look at this image
this is the first photo taken by a
device worth 10 billion dollars that's
right it was made by the james webb
space telescope which is now one and a
half million kilometers or about
million miles away from earth
thousands of scientists around the world
were waiting for this photo for a
quarter of a century at first glance
there's nothing intriguing about it but
it's actually as significant as neil
armstrong's first step on the surface of
the moon
so what's so special about it and what
does it show
the photo depicts a star from the milky
way galaxy it was the first photo taken
by the new james webb space telescope
after it was set up it proves that its
complex design isn't just fully
operational but it has an impeccable
performance that goes beyond all
expectations
this means that humanity is on the verge
of groundbreaking discoveries about the
structure of our universe and because
james webb has everything needed to
detect extraterrestrial life it could
finally put an end to the burning
dispute of whether it exists or not
thousands of scientists from all over
the world worked on the creation of the
james webb space telescope for 25 years
and 10 billion dollars were spent
so what tasks do scientists expect it to
solve after all the famous large hadron
collider which is almost 27 kilometers
long took about 10 years and less than
9.8 billion dollars to be created and it
still made it possible to discover the
famous god particle the higgs boson
there are thousands of articles and
hundreds of videos about this new space
telescope so many of you probably know
that it operates in the infrared range
and is 100 times more sensitive than the
famous hubble space telescope
to build such a sensitive device it was
necessary to create the most complicated
folding mirror consisting of 18
hexagonal segments
the launch took place on december the
25th 2021 it was delayed by a week due
to additional technical checks and bad
weather and then when the powerful
ariane 5 disappeared behind the clouds
thousands of people silently prayed
the telescope as high as a three-story
building and an area of a parking lot
for 20 cars had to be brought into a
working condition in space without human
participation
and not only did it have to deploy the
sun shield and mirror but also adjust it
so that each of the 18 segments took a
strictly defined position with an
accuracy of several nanometers this is
thousands of times thinner than a human
hair or billionths of a meter
an extremely complicated task was
accomplished the first good news came in
february the telescope systems
transitioned from transit to working
mode all 90 cables and 107 launching
devices worked flawlessly
soon the first photo taken by the
telescope flew around the world it
depicted the unremarkable lonely star hd
84406
from the constellation ursa major
even though this celestial body was only
picked to test the telescope's
performance at the time people discussed
it more than any other space object
but why this star
well it sits far enough from the other
stars in the sky this way it was much
easier to assess the telescope's
performance as
hd84406 was the only one in the frame
after assembling the james webb space
telescope the project team needed to
confirm several things
they had to make sure that the near
infrared camera was ready to collect
light from celestial objects and then
identify starlight from the same star in
each of the 18 primary mirror segments
the result is a mosaic of images of 18
randomly arranged points of starlight
the device started to capture images on
february the second and
1560 of them were generated using 10
near cam detectors the whole process
took almost 25 hours and resulted in 54
gigabytes of raw data
these images were then stitched together
to create a single large mosaic that
captured the signature of each primary
mirror segment in one frame consisting
of over 2 billion pixels
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specialists then began to adjust the
segments of the mirror to obtain
characteristics laid down by the
telescope's developers
after a month and a half of tiring work
nasa announced that the precise mirror
alignment phase was completed but they
still weren't done with the adjustments
this stage like the previous one was
also marked by a space image this time
it was a star that doesn't have a name
but a catalog number only
aside from the fact that it's 16 times
brighter than the sun there's nothing
special about this star it's located in
our galaxy at a distance of about 2 000
light years and is just one of the 400
billion stars in the milky way
according to nasa the james webb space
telescope captured the star with a red
filter to enhance its brightness but the
resulting image doesn't show the beauty
of the cosmic depths that we're used to
seeing in the photographs taken by
hubble
still it's by far the highest quality
and resolution infrared image we've ever
made in space
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lee feinberg the nasa engineer who was
in charge of the development of james
webb's optical elements believes the
very first properly focused image was
phenomenal
you only see the star and the spikes
from the diffraction of the star but you
see other stars in the field that are
tightly focused just like we expect and
all sorts of other interesting
structures in the background he told
reporters
and that is yet another proof of how
powerful the telescope is
but what are the structures in the
background
they are distant stars and galaxies and
sometimes it's the background that makes
a photo famous
so what could scientists see behind this
unremarkable star
one of the distant galaxies in the
background is about five billion light
years away from us but these are only
the first and rather primitive
observations of the new space
observatory
so far scientists have only checked how
well the telescope can focus on a star
and yet on the first try we managed to
see an object located 5 billion light
years from us
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nasa has also released a new telescope
selfie the image was taken with a near
infrared camera but instead of an image
of the sky it captures the uniformity of
illumination of each of the 18 segments
of the primary mirror
this way a selfie shows the difference
in the gaps between the segments in the
coming months there'll be more
adjustments so that the segments become
almost a single hole
in the meantime the james webb telescope
managed to pose beautifully against the
background of the stars it was captured
by another space telescope gaia which
has been orbiting the same lagrange
point too as webb
taking a full survey of the night sky
every few months
and on february the 18th this year when
the two spacecraft were at a distance of
one million kilometers the gaia
observatory camera took a picture that
shows a very faint speck of light the
james webb space telescope
this was made possible due to a hyper
reflective mirror shield that the webb
telescope is equipped with
overall the first focused image is a
very if not most important stage in the
preparation of the telescope
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but real breakthroughs and scientific
discoveries can be expected by mid 2022
when the telescope starts to take
pictures at a maximum resolution and
when all the instruments start
collecting additional scientific data
but what will nasa's experts look for
during the first year
james webb's first targets will include
small galaxies in our neighborhood the
remnants of exploded stars and the
oldest stars in the universe
the james webb telescope is in fact a
time machine that would allow humanity
to look 13.5 billion years back
according to modern concepts the
universe we currently observe formed
13.799 plus or minus
0.021 billion years ago
so the difference is just some 300
million years and that compared to
almost 13.8 billion years is only two
percent
things that the telescope would be able
to see could be the most interesting
phenomena that ever happened including
the birth of the very first galaxies and
the formation of our universe itself
we hope that in a couple of decades
we'll be able to create a telescope that
will overcome the remaining two percent
if we succeed in doing so we'll not only
see how galaxies and stars were born but
also what made it happen
as of now scientists wish to learn how
supermassive black holes at the center
of galaxies formed we have already
figured out the way ordinary black holes
appear but it's still a mystery when it
comes to supermassive black holes
one theory is that it's possible when
many smaller black holes merge but we
have no clue about how the needed number
of them could gather at one place at an
early stage of the universe
the james webb telescope will also let
astronomers compare the faintest and
earliest galaxies with today's great
spirals and ellipticals helping us
understand how galaxies come together
over billions of years
we're looking forward to what
groundbreaking discoveries james webb
could make so stay tuned and make sure
you don't miss out on anything exciting
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