No Biggie: The James Webb Has Just Confirmed its First Exoplanet, and it's Almost the Exact Same Size as Earth

When I was a kid, if I wasn't going to be the Bruins goalie, I wanted to be Captain James Tiberius Kirk. Hurtling around the galaxy with my friends. Exploring strange, new worlds. Seeking out new life and new civilizations. Hopping from planet to planet, saving the day with my courage, wits, and overacting. Occasionally scoring with alien chicks, but in the end dumping them for my one true love, The Enterprise. (This was at an age where girls still had cooties.) That was the life for me. 

Well my existence unfolded a little different for me. The human race has taken its sweetass time inventing warp drive. And instead fate chose to put me in front of a laptop writing about trivial nonsense and telling jokes in nightclubs. So I fell just shy of that goal. "Shoot for the moon; even if you miss, you'll wind up among the stars." Which is astronomically wildly inaccurate, but still a nice sentiment. 

What the universe has done for all of us is let us live long enough to see the human race build and deploy a machine capable of positively identifying another world for the very first time:

NASA - Researchers confirmed an exoplanet, a planet that orbits another star, using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope for the first time. Formally classified as LHS 475 b, the planet is almost exactly the same size as our own, clocking in at 99% of Earth’s diameter. The research team is led by Kevin Stevenson and Jacob Lustig-Yaeger, both of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. ...

“There is no question that the planet is there. Webb’s pristine data validate it,” said Lustig-Yaeger. “The fact that it is also a small, rocky planet is impressive for the observatory,” Stevenson added.

“These first observational results from an Earth-size, rocky planet open the door to many future possibilities for studying rocky planet atmospheres with Webb,” agreed Mark Clampin, Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Webb is bringing us closer and closer to a new understanding of Earth-like worlds outside our solar system, and the mission is only just getting started.” ...

Among all operating telescopes, only Webb is capable of characterizing the atmospheres of Earth-sized exoplanets. ... “The observatory’s data are beautiful,” said Erin May, also of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. “The telescope is so sensitive that it can easily detect a range of molecules, but we can’t yet make any definitive conclusions about the planet’s atmosphere.” ...

Webb also revealed that the planet is a few hundred degrees warmer than Earth. ... “We’re at the forefront of studying small, rocky exoplanets,” Lustig-Yaeger said. “We have barely begun scratching the surface of what their atmospheres might be like.”

What a piece of work is man. On the one hand we are primitive, violent, territorial hairless chimps. And yet on the other, we're capable of such profound feats of engineering that we can perfectly place a delicate telescope in our orbital shadow a million miles from Earth and have it send back data of world beyond our solar system very much like our own. This is something our most brilliant minds have dreamed about since they first figured out we are actually on a planet. And today is the day we confirmed a second one for sure. 

OK, admittedly it's not just like ours. There might not be an atmosphere. We don't know if there's water or oxygen. And there's undoubtedly not the exoplanet equivalent of Universal Studios Wizarding World of Harry Potter where you can buy Butterbeer at The Three Broomsticks. Probably not even close. But when the universe is filled with celestial bodies as small as atoms or bigger than a million of our suns, a 99% match is pretty frigging similar. In the whole vast configuration of things, I'm identical to Jennifer Lawrence. Unless you're really into splitting cosmic hairs. 

And on that grand scale of existence, 41 light years is close. It's practically next door. It's a hell of a distance to our reckoning, in the way that your neighbor's house is to a tick. But given how far that is relative to how far James Webb can see, we should find untold numbers of worlds like it. Worlds that will be even more Earth-like. And eventually, ones with the sort of hot alien action Kirk was pulling on a weekly basis. 

I hope we all live to see it. But for now, finding LHS 475 b (work on the name, nerds) is sufficient. Great job NASA. Take a bow, human race. You're doing great.