Dr. David Sing

And actually that sort of 10-minute timeframe is really important because in order to separate out

the spectrum of an exoplanet from the morning to the evening side, you have to wait for this little 10-minute window where only part of the planet is covering the star.

But that event doesn't last very long, about 10 minutes.

And so JVST is big enough to be able to take a spectrum of a planet during that short window.

Absolutely.

So there's kind of two key questions we can start to unravel because we've been looking at these planets for quite some time and we see molecules and their atmospheres and the clouds together.

But now we can separate these out quite cleanly and we can look, for instance, at the clear atmosphere and what its chemical composition is.

And these gas giants are...

basically like fossilized records for when the planet formed.

So we want to use these as basically records to figure out how these planets formed and evolved.

And many of these types of planets we do not have in our own solar system, like hot Jupiters or sub-Neptunes.

And some of these types of planets are actually the most common forms

found throughout the galaxy, yet we don't really have a good idea how they form or evolved.

And so by measuring the chemical composition cleanly with this technique, we can start to unravel that mystery.

And there's another important aspect was actually just studying these clouds themselves.

So clouds and modeling them are the biggest uncertainty we have in studying and modeling atmospheres, and that includes our own Earth's atmosphere.

And with these exoplanets, we're actually using the same models that are used to measure the weather and predict the weather on Earth.

So it actually turns out that we don't know the physics of cloud formation and how it interacts that well.

So by measuring how clouds are formed and the dynamics in these different extreme environments, we can actually improve the physics of our overall models.

Yeah, absolutely.