively, you could construct a 4 km telescope, but that's far bigger than any optical telescope we have now or in the near future (the biggest telescope in the next 20 years will be 40 meter in diameter).
I actually just manually check arxiv every morning for the new submissions in my field. It's like getting in the habit of browsing reddit except with a lot less cute animal pictures (maybe because I'm not in biology).
I think that's a consequence of spherical symmetry. I'm not sure I have the entire logic worked out, but because it's isotropic, then the distributions need to be uniform I think.
I'm involved in some astronomy outreach/teaching activities and this looks like it'd be really useful for that, as it's hard to come up with hands-on activities about star formation and stellar evolution.
Not quite, I think. The supernova is more used to study the dark matter lens, which cannot be seen directly. Seeing the supernova being lensed by different parts of the galaxy cluster will allow them to map the dark matter profile of the galaxy and study how it's distributed.
Actually, you can use this unit system (called Geometrized units [1]) for anything, but it is especially convenient for describing black holes and general relativity in general. As a rule of thumb, in the geometrized units, 1 solar mass = ~1.5 km = ~5 microseconds. They have the same units so you can use them interchangeably (Our sun weights 5 microseconds).
Technically, the radius of a black hole is uniquely determined by its mass, so one can construct a unit system where mass and radius use the same unit of measure...
I think these images help them figure out what's interesting to study as the probe gets closer. It's going to zoom by, so they need to know beforehand what to look at.
After knowing the answer is beige, it's not actually surprising after looking at the spectrum. The spectrum they show is mostly flat so you don't expect one color to dominate much over another (maybe a bit more red than blue..).