How Webb Will Study Atmospheres of Exoplanets?

Webb will look at the air around faraway planets to learn what they're made of, like tasting a cookie to know its ingredients.

Imagine you have a flashlight and a glass of water. When you turn on the flashlight behind the glass, the light bends as it goes through the water. This is called refraction. Webb uses a similar idea, but with light from stars instead of flashlights and planets instead of glasses of water.

When a planet passes in front of its star, some of the star's light goes through the planet's atmosphere, just like light going through water. Different gases in the atmosphere bend the light in different ways. By studying this bent light, Webb can tell what gases are in the air around the planet, like figuring out if a cookie has chocolate chips or raisins by how it changes the light behind it.

Webb is like a super-sensitive detective, catching tiny clues from faraway worlds to solve the mystery of their atmospheres.