How the James Webb Telescope found WATER_1080p

We are seeing the first full-color images. Light from other worlds. It's astounding to me. NASA just released the first images from the most powerful telescope ever built. The significance of this moment. The dawn of a new era. This one is the deepest that we've ever seen into space. And this one is an incredibly clear view at stars being born. But this one is my favorite. It might not look as pretty, but this is the one that gets the kid in me most excited. This is the one that I really want to talk about because this is how to find aliens. Liftoff from a tropical rainforest to the edge of time itself. Million mile journey. It's a planet, but not one in our solar system. James Webb begins a voyage back to the birth of the universe. To give us the best view of worlds beyond our own solar system. We are not alone. These are all of the planets that we know about outside of our solar system. And here they are in 3D. I love this. So far, there are about 5,000 of these exoplanets. There are probably way more. I mean, this column right here is where we pointed the Kepler telescope for four years. Just imagine how many we'd find if we stared anywhere else for long enough. This map is incredible. This is decades of scientific work and huge leaps forward in technology. But when I look at it, I feel a little sad. This is the floor plan of our cosmic house. And as far as we know, there's no one else home. Enter the James Webb Space Telescope. It's hard enough to look at one of these tiny specks of light and figure out that there's a planet there, let alone what's on it. So how does this telescope do it? Well, if you looked at Earth from very, very, very far away, you wouldn't see people, obviously. You wouldn't see cities. You wouldn't see lights. You wouldn't even probably hear all of that noise that we're making. But if you could tell that our atmosphere has 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen, you'd know that you had a very good shot at finding life. Hold on, not necessarily the intelligent kind, but the putting out nitrogen and oxygen kind. Now, hold that thought, because I got that footage from Storyblocks, and they're sponsoring this video. I use Storyblocks for footage all the time. Let me show you. Gorgeous shot of Earth from space? Storyblocks. Time-lapse footage of plants growing? Storyblocks. Footage out the front of a moving car? Storyblocks. Seriously, they're an awesome tool for any creator. I just go to their website, I search what I'm looking for, and voila! I can download as many clips as I want. They're all royalty-free. They have a bunch of different options and plans, but the one that I use is called the Unlimited All-Access Plan, because I like to try out a bunch of options. So go check them out. There's a link in my description. Now, where were we? So those indications of life are called biosignatures, and the James Webb Telescope has the ability to find them on other planets. Here's how. When a planet passes between us and their star, they cause a tiny little dip in the starlight. Measuring those dips helped us find a lot of these planets in the first place. But the planet doesn't block all of the light. In fact, a little bit passes through the atmosphere on its way to us. Like, yeah. And different gases in that atmosphere block different kinds of light, and the James Webb Telescope is powerful enough to see what's missing. This all sounds simple enough, sort of, but what's happening here is astonishing. Like, this isn't the scale that we're talking about, or this. These are tiny, tiny specks of darkness against tiny, tiny specks of light in the depths of space. The scientists behind the James Webb Telescope chose to point it into those depths here first. Okay, so negative 47 and 1.04. This one is in the right spot. This is WASP-96b, or this is an artist's representation. Light left it 1,150 years ago and just arrived to our new telescope. And it looks like this. From the kinds of light that are blocked at the tops of these peaks, we learned that this planet's atmosphere has water. This doesn't mean that we found life. Sorry. WASP-96b is a gas giant. It seems to have water vapor in a hot, steamy atmosphere. This is a hot world. And so we're not looking at liquid water here, but we're looking instead at sort of steam, water vapor. We found water vapor on other planets too, but we can only look much closer to Earth, only a couple hundred light years away. The fact that we have this much detail about a planet over a thousand light years away, it's hard to articulate how insane this is. Just think about how much farther we can search now. Again, the first exoplanet data from Webb. So there's a lot more to come. This is a proof of concept. We know that this way of searching works. This is just the beginning. You know, since I was a kid, I always wanted to be alive when we discovered life on another planet. I still do. I watch a lot of Star Trek. What can I say? But what this telescope made me realize is that we're alive right now at one of the most exciting moments in scientific history. Space is the final frontier. The final frontier. We are right now seeking out new life and new civilizations to see what no one has seen before. And it's not science fiction. It's real. A central element of the human future lies far beyond the Earth. If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal.