Hey there, welcome back to the show.
We got a real treat in store right now.
The first images from NASA's James Webb
telescope are absolutely breathtaking.
They don't even seem real,
but some of us are a little confused
about what we're actually looking at.
Luckily, we have Seattle astronomer Emily
Leveque here to help us break it all down,
and it is so good to see you again.
Thank you for coming back and in studio.
Yeah, it's great to see you
again, too. So let's talk
about it. The last time we talked it
was the days before the James Webb.
Launched and it was a big deal.
Astronomers were watching this very,
very closely, so you've been following
this project for a long time, right?
Yeah, I mean, James Webb has been
in the works since the mid 90s and I
think a lot of people have seen it in
the news and they've seen things like,
you know budget overruns or delays,
but it's such an amazingly
technically complicated telescope
that astronomers have just been sort
of cheering on every step of the way.
We watched it get designed to
get built and then get launched.
And now we're finally seeing
the very first pictures from it.
I had no idea, and I've read
about this extensively that it had
been in the works since the 90s,
so this is an incredible
accomplishment. Ohh yeah,
absolutely astronomers dream
up these new telescopes years
before they're launched,
and then we just get so excited
to see what they're going to see.
You said it was a complicated telescope.
This isn't just something
that is shooting out there.
Can you kind of describe some of
the I guess amazing parts of this?
Yeah, I mean, I'm guessing a lot
of your viewers are very familiar
with the Hubble images that we've
been seeing since the early 90s.
And James Webb is the sort of next
step after Hubble, so there's three
things that really make an amazing.
First of all, it's huge.
Hubble's Mirror is a little
under 8 feet across.
James Webb Mirror is more than 21
feet across, so this helps it to
see things that are so much dimmer,
so much farther away.
It's just a completely new perspective
on how we study the universe.
It also sees very different light.
It sees light in the infrared,
so much redder than what our eyes can see,
but that's perfect for studying things like
planets around other stars or very distant.
Galaxies and that detail of web
means that it's giving us a different
view than we have gotten previously,
and finally, where it is,
it's just amazing because it is
1,000,000 miles away from Earth.
That's much farther than our own moon,
and it's actually orbiting so that it stays.
It keeps the earth between it and the sun,
so the telescope stays in perfect darkness.
Now, anyone who stargazed knows
that the darker it is,
the better.
So this telescope is so dark
and in such a perfect place for
the science it's trying
to do it. And see everything. Yes,
let's look at some of the images it has
been seeing and taking. I mean, this
is unbelievable.
What is this is called? The deep field?
Yes, so this is the famous first image
that was released from James James Webb.
And if you look in the center of the image
you see these sort of fuzzy white blobs.
Each one of those fuzzballs is a
Galaxy that make up a cluster of
galaxies and those are about four
and a half billion light years away.
So that's already amazing.
But the combined.
Mass of those galaxies is so large
that it actually warps space and it
bends the light of galaxies behind
it so that light gets brighter.
It makes those weird sort of Arc shapes.
You can see there's one that
kind of looks like a pancake.
That process of bending the light
is called gravitational lensing,
and it means that we can magnify and
look at galaxies much farther away than
even four and a half billion light years.
Every little blob in that picture is Galaxy.
It's incredible.
That is incredible.
OK, this is the web spectrum
showcasing the Galaxy composition,
yes, so in that picture you're
probably looking at, you know,
the big arching galaxies or the
little spirals and all those
beautiful details you can see.
But the things that astronomers
get super excited about are the
little red blobs in the background,
and you can see in that box on the
upper left we zoomed in on one of
those little blobs and we took this
type of data called the spectrum.
So we take light and we sort
it out according to its color.
When you do that, you can.
Actually, pick up little bright
spikes or dips of light being
produced by atoms so we can see
signs of hydrogen or oxygen
or neon in a Galaxy like that.
It
says 113 point 1 billion years
light years, so we know that light
has a speed limit and because of
that we know that the light we're
seeing now from this Galaxy left
that Galaxy 13.1 billion years ago.
The universe is only 13.8 billion
years old, so we're seeing.
We're seeing a baby picture of the universe.
We're seeing the light from that Galaxy
back when the universe was much younger
and from doing this we can learn
about how the galaxies making stars,
what its chemistry is,
how we can go from the way that Galaxy
looked to the way galaxies looked today.
It's just an amazingly powerful
view of every little tiny red dot
that you can see in that image.
This
is so cool. OK, this is this is amazing.
This is the Carina Nebula.
Yes, so the Carina Nebula is about 7000.
Eight years from Earth.
So absolutely in the backyard
compared to the picture we just saw.
But what's exciting about this
nebula is that it's a place
where new stars are being born,
and this isn't something
that a lot of people know.
People don't necessarily realize
that stars are born and actually
grow old and evolve and then die,
and we're looking at the
birth places of new stars now.
We've studied the Carina Nebula before,
but the detail of James Webb and the
fact that this telescope can see,
like I said, that light too.
Bad for our eyes means that it
can really zoom in on the gas and
the dust and the building blocks
of stars in that nebula so we
can get this beautifully detailed
view of how new stars are made.
Wow,
So
what happens next? What?
What are astronomers going
to do with this information?
So we as astronomers really get to
tackle some of the most fundamental
questions that humans ask.
We are asking questions, you know,
where did the universe come from?
Are we alone?
What does the future hold?
And James Webb is really specifically.
Built to answer these questions,
we have a whole slate of observations
planned for this new telescope.
It has a full schedule and as we observe
we're going to get to look at things
like other really distant galaxies.
We're going to get to look at
planets around other stars.
We're going to get to look at individual
stars and exactly how they're born
and how they go through their lives.
And that's directly going to help us
answer these sort of philosophical,
fundamental questions.
So we're we're all ready to keep
observing with the telescope.
We only have a couple of seconds left,
but I have to ask you, James Webb
is expected to be out there 20 years
before it runs out of gas, so to speak.
What do we expect to see from it future?
I think we expect to get
our minds blown a lot more.
We're going to be looking at
planets around other stars.
We're going to be looking
at how stars evolve.
I'm so excited to get my own data from it.
I have colleagues getting new
data from James Webb right now,
so there's a lot more to come.
I could
listen to you literally all day.
Talk about this and we actually,
we're not gonna let you go just yet.
If you can stick around for a second,
we've got some. Really elementary
questions about the universe.
We just had to ask you.