This is what James Webb saw at the edge of the
universe!
Humans have always been insanely curious. About literally everything!
Curiosity is what keeps us inspired, and makes us capable of incredible things.
We are born curious: we are explorers. We always want to know more about the place
we live in and about who we really are. That’s how Colombus found America. That’s
how Neil Armstrong got to walk on the moon. That’s also how we were able to conceive, design,
and finally launch the James Webb Space Telescope, the most incredible space telescope ever built.
We built
it because we want to know what was before us. Because we want to know what will be after us.
And because we are insanely curious about what is happening right now,
while we are alive here, on this apparently normal planet called Earth, and not elsewhere.
This telescope is already history.
And it will become one of the fundamental pieces of the puzzle of humanity.
But is it really this fundamental? What are his characteristics? What has it discovered so far?
And what can we expect from it?
Follow me in this video to find out the answers to these questions and more.
I promise you will be blown away.
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This is not the first video we have made about the James Webb
space telescope on this channel. And there’s a reason for that.
First of all, our scriptwriters are excited to talk about this amazing engineering miracle;
second, you guys, seem to be very responsive whenever we talk about
Webb. This is really cool. James Webb has summoned us here to enjoy another video.
Webb was first designed and conceived in the 1990s, and the original project estimated it
to cost something like a billion dollars. This is a huge amount of money, isn’t it?
But it is actually nothing compared to the final cost. Let me tell you.
If everything worked out well, James Webb was expected to launch in 2007.
The thing is, building a telescope from scratch is no picnic, and numerous delays
and setbacks haunted the project: it was like James Webb was a cursed telescope!
But in December 2021, 13 years later than expected, it finally launched.
Now it is operational, and it is orbiting around a point in space, called the L2 lagrangian point
of the Sun-Earth system.
In order to be operative, this huge 6500 kg monster, had to spend some months
unpacking itself; testing some hardware, and checking that everything was working properly.
NASA had some problems on the way, but still, James Webb is working better than expected: it is
an undoubted success for NASA and the whole world.
People all over the world have at least heard of JWST and its incredible power. But what can
it actually do?
James Webb is equipped with a sun
shield whose 14x21m dimensions are around the size of a tennis court, in order to keep vital parts of
the instrument cold.
And its mirror for capturing light is 6 times larger by area than Hubble’s primary mirror.
Without a mirror, a telescope can’t function. And the wider the mirror,
the more light the telescope is able to collect. In technical terms, a wider mirror allows the
telescope to pick up more photons from further away to create beautiful and accurate images.
James Webb was equipped with a lot of cameras and ultimate generation scientific instruments,
in order to boost its performance in the infrared spectrum of light. Basically, James Webb doesn’t
see the universe the same way we do. With its characteristic instrumentation, it can explore the
universe in more detail, searching for something unusual, unexpected, and maybe never seen before.
Scientists wanted Webb to be sensitive to infrared light and they had a handful of
reasons to do that.
For instance, we know from physics that due to the expansion of the universe, light from the
furthest objects has been stretched to the point that no matter what they were to start with,
they are all at least infrared light now. So, the only way to see these light sources
is with an infrared telescope.
But this is not the only reason to go for infrared light.
Another one is that the long wavelength part of the light spectrum doesn’t get
absorbed so much by the clouds in the universe, while the optical part does.
If we were looking through clouds of gas and dust in the optical domain, we wouldn’t
be able to see most of what’s behind them. This is because optical light gets blocked by clouds.
Nevertheless, the infrared part is free to move through them. Therefore,
if we are able to build an instrument that detects infrared light, we can unveil what lies
behind these giant clouds. Basically, infrared is better at punching through clouds and other
debris.
Here’s what James Webb can actually do.
Let’s start with our own galaxy.
The first object to talk about is a place known as the cosmic cliffs.
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/styles/full_width_feature/public/thumbnails/image/main_image_star-forming_region_carina_nircam_final-5mb.jpg
This landscape of “mountains” and “valleys” speckled with glittering stars is actually
the edge of a nearby, young, star-forming region called NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula.
What’s amazing about this image is that it reveals for the first time
previously invisible areas of star birth. The tallest “peaks” in this image are
about 7 light-years high. The cavernous area has been carved from the nebula by
the intense ultraviolet radiation and stellar winds from extremely massive,
hot, young stars located in the center of the bubble. Those are newborn stars!
This image was already taken by Hubble, but Webb reveals emerging stellar nurseries and
individual stars that are completely hidden in visible-light pictures.
https://preview.redd.it/qdr7lxe2vbg91.png?auto=webp&s=6615082ae095ba2b564abc671e60ed80558b1ea2
And now, let’s look a tiny bit closer to home at
NGC 3132, also known as the Southern Ring Nebula. This is actually a hot, dense white dwarf star.
As it transformed into a white dwarf, the star periodically ejected mass and, as if on repeat,
it contracted, heated up, and then, pulsated. The bluer star at the right helps
stir up the ejected material. The disc around the stars is wobbling,
shooting out spirals of gas and dust over long periods of time. Webb captured this scene in
mid-infrared light — most of which cannot be observed from the ground with a normal telescope.
https://www.esa.int/var/esa/storage/images/esa_multimedia/images/2022/07/southern_ring_nebula_miri/24348419-1-eng-GB/Southern_Ring_Nebula_MIRI_pillars.png
The image on the left was taken by JWST’s Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam),
while the one on the right was taken again by Once again, compare this with Hubble’s image
and take a moment to appreciate the increasing detail Webb offers us.
http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/styles/full_width/public/images/137415main_image_feature_443_ys_full.jpg?itok=xpikvkar
Are you ready now? We are about to leave our galaxy behind.
Take a moment to stare into thousands of never-before-seen
young stars in the Tarantula Nebula, 161.000 light years away from us.
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/styles/full_width/public/thumbnails/image/stsci-01ga76rm0c11w977jrhgj5j26x.png?itok=MTDn90jy
The James Webb Space Telescope reveals details of the structure and composition of the nebula,
as well as dozens of background galaxies. Stellar nursery 30 Doradus gets its nickname
of the Tarantula Nebula from its long, dusty filaments. Located in the Large Magellanic
Cloud galaxy, it’s the largest and brightest star-forming region near our own galaxy, plus
home to the hottest, most massive stars known. At the longer wavelengths of light captured
by its Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), Webb focuses on the area surrounding the central
star cluster and unveils a very different view of the Tarantula Nebula. In this light,
the young hot stars of the cluster fade in brilliance, and glowing gas and dust come forward.
Abundant hydrocarbons light up the surfaces of the dust clouds, shown in blue and purple.
Why is this nebula interesting to astronomers? Unlike in our Milky Way,
the Tarantula Nebula is producing new stars at a furious rate. Though close to us, it is similar
to the gigantic star-forming regions from when the universe was only a few billion years old,
and star formation was at its peak — a period known as “cosmic noon.” Since the Tarantula is
close to us, it is easy to study in detail to help us learn more about the universe’s past.
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But now
hold your breath, because I’m gonna show you something that will blow your mind.
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/styles/full_width_feature/public/thumbnails/image/main_image_deep_field_smacs0723-5mb.jpg
This fantastic image is approximately
the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length, a tiny sliver of the vast universe. It is really
really small, but if you look carefully, you can basically see a bunch of galaxies. And if this
is a grain of sand, imagine how many countless galaxies are out there, and how many stars, how
many planets, and how many Earths. It’s incredible if you think about it, even just for one second.
The combined mass of this galaxy cluster acts
as a gravitational lens, magnifying more distant galaxies, including some seen when the universe
was less than a billion years old.
This is the so-called “Webb’s first deep field” taken by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam),.
It is actually a composite made from images at different wavelengths,
totaling 12.5 hours – achieving depths at infrared wavelengths beyond the Hubble Space
Telescope’s deepest fields, which took weeks. What you observe in this image is the galaxy
cluster SMACS 0723 as it appeared 4.6 billion years ago, with many
more galaxies in front of and behind the cluster. Light from these galaxies took billions of years
to reach us. It's one of the furthest images we have of the universe. It is basically looking at
a picture of the cosmos when it was young. This is the beauty of astronomy: we can observe the past
from the present. Mindblowing!
This light coming from afar was stretched by the expansion of the universe to the infrared
wavelengths that Webb was designed to observe. But why are there arches in this field?
As we’ve already said, the powerful gravitational field of a galaxy cluster is bending the light
rays from more distant galaxies behind it, just as a magnifying glass bends and warps images.
Images like these give me goosebumps.
Among other things, James
Webb will be investigating exoplanets for signs of life and will help us to understand both an
old galaxy like ours and the young galaxies that formed just after the Big Bang when only hydrogen,
helium, and lithium were present in the universe. I’m sure new incredible discoveries are around
the corner. We just need to wait a while. Webb will do the rest.
Hey! This
video ends here! Thanks for watching! What do you think of James Webb? Let us know in the comments
below! Make sure to subscribe to the channel and maybe turn on notifications! See you next time!