The Pillars of Creation Revisited: Kirsten Banks, Assists and Science Communicator at the Hubble Centre, Washington, D.C. Webb
Webb also took a picture of the Pillars’ creation. That image is even more vivid and vibrant than what Hubble saw. That’s because Webb is looking at these longer wavelengths of light that are able to pierce the clouds of dust that blocked the light from Hubble. And because of this, astronomers can now see details and structures that were previously invisible to them. That could be dust or gas.
Kirsten Banks, an astrophysicist and science communicator, praised James Webb for revisiting the Pillars of Creation and giving scientists more precise data to learn from about the formation of stars.
“The nebula, M16, is located right in the plane of the Milky Way; there are just so many stars!” Pontoppidan wrote a letter. “This image was taken in exactly the same way as the cosmic cliffs, and covers an area the same size on the sky.”
“Not only are the stars speckled in the image but you can see this fiery redness if you look closely at the pillar tips.” Banks said in a video. “It looks like a volcano spitting lava.”
Luminous Galaxies at Early Times: The First 2021 JWST Mission and a New Observatory for the Solar System
The telescope had to endure delays, overruns, and threats from Congress as it had to endure more than 20 years of technical difficulties. Critics were skeptical of its large size, the Webb’s primary mirror boasting six times more light collecting area than that of the Hubble.
Many other distant-galaxy candidates from JWST are still working their way through the peer-review process. Some could surpass the previous record at redshift 12.4. At least one has already been spectroscopically confirmed at redshift 9.76, in a preprint posted on 27 October to arXiv.org4. Nature listed that preprint as having been submitted.
The earliest galaxies ever observed had some surprises in store, like being far brighter than anticipated. That means there’s more for us to learn about how galaxies form in the early universe.
At a 17 November press briefing, Garth Illingworth, an author of one of the new reports, said it was amazing that we are seeing such Luminous galaxies at early times.
JWST launched on 25 December 2021 as the most expensive, most delayed and most complicated space observatory ever built. Hundreds of failures could have damaged the machine during a six-month deployment in deep space, but Astronomers held their breath.
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.
It’s not only distant planets that have been getting JWST’s attention. Nearer to home, a new observatory will be used to study planets in our solar system, including Jupiter and Neptune. Jupiter has many features and a clear view of its Great Red Spot that were picked out by the JWST by looking in the infrared range. And the telescope’s high accuracy meant it could view small objects even against the brightness of the planets, such as showing Jupiter’s rarely-seen rings. It also took the clearest image of Neptune’s rings in more than 30 years.
It has proved its worth in studying objects in the sky. The astronomer Geronimo Villanueva at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center showed the audience new images of the Enceladus, which are part of the moon. 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. Separately, engineers have also figured out a way to get JWST to track rapidly moving objects, such as Solar System planets, much better 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.
Astronomers can apply to be part of the JWST during their second year of operation, which starts in July. Pontoppidan reckons the next round will result in moreambitious or innovative proposals to use the telescope since it’s now known what it can do.
There are still some problems despite the good news. Primary among them is a lack of funding to support scientists working on JWST data, says López-Morales. She says that they can do the science, have the skills, develop the tools, and make a breakthrough discovery, but on a very thin budget. It is not ideal right now.
But overall the telescope is opening up completely new realms of astronomy, says Rowe-Gurney: “It’s the thing that’s going to answer all the questions that my PhD was trying to find.”
Yeah, we finally got pictures back from the James Webb Space Telescope. This telescope is the biggest in NASA’s collection. So these first photographs from Webb were so amazing that on Monday —
And they were just gorgeous. There was an amazing photograph of this stellar nursery. And you could see all these ripples of gas where new stars are being born. You could see a picture of one of the dying stars, another one of the fivegalactic objects in the picture.
It’s amazing is that you realize that the universe, you just look in the sky. It looks like it’s mostly empty. But once you look at it in these new wavelengths of light, you realize there’s exciting structure.
The scientists were saying that they were speechless. One person said that she ugly cried when she saw the first data. It was joked that all the astronomer’s background screens on their computers have changed.
As you said, Ken, the James has already started to show us things we have never seen before. What else do we expect for it to show us? Don’tspace to me.
So the James Webb Telescope is designed to look at infrared light. The universe is expanding and as a consequence, the farthest objects are shifted to the longer wavelength. The part of the spectrum that is redder than red is what you have to look in to see them.
Astronomy really is time travel, because light takes time to reach us. Light takes a long time to get to us. We are looking back in time when we look at some of the farthest things.
Yes, it looked like the billions of dollars that they spent on Hubble was a complete failure. And that was very embarrassing for NASA at the time. And it took several years for NASA to come up with a fix.
All the images were blurry once they got the first images back. And they started tweaking. Maybe they thought they needed to adjust something. The images were still blurry even after they did something. There had been enough investigation to find that the mirror was not the right shape.
Nasa James Webb Telescope – A Space Mission to Help Save the Earth, and The Future of Space Travel: What Do They Mean to Take Into Account?
And with Hubble, NASA could send astronauts with the space shuttle to fix the problems. There is no such luxury with Webb. Because Webb was bigger and because of its design it had to be at super cold temperatures, which meant they had to put it at this point in space that’s a million miles from Earth.
So everything that was on Webb had to work the first time. There was not going to be a chance to try it again. It means that you have to check everything again. It takes a lot of time to do testing to make sure that everything works. And it takes a lot of money. Over the years the project had to contend with problems.
So we’ve now seen this extraordinary scientific success from NASA, this telescope that is unique, launching to universal acclaim and excitement. But as you said on the show before, it comes at a time in which it’s been private companies, and specifically billionaires who have been making the most hay in terms of space travel in recent years, not NASA.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/28/podcasts/the-daily/nasa-james-webb-telescope.html
Nasa Jakes Webb Telescope to launch on Christmas Day, 2021 (with the help of James Webb and J/Pseudosolar)
And more importantly, infrared light is easily distorted if there’s any sources of heat around it. And that’s what led to a decision to put the telescope a million miles from Earth. So none of the heat from the Earth’s atmosphere can affect the Webb telescope because it’s so far away.
And so they had to do something that was almost like origami. They broke the mirror apart into little smaller hexagons that stacked on each other. They had to fold up the sun shield and pack it in a rocket so that it would unfold and move into place perfectly the first time. So you can kind of see why it turned out to be a little bit harder than NASA thought at first.
And at that point they said, we are now aiming for 2018. And we’re going to say that this is going to cost no more than $8 billion, which is huge, because again, they thought it was $1 billion and change when they started.
It is hard to overstate how significant this was for NASA. This was the signature program that was going to define NASA for decades to come. NASA had to go back to Congress and say that they can’t get this done on time. And we’re going to have to ask for another few billion dollars from you.
There was some concern in Congress about the rising price tag and the need to cut our losses. But in the end, Congress decided not to cancel Webb. It gave NASA the additional money. The project started moving forward again. And that brings us to launch on Christmas Day, 2021.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/28/podcasts/the-daily/nasa-james-webb-telescope.html
First Science with Webb from the Ariane 5 rocket. An Exoplanet at the Hubble Laboratory in Kourou, France
You’re looking at live footage of an Ariane 5 rocket in Kourou, French Guiana. At the very top of that extraordinary machine we find the most ambitious space observatory ever built.
He is on the Ariane 5 rocket. It is a European rocket. The launch pad is in French Guiana in South America. It’s actually a good place to launch, because it’s closer to the equator.
It is possible to add speed to your rocket if you are close to the equator.
So first thing in the morning there are literally astronomers around the world watching the live stream of this rocket. All of them are completely nervous.
This is something that they’ve been thinking about, dreaming about since the ‘90s. They want to make sure that the Hubble mirror is correct, but they also want to make sure that something wouldn’t go wrong because this was a million miles away.
This is the end. We have witnessed and the confirmation that Ariane 5 have safely delivered Webb into space. Good luck, is all I can say to you. And bring us incredible data from the deep universe.
All of the 884 things they did worked. At the end of January it got to its final destination. The instruments turned on. Almost everything worked for NASA. All this preparation and all this testing paid off. They were ready to begin their first scientific measurement by June. The Webb seems to be working well more than previously thought.
One of the main things Webb is supposed to do is look at exoplanets. That is planets around other stars. The first image of an exoplanet was captured by WEBB a few months ago. The star is 395 light years from Earth in a constellation. This exoplanet is so far from its star that it won’t have life. But it’s the first step to studying these planets.
We now have these star systems. And some of them are pretty close where there’s planets. There is a nickname called TRAPPIST 1. It’s about 40 light years away, so not far at all. And it has seven Earth sized planets in orbit around it.
And this is kind of a trick. Because for certain planets they occasionally pass in front of a star. So basically you just have a little black dot. The atmosphere on the planet blocks certain colors of the starlight. So you can actually compare the colors of the starlight by itself versus what colors you see when there’s a tiny planet in front of it. Different molecule will block different colors from the starlight.
You can find out what the atmosphere of that planet is. So a planet that’s about the size of Earth, it passes in front of stars, we can start seeing is the oxygen in there? Is there water in this picture? Is there any evidence that life is alive on that planet?
So basically what this telescope does is not look at the exoplanets directly, but analyze the atmosphere around the planet, which can then basically see if there are things that could point to potential signs of life?
It’s a pretty small star. So the planets are actually pretty close to the star. And three of them are in what is known as the habitable zone. That is where it is not too cold or hot. And if it’s not too hot, not too cold, maybe there’s liquid water on it. If there is liquid water.
We don’t know any of this information now. It looks like it is about the size of Earth. We don’t know anything about the atmosphere or what we can see on the planet. We can explore not only TRAPPIST 1 but all of the stars around them and find out what the range of planets we’ve found in our galaxy is. How different are they from Earth? How common is something like Earth?
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/28/podcasts/the-daily/nasa-james-webb-telescope.html
Nasa James Webb Telescope : What’s Going On? The Goals for 10 Years and How It Happened
The original goals were for 10 years. Because the launch went so perfectly, they didn’t have to use very much propellant for getting the trajectory corrected as it went out to its final destination. They said that they have enough propellant for at least 20 years.
You never know what is out there. There’s rocks just whizzing back and forth in the solar system. And if one of them hits the telescope in the wrong spot it could just knock it out of operation tomorrow.
Yeah, it happened a couple months ago. They sort of thought it would happen. It was a little bit bigger than what they were expecting. But they have ways to adjust for that. And they say it’s still operating — meeting all of its specifications.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/28/podcasts/the-daily/nasa-james-webb-telescope.html
NASA is the first thing that people are interested in: What do we really want to know about the universe and what we can do about it?
Actually, they were actually hoping by measuring how many times it gets hit by different things a better understanding of how much stuff there is in the solar system. So even by being damaged —
The billionaires are changing something. I think it’s a great thing that more people are going to space than ever before. Human spaceflight is a part of NASA.
This is space science. These are asking the fundamental questions that we all think about when we’re up late at night and can’t sleep. Are we alone? Why is the universe not complete? These are questions that, you know, you can argue that this has no practical effect on your everyday life. The things that make people special are what we are curious about. What is beyond the next hill? We want to discover what is beyond the next star.
It is just like hundreds of years ago when people were exploring the oceans and the new continents. NASA’s exploring the solar system and the universe in ways that is very much in the adventure vein that people have always done.
Until now, telescopes had not been able to see the dim, far away galaxies that were found by Webb. It’s believed that one formed 350 million years after the Big Big bang. And while 350 million years sounds like a really long time, the universe is almost 14 billion years old. So in the grand scheme of things, these galaxies were among the first to light up the universe.
If we think about the arc of space imagery, it’s kind of like the history of television, like how in the old days we had the equivalent of cathode ray TVs. And then Hubble came along. It was like we finally got HD.
And now, with Webb, we’ve got 4K. We’ve got Dolby Vision. We’ve got everything. Everything scientists hope to be seeing is now seen with the use of the telescope. And this is just the beginning.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/28/podcasts/the-daily/nasa-james-webb-telescope.html
The JWST Galaxies: Early Events, Star Formation, and Protostellar Formation in Nearby Regions of the Universe
Astead Herndon hosted today’s show, in conversation with Kenneth Cheung. It was produced by Sydney Harbor, Michael Simon Johnson, Nina Feldman, Asthaa Chaturvedi, and Rikki Novetsky, and was edited by Michael Benoist, Patricia Willans, and Anita Badejo, with help from Liz Baylen. The music is composed by Elisheba Ittoops and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.
Astronomers and space fans from around the globe gathered at Christmas to watch the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. The telescope was over budget and behind schedule and was named after a man who had been accused of being gay.
These early galaxies are identified using surveys and deep field images, which use Webb to look at large patches of the sky which might look empty at first glance. These areas don’t have bright objects like solar system planets and are located away from the center of our galaxy, allowing astronomers to look out into the depths of space to spot these extremely far-off objects.
Another aim of JWST is to learn about the lifecycle of stars, which astronomers currently understand in broad strokes. They know clouds of dust and gas form knots that gather more material to them and collapse to form protostars, for example, but exactly how that happens needs more research. They are learning about the regions where the stars form and why they form in groups.