The James Webb Space Telescope will be astrochemists’ newest and most powerful tool

Delayed for more than a decade, the world’s next flagship space telescope will launch in December, giving scientists an unprecedented view of chemistry around the galaxy

JWST will provide scientists with new ways to study gas-phase molecules in protoplanetary disks that they’ve previously monitored with other telescopes, like the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile. Above Earth’s atmosphere, the JWST will observe vibrational signatures of molecules, like water, that ALMA cannot. And the JWST’s bigger mirror makes it more sensitive than Spitzer, which also could observe in the infrared. “Spitzer gave us a taste for this research,” astrochemist Karin Öberg of Harvard University says. “But its big limitation was size.”

Full article available online - https://cen.acs.org/physical-chemistry/astrochemistry/James-Webb-Space-T...