James Webb Space Telescope

When it comes to studying alien worlds, the James Webb Space Telescope could be drastically wrong, though not for any fault of its own.

That’s the finding of a new study by researchers who looked not at the Webb telescope’s optics, but at the models scientists use to interpret the findings after the telescope has made an observation.

Specifically, the models scientists use to understand opacity, how easily light passes through an atmosphere, are not accurate enough, according to MIT graduate student Prajwal Niraula, a co-author on a new paper published Thursday in Nature Astronomy.

And since Webb studies exoplanets — planets around stars other than our Sun – by measuring the wavelengths of light that pass through a planet’s atmosphere using its spectroscopy instrument, the less accurate models could mean Webb telescope observations are off from reality by an order of magnitude.

“Currently, the model we use to decrypt spectral information is not up to par with the precision and quality of data we have from the James Webb telescope,” Niraula said in a press statement. “We need to up our game and tackle together the opacity problem.”……


https://www.independent.co.uk/space/nasa-webb-telescope-images-wrong-b2168536.html