JWST's successor: The Carl Sagan Observatory - a 12 METRE optical telescope searching for exo-Earth

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The people in charge of managing space telescopes are already planning for the follow-up to JWST: The Carl Sagan Observatory. The plan is to design it so it will be able to detect candidate Exo-Earths!

Big thank you to Matt Mountain (STSci, AURA) who recently gave a lecture in Oxford on his experience leading the planning and development of JWST and who touched on the Carl Sagan observatory in his talk.

#jwst #alienlife #carlsagan

Hammel et al. (2020; The Carl Sagan Observatory plan) - https://baas.aas.org/pub/2020n7i192/r...
Sagan & Salpeter (1976; ecology in Jupiter’s atmosphere) - https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/p...
Mayor & Queloz (1995; first exoplanet discovered 51 Pegasi b) - https://www.nature.com/articles/378355a0
Carter et al. (2022; JWST first direct image exoplanet HIP 65426b) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2208.14990.pdf

JWST weekly observing schedules (made public each week) - https://www.stsci.edu/jwst/science-ex...
JWST raw data archive access (public images available to download free) -

00:00 - Introduction: JWST planning started before Hubble was launched
01:09 - The Carl Sagan Observatory: “Are we alone?”
01:31 - JWST’s design choices and limitations
04:33 - Why “we’re going to need a bigger boat”
05:17 - Simulation of what an exoplanet system would look like to the Sagan Observatory
08:00 - How many exo-Earths the Sagan Observatory is predicted to find
08:47 - The improvement to galaxy evolution studies
09:42 - Launch date is planned for 2034 - why so soon?
11:23 - JWST & the TRAPPIST-1 system while we wait
12:47 - Outro tribute to Carl Sagan
13:22 - Brilliant
14:28 - Bloopers


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👩🏽‍💻 I'm Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford (Christ Church). I love making videos about science with an unnatural level of enthusiasm. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don't know. If you've ever wondered about something in space and couldn't find an answer online - you can ask me! My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars.


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