Jeyhan Kartaltepe: The early creation of the James Webb Space Telescope and a hero of the early Universe
The rush of preprints on the early evolution of galaxies came first out of the floodgate. The expansion of the Universe has stretched the light from distant galaxies to a newer wavelength. The telescope can see distant galaxies as old as 400 million years ago, and as recent as 350 million to 400 million years ago.
Jeyhan Kartaltepe, an astronomer at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, says that it has been a bit of a surprise that many of them formed so early. And that is challenging ideas of how galaxies formed early in the Universe, she says.
The author of one of the new reports, who is an astronomer at the University of Santa Cruz, said at a 17 November press briefing that it was amazing to see such Luminous galaxies at early times.
This astronomer had a key role in getting the James Webb Space Telescope into space and working properly, providing vast new capabilities to study the Universe.
Yet it was far from clear that JWST would be a success. The project had dragged on for decades and was now experiencing schedule delays and soaring costs. In 2010, just as all the telescope’s problems were compounding, Rigby turned down two other job offers and joined the project. “The science was just so compelling,” she says. Part of her job was to work out how to restore the capabilities that had been slashed as its budget ballooned.
He says the one that scared him was the telescope’s operations project scientist. I could see a beautiful telescope with gold mirrors that focused the light to nothing in space.
She became an astronomer because she was too short to fly the space shuttle. She was fascinated by Sally Ride, who became anastrologess, after she read about her in Carl Sagan’s series. She decided to pursue astronomy as a way into space, because she didn’t meet the physical requirements to become a shuttle pilot. She bought a second-hand telescope, and took it to the fields at night, where she experienced soldering and tinkering with her father.
As an undergraduate, she dove into researching with data from the Keck telescopes in Hawaii. By the time she started graduate school at the University of Arizona in Tucson, she was analysing observations from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, which opened up fresh realms of infrared astronomy. “You put up a telescope that’s just so much better than anything we’ve had before, and you can’t help but discover stuff,” she says.
Rigby credits her activism in the LGBT+ community with sharpening her leadership in science. She helped to organize people against the ballot proposal in California that would have banned same-sex marriage, developing skills as a result. Frank Kameny, an astronomer who was fired by the US government in 1957 because he was gay, went on to become a leader in the gay rights movement.
A thread that ties together many LGBT+ people in astronomy, she says, is “there’s a feeling of belonging, that the Universe doesn’t reject me”. She says the sense of acceptance and safety for LGBT+ scientists is crucial. “Certainly for me there was a sense of being drawn to astronomy in part because of my queer identity — that it was a feeling of being part of the Universe, and being part of the bigger story.”
But it works — and spectacularly so. “I feel really lucky to be alive as a scientist to work with this amazing telescope,” says Laura Kreidberg, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany.
JWST has even made its first planet discovery: a rocky Earth-sized planet that orbits a nearby cool star, Kevin Stevenson at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, told the meeting.
The telescope is capable of looking at objects in the sky. At the symposium, an astronomer showed new images of the moon Enceladus. Scientists knew that Enceladus has a buried ocean whose water sometimes squirts out of fractures in its icy crust, but JWST revealed that the water plume envelops the entire moon and well beyond. Engineers have discovered a way to get JWST to detect objects in the Solar System planets that are moving at a faster pace than expected. That led to new studies such as observations of the DART spacecraft’s deliberate crash into an asteroid in September, says Naomi Rowe-Gurney, an astronomer also at Goddard.
Applications are now open for astronomer to make observations during JWST’s second year of operations. Pontoppidan says that the next round could lead to moreambitious or creative proposals using the telescope now that they know what it is capable of.
Amid all the good news, there are still glitches. Lpez-Morales says the lack of funding is the primary reason for it. She says that they can do the science, have the skills, develop the tools and make discoveries on a very thin budget. Which is not ideal at the moment.
Rowe-Gurney says that the telescope is going toanswer all the questions that she was trying to find.