Webb telescope images offer a new window into the cosmos

Webb telescope images offer a new window into the cosmos

The universe was born in darkness 13.8 billion years ago, and even after the first stars and galaxies formed a few hundred million years later, these too remained dark. Their brilliant light, stretched by time and the expanding cosmos, dimmed in the infrared, rendering them—and other clues to our beginnings—inaccessible to every eye and instrument.

Until now. On Tuesday, the James Webb Space Telescope, the most powerful space observatory ever built, offered a spectacular slideshow of our previously invisible nascent cosmos. Ancient galaxies clothe the sky like jewels on black velvet. Nascent stars sparkle deep in cumulus clouds of interstellar dust. Hints of water vapor in the atmosphere of a remote exoplanet.

Their sum is both a new vision of the universe and a vision of the universe as it once seemed new.

“It’s always been there,” said Jane Rigby, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the telescope’s operations manager. “We just had to build a telescope to see what was there.”

The Webb Telescope — NASA’s vaunted successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, 30 years and nearly $10 billion in the making — is equipped to access this realm of cosmic history, study the first stars and galaxies, and get closer , to search for potentially habitable worlds. It is a collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.

“We’re looking for the first things to come out of the Big Bang,” said John Mather, senior project scientist for the telescope.

President Biden offered a preview on Monday afternoon, when he introduced what NASA officials and astronomers hailed as the deepest image yet taken of the cosmos, a sign that will likely be passed before the week is over as more data comes out of NASA’s computers .

The image, of a distant star cluster called SMACS 0723, revealed the presence of even more distant galaxies scattered across the sky. The light from those galaxies, magnified to visibility by the cluster’s gravitational field, arose more than 13 billion years ago.

To look out into space is to peer into the past. Light travels at a constant 186,000 miles per second, or nearly six trillion miles per year, through the vacuum of space. To observe a star 10 light-years away is to see it as it existed 10 years ago, when the light left its surface. The further away a star or galaxy is, the older it is, making each telescope a sort of time machine.

Astronomers theorize that the farthest, earliest stars may be different from the stars we see today. The first stars were composed of pure hydrogen and helium left over from the Big Bang, and they could grow much more massive than the Sun — then collapse rapidly and violently into supermassive black holes of the kind that now populate the centers of most galaxies.

The new photos were rolled out at a one-hour ceremony at the Goddard Space Flight Center, which was hosted by Michelle Thaller, the center’s assistant director for science communications, with video stops around the world. A few miles away, at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, an overcrowded crowd of astronomers cheered and screamed, ohh and aahed, as new images flashed onto the screen — proof that their telescope was working even better than hoped.

An infrared skyscape showed Stephan’s Quintet, five galaxies that were incredibly densely packed in the constellation Pegasus. Four are so closely engaged in a gravity dance that they will eventually merge. Indeed, the image revealed a band of dust that was heated up when two of the galaxies ripped stars apart.

A look at the Southern Ring nebula, the remnants of an exploded star, revealed hints of complex carbon molecules known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, floating in the center. Such molecules float through space, settling in clouds that then give birth to new stars, planets, asteroids – and whatever life might then sprout.

“Possibly the formation of PAHs in these stars is a very important part of how life started,” said Bruce Balick, an emeritus professor of astronomy at the University of Washington. “I am stunned.”

The most striking image was of the Carina Nebula, a huge, swirling cloud of dust that is both a star nursery and home to some of the most luminous and explosive stars in the Milky Way. Seen in infrared, the nebula resembled a looming eroded coastal cliff, studded with hundreds of stars astronomers had never seen before.

“It took me a while to figure out what to call this image,” said Amber Straugn, adjunct project scientist for the telescope, pointing to a steep structure.

dr. Straugn added that she couldn’t help but think about the scale of the nebula, full of stars with planets of their own.

“We humans are really connected to the universe,” she said. “We’re made of the same material in this landscape.”

There was uniform relief and praise from astronomers and at viewing parties around the world.

“This event blew me away,” said Alan Dressler, a Carnegie Observatory astronomer who was instrumental in planning for the telescope 30 years ago. “I guess I’m not as jaded as I thought.”

He added: “The growth in our understanding of the universe will be as great as it has been with Hubble, and that’s really saying something. We are in for a great adventure.”

The photos and other data released Tuesday were selected by a small team of imaging experts and audience-reach specialists because the images could show the range and power of the new telescope — and blow the public’s socks off. .

These will be followed in the next six months by the results of studies in NASA’s Early Release Science Programs† Some results, including images of galaxies even more distant than Mr Biden’s on Monday, will be available later this week. All data collected during the testing of the telescope and its instruments will be available on Thursday.

Now that the images are out, “there will be an astronomer feeding frenzy!” Garth Illingworth, a researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an initiator of the telescope program four decades ago, wrote in an email.

The Early Release Science programs, designed to jump-start the Webb era, include studies of the solar system, galaxies, intergalactic space, massive black holes and the evolution of stars.

Jupiter and its myriad intriguing satellites, such as Europa, the target of an upcoming NASA mission, will be one focus. Two other studies will be devoted to exoplanets, including the Trappist-1 system, just 40 light-years away, where seven planets orbit a faint red dwarf star. Three of those planets are Earth-sized rocks orbiting the habitable zone, where water could exist on the surface.

Just as the Hubble Space Telescope has defined astronomy for the past three decades, NASA expects Webb to define the field for a new generation of researchers eagerly awaiting their own encounter with the cosmos.

It’s been a while. What started when the Next Generation Space Telescope evolved in an infrared telescope that can observe the heat of the earliest stars and galaxies in the universe.

As the cosmos expands, those earliest stars and galaxies fly away from Earth so fast that their light is shifted to longer, redder wavelengths, much like the sound of an ambulance siren shifts to a lower register as it hurtles past. The light from the most distant and earliest galaxies and stars, once blue, is now infrared “heat” radiation, invisible to the eye. This also applies to the radiation of carbon, ozone and other molecules that are of great interest to astrobiologists.

An early planning committee concluded that the telescope would have to be at least four meters in diameter (Hubble’s was only 2.4 meters wide) and very sensitive to infrared radiation, and that it would cost $1 billion. NASA’s administrator, Dan Goldin, liked the idea but was concerned that a four-meter telescope would be too small to see the first stars, so he enlarged it to eight meters.

Doubled in size, however, the telescope would no longer fit aboard an existing rocket. That meant that the telescope’s mirror had to be collapsible and unfold in space. NASA eventually settled on a 6.5-meter wide mirror, with seven times the light-gathering power of Hubble’s.

In addition, the telescope would need to be cooled to minus 380 degrees Fahrenheit to prevent the telescope’s own heat from engulfing the faint emanations of distant stars. (One instrument had to be even colder, minus 447 degrees Fahrenheit, just a few degrees above absolute zero.) This was accomplished by permanently parking the telescope behind a sunshade.

But all the challenges of developing and building the instrument remained. In 1990, NASA had sent Hubble into orbit with a misshapen mirror; still stinging with that embarrassment, the agency devised a long and expensive testing program for the new telescope. The price tag rose to $8 billion, and in 2011, Congress nearly canceled the project.

“Webb became the perfect storm,” Dr. Dressler himself. “The more expensive it got, the more critical it was that it didn’t fail, and that made it even more expensive.”

During an early test, the sunshade was torn. “If you’re working with a $10 billion telescope, there are no small problems,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s co-administrator for science missions. “It’s hard to know what’s fat and what isn’t.”

The Webb telescope represents the combined effort of about 20,000 engineers, astronomers, technicians and bureaucrats, according to Bill Ochs, who has been the telescope’s project manager since 2011. It now orbits the sun at a spot called L2, where the combined gravitational fields of the sun and Earth provide a stable resting place. The mirror, made of 18 gold-plated beryllium hexagons, suggests a sunflower floating on the blade of a giant shovel — the sunshade that keeps the telescope cold and always points out from our star.

All of Webb’s troubles disappeared on Christmas morning, when a flawless launch from French Guiana lifted the telescope past hundreds of “single points of failure” and left him twice as much maneuvering fuel as expected and the possibility of a 20-year career in science. The mirror was also found to be twice as good as expected at detecting the shortest wavelengths of light, increasing the telescope’s resolving power.

As the Goddard ceremony concluded on Tuesday, Dr. Zurbuchen and Dr. Mather took the stage to congratulate and praise the team that had worked together for so long and well. dr. Mather said he never worried that the telescope would fail. “Although maybe I should have,” he added.

dr. Zurbuchen shot back: “I get paid to worry.”