[RobC (OP)]

Hubble produced many surprises.

Would anybody like to speculate on what unexpected things the James Webb telescope might reveal?

[evan_au]

I hope the JWST can see:

• A new Planet 9 (not Pluto, now that it has been demoted).
• A clearer view of planet-forming circumstellar disks?
• New dim infra-red stars in our neighborhood (perhaps closer than Sirius)?
• Planets wandering through space, without a star?

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope#Infrared_astronomy

[Atomic-S]

Well, if we knew what it was going to see, there would not be much point in sending it up.  One thing it might do is give us a fuller view of the outer Solar System, including hitherto undiscovered dwarf planets.

[PmbPhy]

As Atomic-S suggested, we can't know what we're going to discover before we look.

[Tim the Plumber]

The sky.

[RobC (OP)]

People are justifiably reading the title of the topic and giving obvious and silly replies.

What I was hoping for was replies to the body of the post –

“Would anybody like to speculate on what unexpected things the James Webb telescope might reveal?”

Emphasizing on 'speculate' and 'unexpected'.

[Alan McDougall]

People are justifiably reading the title of the topic and giving obvious and silly replies.

What I was hoping for was replies to the body of the post –

“Would anybody like to speculate on what unexpected things the James Webb telescope might reveal?”

Emphasizing on 'speculate' and 'unexpected'.

The James Web Space telescope when put into its Lagrange Point , somewhere between the moons gravity field and earths       it would be much more powerful that the Hubble space telescope,    it is infra red sensitive and can view much more and deeper into the universe and open new doors to new discoveries about the cosmos. It will also be used to look for exoplanets Planets revolving around the stars of other Solar systems, in an endeavor to find other  worlds similar to our or even identical.

[chiralSPO]

I am most excited about the prospect of using the JWST to do infrared spectroscopy of the atmospheres of other worlds (planets and some moons within our solar system as well as exoplanets!), allowing us to "see" some of their chemical compositions. Unfortunately, not all molecules are IR active, but we would be able to  learn a lot based on what we see:

One very nice thing about this is that it is sensitive to greenhouse gasses. This will allow us to refine models of surface temperatures of exoplanets (taken together with distance, output and spectrum of parent star(s)).

The H to O ratio in the atmosphere can also tell us a lot about the atmospheric chemistries. So far we know of reducing environments with significant amounts of ammonia (NH₃), methane (CH₄), and other volatile hydrocarbons, and hydrogen sulfide (H₂S), like the outer planets of our solar system (and Titan). If the planet is large enough, this will also include molecular hydrogen (H₂), but we can't see that by IR, and we should already know the mass of the planet being observed. Then there are the O-rich environments (like Venus, Earth, and Mars), which may have CO₂, N₂O NO, NO₂, N₂O₄, HNO₃ SO₂, SO₃, H₂SO₄ etc. O₂ is not IR active, but O₃ is, and would be a sign that the atmosphere has significant concentrations of O₂.

While we are unlikely to have any direct evidence of life from JWST (though who know, maybe...) an analysis of the composition of the atmosphere is a good but of information to have when considering the habitability of another world.

[evan_au]

The JWST may tell us that building something as complex as a space telescope without a method to repair it and update its instruments will result in an expensive device that has a limited lifetime as an advanced instrument.

The Hubble Space Telescope only became useful after the first servicing mission.
Subsequent servicing missions using the space shuttle provided significant upgrades to the instrumentation packages, making the most of its large mirror and unique observing vantage point outside the haze of Earth's atmosphere.

Unfortunately, the orbit of the JWST means that manned servicing missions will not be able to reach it using currently available technology.

[PmbPhy]

Would anybody like to speculate on what unexpected things the James Webb telescope might reveal?

Nope. If we knew then we wouldn't need it. We build these things to make discoveries. Ones we would never have imagined before we built it.

Here's an example of a discovery which we still can't explain and we can't even imagine how or why it exists. There is a monolith on the moon Phobos!

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160923-there-is-a-huge-monolith-on-phobos-one-of-marss-moons

Here's Buzz Aldrin talking about it:

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phobos_monolith

Its cool extremely unexpected and unimagined things like this that we look out into the stars!

[SeanB]

[PmbPhy]

quote author=SeanB link=topic=66791.msg517746#msg517746 date=1498982150]

[/quote]
Gee. Nobody saw that comming, huh? Yawn!