Transcriber: Thanasis Zantrimas Reviewer: David DeRuwe
I work on the James Webb Space Telescope.
And if you've seen the stunning images it's been sending back to us,
you know what a big deal this telescope is.
So naturally, I’m going to begin by discussing
my two year old’s favorite TV show, “Sesame Street.”
(Laughter)
At this point, I've seen almost every episode of the show,
and a feature of the past decade or two
is a theme built around a sequence of three phrases:
I wonder …
What if?
Let’s try.
The children and monsters on the show
follow this sequence of thought to have adventures and solve problems.
Trust me when I say that their cute, hand gestures
and facial expressions are quite contagious.
But moreover, I couldn't help
but notice that these ideas encourage kids to think big,
dream big and do big things.
While I’m extremely grateful that this is what my inquisitive child
is absorbing during her screen time,
these three threads of thought, and more importantly of action,
are incredibly powerful
and could really define adult imperatives:
thinking, dreaming, and doing big.
We know how big the problems that face us these days are:
COVID, climate change, hunger, poverty.
These are big problems that require big and actionable solutions.
And if the scope of our ambition is going to meet the scope of our challenges,
it will require collective thinking, dreaming and doing to solve our problems.
Maybe that crucial middle question
really needs to change from a self-driven hypothesis -
a “what if I” to a “how do we?”
That is the question itself should explore the ways
a big dream can be explored.
It can be pursued and tap the power of collaboration in that pursuit.
For example, lifesaving COVID vaccines are only here today
because science, government and industry all came together to address the issue.
And if we aren’t ...
thinking big,
finding hope in possibility,
using our unlimited potential to make possibility a reality,
are we even fully human?
Are we doing humanity justice?
I would say no.
Our capacity as humans relies both on our ability to dream big
and to act even bigger.
As much as I’d like to solve world hunger, I’m an astronomer,
so my questions instead, my big questions look like:
How did the universe begin?
How do stars and galaxies form and evolve?
And ultimately, how did we get here?
To understand our origins, our truly cosmic origins,
is a breathtaking and awe-inspiring goal,
and amazingly one within our grasp.
Despite our minuscule size - astronomically speaking -
we as humans have the potential to understand it all.
So how?
How do we study our cosmic origins?
This is an image taken by pointing the Hubble Space Telescope
at a tiny patch of black sky for several days.
And after a long time of looking, we discovered thousands of galaxies
where we’d never seen a single photon of light before.
Let that sink in.
It’s incredible.
And maybe what’s more incredible is that in this image there is a galaxy
from 400 million years after the Big Bang.
Remember when we stargaze across great distances,
we’re also seeing back in time.
So we’re seeing something here from a long time ago
when the universe was much younger.
But how young?
If we understand this galaxy,
are we learning about the beginning of the universe?
Well, to put it in perspective,
if the universe was an 80-year-old person, this galaxy would be about two years old.
As I mentioned, I have a two-year-old.
I can assure you she's undergone a lot of growing and changing,
for better or for worse,
and so has the universe at the same point.
Stars, galaxies, even black holes were different in the first 400 million years.
To understand the beginning of the universe,
to understand our cosmic origins,
we must seek out galaxies even earlier.
But how?
Well, if this galaxy is a small, faint-red splotch,
then earlier galaxies are even fainter and even redder.
They’re fainter because they’re further away,
and they’re redder because of the expansion of the universe.
As light travels through the universe,
the expansion of the universe expands the wavelengths of light.
And when wavelengths of light expand, they get redder.
What’s blue becomes red,
and what’s red becomes infrared.
So we are seeking out galaxies that are very faint and infrared.
And this is where the incredible James Webb Space Telescope
comes into play.
Webb is a giant infrared telescope.
Its huge gold mirror was specifically designed
to find the earliest galaxies in the universe.
Its mirror is over six times the size of Hubble’s mirror
and over 50 times the size of NASA’s previous infrared telescope, Spitzer.
And this huge infrared telescope
requires a 70-foot sun shield to protect it from other sources of light.
So the answer to “How do we study our cosmic origins?”
was to build something as tall as a house,
as large as a tennis court and send it into space.
(Laughter)
Easy right?
(Whispers) No.
First off, we didn’t have a rocket that could even fathom
launching something this big into space.
So we had to design the telescope to fold up inside the rocket
and unfold on its own in space.
Telescope Origami.
(Laughter)
A giant transformer. Pretty cool.
But even then, we didn’t have a rocket that was big enough.
To go this big,
“we” had to become an international “we.”
provided an Ariane 5 rocket whose large fairing size
and a great track record were exactly what we needed.
European scientists and engineers also contributed two
of the scientific instruments on Webb,
and the Canadian Space Agency provided the telescope's guiding functionality
and another science instrument.
With the combined efforts of 14 countries and thousands of people.
the James Webb Space Telescope was built to answer the big questions for all of us.
So did we do it?
Yes.
This incredible thing launched on Christmas morning.
This is a magnificent image of the telescope
separating from the rocket,
and it has been quite the journey ever since.
After a harrowing few weeks of unfolding a house-sized transformer
in space from a million miles away,
we got to work preparing.
Scientists and engineers meticulously calibrated and positioned
hundreds of tiny motors on the back of Webb’s 18 mirror segments
to align them all to work perfectly as a single mirror.
And then they taught the mirrors to do it themselves forever.
And all of these operations were planned years in advance,
as NASA always does, to ensure a successful mission.
But what we could not have planned
was what we would see when we flicked the proverbial “on” switch.
The plan was to bring a single star into perfect focus.
The result ...
was to find hundreds and hundreds of galaxies ...
everywhere we looked.
We couldn’t not see galaxies.
They were thirsty.
They were throwing themselves at Webb.
(Laughter)
Seriously, though.
There was all of these galactic islands of light
where we had never seen anything before.
Galaxies emerging everywhere.
And this is what happens when you ask the big questions.
You get more than you could have anticipated,
more than you could have hoped.
In Webb’s case, more galaxies.
Everywhere.
And now fast forward a few months
and we’ve got the first science images from the telescope.
And they’re even more jaw-dropping.
This is the Carina Nebula:
a star-forming region thousands of light years away,
whose exquisite detail can only be done justice using Webb's powerful abilities.
And even though we see such depth and structure in the nebula itself,
we’ve actually discovered several new galaxies
just in the background of this image.
Wow!
This is the Southern Ring Nebula,
the end result of a dying star shedding its layers in a glorious spectacle.
We’ve never seen this level of detail before,
and one fun little detail is to the left of center here -
a little galaxy that’s cleverly hiding out
amidst the corpuscular rays emanating from the central star.
Pretty cool.
And we used Webb to intentionally look at galaxies,
including this beautiful cluster here known as Stephan's Quintet.
But again, it’s hard to ignore the literal thousands of galaxies
in the background of this image.
Thousands.
Galaxies emerging everywhere.
And last but not least,
in our very first picture of the deep cosmos,
we found galaxies from the beginning of the universe,
galaxies whose light has traveled billions of years to reach us,
to illuminate a previously dark part of the sky
and of our cosmic understanding.
But we’re not done.
This image is only the beginning.
In fact, it’s been exactly one month today since Webb released its first images,
and already scientists are claiming to have beaten Hubble’s record
for the earliest galaxies ever discovered.
And we discovered a brand new supernova,
which is a super-rare phenomenon that we get to witness
from its inception with Webb.
Who knows what discoveries Webb will have made by the time
the light from this talk reaches you.
(Laughter)
And all of this illuminates what we will do:
We will look deeper into space and see further back in time,
and we will continue to ask ourselves the big questions about our origins.
But one thing James Webb Space Telescope can’t answer is why.
Why do we search?
Why do we ask “what if” and “how do we?”
Why do we try?
Perhaps because it gives us hope to dream.
Or because it helps us realize our potential to act.
Or perhaps because ...
no matter our origins or where we are headed,
we are here in this moment,
the most alive we will ever be,
and if we can see clearly enough,
we might just discover hidden sources of light within ourselves,
just waiting to emerge from the darkness.
Thank you.
(Applause)