We're just weeks away from the release of the first images taken by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, and while that will be momentous, there is much more science to come.
One of the earliest programs of the James Webb Space Telescope is a study that will use the telescope to observe a stellar nursery. The stellar nursery's small, faint residents are mostly brown dwarfs and rogue planets, which have been difficult to see with less powerful telescopes.
A failed star is a brown dwarf. They don't gather enough mass to start fusion because they start in the same way as true stars. They are small and hard to see because they don't produce bright light like other stars. The smallest and hottest type of main sequence star is the brown dwarf.
It is almost ready for science. What's next?
The leader of the study said that the brown dwarfs are five to ten times heftier than Jupiter. We don't know if even lower-mass objects form in stellar nurseries. For the first time ever, we expect to see cluster members as small as Jupiter.
There are rogue planets that formed in a stellar system before being ejected into space. The planets are bound to the stars.
The scientists will be able to observe these small, dark objects with the help of the Near IR imager and Slitless Spectrograph.
Ray Jayawardhana is an astronomer at Cornell University and a member of the research team. Being able to observe many objects at the same time is very helpful. The alternative is to take images first, measure colors, select candidates, and then take a spectrum, which will take a long time and rely on more assumptions.
The study is part of the first year of the guaranteed time observations program.
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