Well, first and foremost,
it tells us that JWST is performing
better than the specifications.
The images are incredibly sharp,
they're really sensitive,
and we're seeing not only the
things in the foreground,
but all of these background galaxies,
and so it's telling us that
web is going to be a tremendous
tool for discovering lots of
things about our universe.
The images themselves contain
some really cool information.
About things that are going on
both relatively close to our own
solar system and then things that
are billions of light years away.
And what we know that the Hubble and then
the web now they're quite different.
Can you explain some of the
differences that we're seeing?
Trouble is, they're both space telescopes.
Hubble is an optical telescope.
It sees mostly in the.
The range of the human eye in
terms of colors or wavelengths.
Web, on the other hand, goes from the
sort of red part of what we would say,
think of as the visible spectrum way
out into the infrared, where light is.
We think of it as heat rather than light,
but it's really light,
it just has longer wavelengths
than what our human eye can see,
and that allows us not only to
penetrate dust in young stars in nearby,
in our Galaxy.
It also allows us to see galaxies that
are so far away that as they're caught
in the flow of the expanding universe,
their light is being stretched
out into the infrared,
red shifted,
and Hubble can't see those galaxies.
Web can see them,
so web I like to say is kind of a Triple
Crown in terms of extraordinary sensitivity.
Very,
very faint objects that it could
detect the heat of a bumblebee
at the distance of the moon.
For example,
very very sharp images that could
image a penny at a distance of
25 miles away and then this broad
range of wavelengths of light.
This might be a strange question,
but I think the general public
would like to know also is when
we're looking at these images.
Often the kind of look like what
you would see in a kaleidoscope.
You're just looking at a bunch
of lights everywhere. How do we?
How are we able to distinguish that
one thing is a star versus something
else being something different?
So in the foreground of most of
the images are things that you
know we can easily recognize.
This is a Galaxy, or in one case
it's sort of this egg shaped
nebula of material that's being
pushed out from from two stars.
You can actually see the stars in the
center of it for the more distant
the smaller things in the image.
Almost all of those are galaxies,
and you can tell that in two ways.
From some of them you can actually see
that they're shaped like a little spiral,
or like a kind of an Oval shape,
so they're not a star.
And then for the ones that are really,
really distant that you know really just OK.
Is that a star or Galaxy?
You can actually measure what's called
the spectrum and see that the the
light from it is being shifted so far
into the red or the infrared that we
know that this is very very far away.
And in order to see something that far away.
It can't be a single star.
It's got to be a whole Galaxy of stars,
so that's kind of the way you
can distinguish between them.
And I've seen the images coming out and
was there 4 galaxies or was there 5?
So there's one image which
is called Stefan's quintet,
and that is a collection of five galaxies.
One of those galaxies,
the one on the left, is actually
not associated with the other four.
It's closer to us.
It's in the foreground,
but the other four are actually
interacting and colliding with each other,
and the middle one.
If you look carefully,
there are actually 2 galaxies
that are very close to each other,
and they're kind of tearing each other apart.
As they move through each other
and so it's a really violent,
we're catching sort of a glimpse of
a very violent set of interactions
between these systems of of billions
and billions of stars which in
tearing each other apart are actually
creating new stars as they do it.
That's really interesting.
The creating the new star aspect.
Would you relate that to something similar
as like a fire burning as it goes out?
There's a small ember that could kind of
spark a new fire if it was lifted out.
Yeah, that's one way to think of it.
Another is to think of it as these things
are as the stars within each Galaxy
are interacting with each other and
tugging on each other gravitationally.
They're pulling material out in a
kind of a a streamer if you will.
And and that streamer of material
almost like a firework, I suppose.
Stars are being formed within that streamer.
I saw one image that almost looks
like a like a gaseous image is.
Is that actual kind of a gas looking
foreground with the stars behind it?
Can you explain that one?
Yeah, so that's the one that looks sort of.
This brownish, smoky stuff at the
bottom and then the blue at the top.
So that's part of what's
called the Carina Nebula.
It's a few thousand light years
from the from the Earth and it is
a place where stars are being born.
In our own Galaxy,
so two things are happening in
the bottom of the image where you
see all of that dust that brown
material that is part of the
raw material of star formation.
Stars are being formed there,
but in the upper part which is clear
stars that have already formed
massive stars much more massive
than the Sun have started eroding
away that brown material they're
emitting what are called stellar.
Wins and also a large amount
of ultraviolet light.
What we try to protect ourselves
from when we go to the beach and
that is eroding away the edge
of the star forming region.
And so it's kind of a battle
between making new stars at the
bottom of the image and tearing
that material away at the top.
That's very interesting.
Another question in terms of I hear
we could find other information
while looking through this,
could we find information in terms
of chemicals on certain planets,
potentially water?
So one of the things that web is
designed to do is to make what we call
Spectra of objects in the universe.
Everything from galaxies to individual
planets around other stars and a
spectrum is simply a way of displaying
the peaks and valleys of the
light as a function of wavelength.
Those peaks and valleys are
fingerprints of the chemistry of
whatever it is you're looking at.
There's a very characteristic.
A set of peaks and valleys
for different elements.
For molecules, the composites of elements,
and so by making Spectra of
planets around other stars.
For example,
JWST can tell us what the composition
of the atmosphere of that planet is.
Does it contain water?
Does it contain carbon dioxide?
Does it even have an atmosphere?
And that would tell us whether
that planet you know potentially
could support life.
It won't tell us whether there is life, but.
Whether it could support life,
that's actually a tricky thing to do,
because planets orbiting close to
their parent stars are very very
dim compared to the the star,
and so JWST has to use some tricks
in order to be able to pull the light
of that planet out from the star.
But there are number of ways to do that,
and one of the images that came
out was of a spectrum of a a planet
around a nearby star showing the
features of water in the atmosphere.
How exciting is that to be able to to find,
maybe potential to have life on other
another planet? I mean in your field.
It's very exciting.
It's actually an area that
I'm personally interested in,
and that I'll be participating in
some of the later data that will come
back from planets around other stars for.
Along time, well go back to 1600
when Giordano Bruno said there must
be innumerable stars and innumerable
planets around those stars.
But we just can't see them
because the planets are too dim.
Astronomers that wanted to see planets
around other stars and and that
became possible only in the 1990s.
But the telescopes that we had at
the time could tell us that yeah,
there's a planet there,
but it couldn't really tell us what
the atmosphere was made of and.
With Hubble and another observatory
called Spitzer,
the very first tentative indications of
atmospheres around the biggest planets
became it became possible to detect those.
Now with web we can do that
with planets that are down
almost to the size of the Earth,
not just giant planets,
but planets that more closely
resemble our own home world.
It's very fascinating.
It's just that extra step forward
from Hubble that I feel like we we
haven't seen yet and as much needed
just last question for you and you
have to get running here, but.
What's the next step in getting an even
better and closer look at these galaxies
so the next step you know these are
only a half a dozen or a dozen images,
depending on how you count them,
and astronomers from around the
world have scheduled time on web,
and we'll be collecting data.
Many of those datasets are going to be
even more sensitive than these images,
so that image of distant galaxies,
for example, was not the
deepest that web can go.
It was actually relatively short exposure,
so astronomers.
We're going to be pushing the envelope
with JWST now with their own observations,
and so for the next 10 years
there'll be lots of new discoveries
from this remarkable observatory.