BALTIMORE – So far from the sky a white eye: The black enigmatic waste of the place pregnant, The flower of light inscrutable far away. We already knew the faint images of Neptune, Jupiter, and other neighbors. Nebulae and galaxies were made visible through the penetrating eyes of the James Webb Space Telescope.
The telescope, named after James Webb, a NASA administrator in building the Apollo moon landings, is a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. Christmas was launched one year ago — after two decades of hard work and $10 billion — on a mission to observe the world in the equality of people no eye can see. With a primary mirror 21 feet wide, the Webb is seven times as powerful as its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope. Depending on how you do the math, one hour of observing time on a NASA telescope can cost $19,000 or more.
But neither NASA nor the astronomers paid all the money and capital of the state just for the most beautiful pictures, not that anyone is complaining.
“The first images were just the beginning,” said Nancy Levenson, interim director of the Science Institute’s Space Telescope, which runs both Webb and Hubble. “We need to turn them into real science.”
Bright (infrared) future
For three days in December, some 200 astronomers filled an auditorium at the institute to hear and discuss the first results from the telescope. An additional 300 or so are observed online, according to the authors. The event was a belated celebration of Webb’s successful launch and inauguration and a foreshadowing of its future glory.
Astronomers went one by one to the podium, quickly speaking the limit of twelve minutes, they minuted through the cosmos of the discoveries. Galaxies, even in their youth, have already given birth to supermassive black holes. Atmospheric studies of some of the seven rocky exoplanets orbiting Trappist 1, a red dwarf star that harbors habitable planets. (Evidence suggests that at least two exoplanets lack the primordial hydrogen-heavy atmospheres that suffocate life as we know it, but may have atmospheres denser with molecules like water or carbon dioxide.
“We are in business,” declared Bjorn Benneke of the University of Montreal, when he presented the data of one of the exoplanets.
Megan Reiter of Rice University took her colleagues on a “deep dive” through cosmic rocks, a cloud of star formation in the hot star Carina that was the favorite piece of early sky candy. It tells us how the shock waves and ionization radiation from nearby large stars, which were born boiling hot, are constantly reshaping the cosmic geography and stimulating the formation of new stars.
“This may be an example of what our Sun went through when it was formed,” Dr. Reiter said in an interview.
Between presentations, on the sidelines and in the error, the senior astronomers who were present in 1989 when the concept of the Webb telescope was first congratulated each other, and carried war stories about the progress of the telescope. They gasped audibly as the young men displayed the data that went beyond their experience with Hubble.
Jane Rigby, the project scientist for operations for the telescope, recalled her emotional reactions a year ago as the telescope finally approached launch. The tool was designed to expand space — a complicated process with 344 potential “single point failures” — and Dr. Rigby could just count them, over and over.
“I was in denial,” Baltimore said. But it’s pure and simple. Now she answered: “I am living the dream.”
Garth Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who chaired the 1989 Space Telescope Science Institute key meeting that eventually led to Webb, said simply, “I was just blown away.”
At the reception after the first day of the meeting, John Mather of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and senior scientist Webb raised the glass project from the beginning to the 20,000 people who built the telescope, the 600 astronomers who tested it in space. about the new sciences that have their own use.
“Some of you weren’t even born when we were planning on it,” he said. “Have it now!”
A wayback machine
Until now, the expectations of telescope cameras, spectroscopes and other instruments are too high. (Answering power twice as much as advertised.) A telescope without a spot, Dr. Rigby reported, leaving her with enough conversion fuel to keep it working for 26 years or more.
“These are happy numbers,” she said, as she and her colleagues rattled off statistics from the media. Dr. Rigby warned that the telescope’s instruments are still being calibrated, so the numbers could still change. Prepare to recalculate your results at the push of a button, a group of astronomers told the lobby: “Otherwise you hate your life.”
Perhaps the biggest surprise from the Webb telescope in this way involves events in the first millennia of the universe. Galaxies appear to form, generate, and nurture stars faster than estimated by cosmological battle-tested models.
“How do galaxies get so old so quickly?” asked Adam Riess, Nobel laureate physicist and cosmologist from Johns Hopkins University, who happened to be on the day.
Exploring that province – “cosmic spring” as one astronomer called it, is the goal of several international collaborations with the snappy acronyms Observation from Space) and MARGARITA (First Extragalactic Areas of Reionization and Lentising Science).
Webb’s infrared vision is fundamental to these efforts. As the universe expands, galaxies and other celestial objects far away from Earth are accelerating so much that their light is stretched and moved to their invisible, infrared wavelengths. Beyond a certain point, the last galaxies recede so quickly, and their light is so extended in fluctuation, that they are invisible even to the Hubble telescope.
The Webb telescope is designed to expose and explore these regions, which represent the universe just one billion years ago, when the first galaxies began to blossom with stars.
“It is time for the material to cool and become dense enough to light the stars,” noted Emma Curtis-Lake, University of Hertfordshire and member of the JADES team. The rate of star formation doubled when the universe was four billion years old, he added, and has fallen since then. The world is now 13.8 billion years old.
Astronomers measure cosmic distances with a parameter called redshift, which indicates how much light has been stretched by a distant object. A few months ago, the redshift of 8, which corresponds to the time when the universe was about 646 million years old, was considered a high redshift. Thanks Dr. According to Curtis-Lake and his colleagues, the redshift record is now 13.2, corresponding to when the universe was only 325 million years old.
Dr. Curtis-Lake and his team headed the telescope to a patch of sky called the Southern Hemisphere, looking for galaxies that Hubble had failed to detect. At least four of them were specters in the mist of creation. Later measurements confirmed that they were indeed later in time.
“We don’t want to say, we believe — officially,” says Brant Robertson, a member of JADES at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
The record is not expected to last long. The CEERS collaboration reported a candidate galaxy that could have had a 16th redstation when the universe was only 250 million years old.
Now, experts are debating whether these massive galaxies reveal something fundamental and beyond current theories of the universe. Perhaps some field or effect of gravity juice then went backwards and accelerated the growth of galaxies and black holes. Or perhaps the discrepancies simply reflect scientific uncertainties about the details — the “gastrophysics” — of star formation.
Over the past 20 years, astronomers have honed in on a solid “standard model” of the universe composed of dark energy, dark matter, and a smidgen of atomic matter. Rather than break that pattern, Dr. Curtis-Lake said in an interview; Webb had perhaps three decades of observation ahead of him. “We are in the first place,” he said.
The closing discussion fell on Mr. Mather. He covered the telescope’s history and gave a shout-out to Barbara Mikulski, a former state senator from Mary who supported the plan in 2011 when it threatened to be scrapped. It also previewed NASA’s next big act: a 12-meter space telescope they called the World’s Habitable Observatory that would search for planets and study them.
“Everything we’ve done has been worth it,” he said. “So here we are: this is part of the celebration, getting a first peek at what’s here. This is not the last thing we are going to do.”
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