there is no recent event in space and
astronomy that comes close in hype to
the launch of the james webb space
telescope after a wait that seemed like
an eternity and tortured people in the
scientific community the new and
powerful space telescope has made its
way to its location where it will use
its large lens to capture mind-blowing
images of the universe
some of the pictures will be of the much
acclaimed big bang giving scientists
their best chance ever to understand the
great event that started it all
however why do we need to understand the
big bang and how will the james webb
space telescope help us do that join us
as we dive into the terrifying pictures
that the james webb space telescope will
take and how it changes everything
you have probably gazed up at the stars
and wished you could get a closer look
at them that has been the dream of
humanity for a long time and we've seen
lots of space telescopes up there to
give us better looks at the stars and
other celestial bodies popular space
telescopes include the solar and
heliospheric observatory soho which has
spent the last 25 years looking at the
sun another one is the chandra the
world's most powerful x-ray telescope
chandra named for indian american
physicist subramanian chandrasekhar
examines the x-rays emitted by some of
the universe's strangest objects
including quasars immense clouds of gas
and dust and particles sucked into black
holes it was launched in 1999 by nasa
the granddaddy of space telescopes was
the hubble which has been observing from
earth's orbit for more than 30 years
hubble the first of nasa's great
observatories has revolutionized
astronomy providing stunning images of
countless cosmic objects and giving
astronomers their most distant views of
the universe with the hubble deep field
and ultra deep field hubble has meant so
much during its 30-year run for one
thing it sent us unforgettable
jaw-droppingly beautiful images like
those the lagoon nebula and the pillars
of creation however none of these space
telescopes are as powerful as the james
webb space telescope which launched last
december basically you can say the jwst
represents the culmination of decades if
not centuries of astronomy the jwst
project was originally supposed to
launch in 2010 and cost around 1 billion
dollars his price tag ballooned to 10
billion dollars and it was way overdue
but the weight would be more than worth
it the jwst improves on hubble in two
key ways the first is the sheer size
while the hubble was about the size of a
school bus the jwst is more like the
size of a tennis court it is so enormous
that it is by far the biggest telescope
nasa's ever attempted to send into space
but the size is not the only improvement
here that matters when you are building
a reflecting telescope the key component
is the size of its curved mirror the
telescope mirror is like a light bucket
the more light you can collect in your
bucket the fainter and farther away
things you can see in the universe
hubble's mirror was an impressive 7.8
feet in diameter jwst however surpasses
that with its beautiful gold hued
mirrors that combine to form a diameter
of 21.3 feet overall that gives the jwst
more than six times the light collecting
area of the hubble the jwst has other
advantages making it more powerful than
the hubble one of them is the type of
light it collects you see light comes in
a lot of different varieties the human
eye can only see a narrow band known as
visible light but the universe contains
lots of light outside this range
including the higher frequency higher
energy forms known as ultraviolet gamma
rays then there's the lower energy light
with a longer wavelength infrared
microwaves radio the hubble collects
visible light ultraviolet and a little
bit of infrared but the jwst is
primarily an infrared telescope so it
sees the light that's in a longer
wavelength than what our eyes can see
this is what allows webb to look further
back in time than the hubble and we will
get to how this affects the big bang in
a moment
while one reason for all the launch
delays had to do with contractor snafus
and political interference a big source
of all of them is the complexity of the
telescope itself due to its size there
weren't any rockets that were big enough
to launch it fully deployed so the
telescope had to be folded up to fit
inside a rocket upping the stakes is the
fact that while hubble sits around 340
miles above the earth the jwst will be
almost a million miles away four times
the distance from the earth to the moon
it means human hands cannot fix the jwst
if it breaks that's scary for a 10
billion dollar asset especially if you
consider the history of the hubble
shortly after the hubble launched in
1990 engineers realized there was a
problem with its mirror the telescope's
initial images came back fuzzy and
astronauts had to launch a space shuttle
to fix it however that won't be possible
with the jwst
the jwst will surpass the hubble in
several ways it will allow astronomers
to look farther out in space allowing
scientists to make careful studies of
numerous exoplanets that is planets that
orbit stars outside our solar system
they will even look for signs of life
there however the jwst will not only
dwell in the present because it's taking
us right back to the big bang the
explosive event that kick-started the
universe scientists have longed to
understand the big bang better but
lacked the tool but with the powerful
jwst it is time to go back in history
billions of years
but why is the big bang important and
worth sending a multi-billion dollar
telescope to deep space well the big
bang theory is the leading explanation
for how the universe began simply put it
says the universe as we know it started
with an infinitely hot and dense single
point that inflated and stretched first
at unimaginable speeds and then at a
more measurable rate and over the next
13.8 billion years it has been expanding
to become the cosmos that we know today
for most of human history observers of
the sky assumed it was eternal and
unchanging until edwin hubble dealt this
theory an experimental blow in the 1920s
his observations showed both that
galaxies outside the milky way existed
and that their light appeared stretched
a sign that they were rushing away from
earth
george lementra a contemporary belgian
physicist interpreted data from hubble
and others as evidence of an expanding
universe a possibility permitted by
einstein's recently published field
equations of general relativity thinking
backward lametra inferred that today's
separating galaxies must have started
out together in what he called the
primeval atom
interestingly the first public use of
the term big bang for lemetra's idea
actually came from a critic the english
astronomer fred hoyle in 1949 hoyle
coined the phrase during a defense of
his preferred theory of an eternal
universe that created matter to cancel
out the dilution of expansion oil said
the notion that all matter of the
universe was created in one big bang at
a particular time in the remote past was
irrational hoyle would later deny
intentionally inventing a slanderous
name but the moniker stuck much to the
frustration of some
because we can't see it directly
scientists have been trying to figure
out how to see the big bang through
other measures in one case cosmologists
are pressing rewind to reach the first
instant after the big bang by simulating
4 000 versions of the current universe
on a massive supercomputer it's like
trying to guess a baby photo of our
universe from the latest picture the
chemical elements of life today were
first produced in the first generation
of stars after the big bang we are here
today because of them so the first stars
must have influenced our own history
beginning with stirring up everything
and producing the other chemical
elements besides hydrogen and helium so
if we really want to know where our
atoms came from and how the little
planet earth came to be capable of
supporting life we need to measure what
happened at the beginning you can call
the jwst a time machine because in
astronomy the farther away things are
the older they are that is simply
because light from far away places takes
a very long time to travel to earth that
means photos taken by the hubble are not
only a snapshot of space but also
contain the history of our universe the
captured galaxies appear to us as they
were billions of years ago what the jwst
will do is take that time frame and go
even further allowing us to see farther
back in time with the jwst astronomers
like casey will be able to see so far
back that they'll potentially spot the
very first stars and galaxies hubble has
seen light dating to about 400 million
years after the big bang which took
about 13.3 billion years to reach us but
jwst has the capability to take us to
250 million years after the big bang
does the 150 million years gap make any
difference it sure does it's like the
difference between seeing the first
stars that ever turned on and arriving a
bit too late after the funeral this
period in time when the first starlight
shone through the universe is known as
the cosmic dawn with the jwst humanity
will be able to glimpse at it for the
very first time
beyond that are barriers prior to the
first starlight the universe was
shrouded by a dense obscuring fog of
primordial gas there is no light that
reaches our telescopes from this time
which is appropriately called the cosmic
dark ages there is some background
radiation from the big bang called the
cosmic microwave background a faint glow
that shines to us from before the dark
ages but for the most part the dark ages
is a blank spot in our timeline of the
universe astronomers hope the jwst will
help them make sense of the end of the
dark ages and figure out what caused
this fog to lift ushering in the cosmic
dawn
scientists suspect the starlight from
the earliest galaxies did it they reason
that if you have a cloud of gas and it
encounters energetic light that vibrant
light will ionize that gas and
disassociate that cloud and so if that
light has just turned on it then hits
that gas and really transforms the
entire universe from a dark place to a
light place let's hear what you think of
the jwst helping us to understand the
big bang theory better in the comments
section