WEBVTT FILE

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Another one of the big goals of the James Webb Space Telescope is to see how

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planetary systems got their start. So that would be akin to thinking about

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how our solar system was several billion years ago. So looking

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at the big disks of gas and dust that eventually

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form stars and planets. Another really great thing about

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Webb being an infrared telescope is the fact that a lot of the really interesting

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components in a planet's atmosphere happen to fall in the infrared part

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of the spectrum. When a star has a planet that goes in front of the star

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and blocks some of the starlight we can say ah, now we know how big that planet was

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and also we can begin to explore the light that goes through the planet's atmosphere on its

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to our telescope. We spread that out into a spectrum as well and we can see can now

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now what chemical in the atmosphere of another planet. So for

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example we can look for things like water vapor or carbon dioxide

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those types of things. So the Webb telescope is definitely our next

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step in our search for life in the universe.