Gary Boyle IHe is an astronomy educator, guest speaker and monthly columnist for the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (RASC), as well as past president of RASC’s Ottawa Centre.
It’s often said, a picture is worth a thousand words, and the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope did not disappoint.
During the press conference on Tuesday (July 12), the world had a ringside seat to the most remarkable images of the universe ever captured.
Over the course of the hour, five images left us wanting more. This is only the tip of the cosmic iceberg.
The deep-field image showed thousands of galaxies, including some that appear stretched. This is not a defect of the telescope.
It is the distortion caused by gravity from a large foreground galaxy. Albert Einstein predicted this warping or curvature of the fabric of spacetime, like someone standing on a trampoline where the rubber mat is distorted. The larger the object, the greater the distortion of light.
To demonstrate James Webb’s power, the region of space where the deep-field image was taken was as small as a grain of sand held at arm’s length.
This cluster is 4.6 billion light years away. This is the time it took light to reach us and when the sun and planets slowly formed from the solar nebula.
Launched on December 25, 2021, the mighty Ariane 5 rocket delivered the seven-tonne telescope into space where it was deployed and gracefully continued its journey.
It traveled for another 30 days to its final position, known as Lagrange 2, a point in space about 1.5 million km from Earth, or about four times the Earth-Moon distance.
Unlike Hubble, which launched in 1990 with a faulty mirror that required a repair mission in 1993, outfitting it with corrective lenses, James Webb is too far away for a service mission.
Who knows if there will be such a mission down the road if needed, but for now, there are no plans to ever visit the telescope.
The $10 billion project is a collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency along with other companies.
Canada’s contribution is the Fine Guidance Sensor (FGS) used to guide the massive telescope as well as the Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS).
Thousands of people around the world worked on this project that began in 1996 when it was first called the Next Generation Telescope. In 2002, the name was changed to the James Webb Space Telescope, who was NASA’s administrator from 1961 to 1968.
These were the early days of Mercury, Gemini and Apollo.
The Webb project suffered setbacks along the way, with redesigns and the COVID-19 pandemic not helping matters.
When complete, the 18 gold-plated hexagonal honeycomb-style mirrors have a total width of 6.5 meters compared to Hubble’s single mirror which is 2.4 meters wide. This results in more light-gathering power along with its infrared ability to observe thermal signatures through clouds of interstellar dust.
Another critical part of the telescope is the sun shield, which measures the size of a tennis court.
Composed of a lightweight material with special thermal properties, the five layers will provide a shield from the heat and sunlight as well as the heat of his organs allowing the sensitive infrared to function without interference.
The mirror will operate at -223 C and the rest of the equipment near absolute zero or -273 C.
In the wise words of Carl Sagan, “somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known,” the James Webb Space Telescope has opened a new gateway to discovery.
Will we someday see the first stars and small galaxies dating back 13.8 billion years? Only time will tell.
Clear skies.
