So far it’s been eye candy from heaven: The black vastness of space teeming with enigmatic, unfathomably distant blobs of light. Ghostly portraits of Neptune, Jupiter and other neighbors we thought we knew. Nebulas and galaxies made visible by the penetrating infrared eyes of the James Webb Space Telescope.
The telescope, named for James Webb, the Nasa administrator during the buildup to the Apollo moon landings, is a joint project of Nasa, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.
It was launched on Christmas one year ago, after two trouble-plagued decades and US$10 billion, on a mission to observe the universe in wavelengths no human eye can see.
With a primary mirror 6.4m wide, the Webb is seven times as powerful as the Hubble Space Telescope, its predecessor. One hour of observing time on it costs Nasa about US$17,000.
But neither Nasa nor the astronomers paid all that money and political capital just for pretty pictures, not that anyone is complaining.
“The first images were just the beginning,” said Dr Nancy Levenson, temporary director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, which runs both the Webb and the Hubble. “More is needed to turn them into real science.”
For three days in December, some 200 astronomers filled an auditorium at the institute to hear and discuss the first results from the telescope. An additional 300 or so watched online, according to the organizers.
The event served as a belated celebration of the Webb’s successful launch and inauguration and a preview of its bright future.
One by one, astronomers marched to the podium and, speaking rapidly to obey the 12-minute limit, blitzed through a cosmos of discoveries: Galaxies that, even in their relative youth, had already spawned huge black holes.
Atmospheric studies of some of the seven rocky exoplanets orbiting Trappist 1, a red dwarf star that might harbor habitable planets.
(Data suggests that at least two of the exoplanets lack the bulky primordial hydrogen atmospheres that would choke off life as we know it, but they may have skimpy atmospheres of denser molecules such as water or carbon dioxide.)
Between presentations, on the sidelines and in the hallways, senior astronomers who were on hand in 1989 when the idea of the Webb telescope was first broached congratulated one another and traded war stories about the telescope’s development.
They gasped audibly as the youngsters showed off data that blew past their own achievements with the Hubble.
Dr Jane Rigby, project scientist for operations for the telescope, recalled her emotional tumult a year ago as the telescope finally approached its launch.
The instrument was designed to unfold in space, an intricate process with 344 potential “single-point failures”, and Dr Rigby could only count them, over and over.
“I was in the stage of denial,” she said in Baltimore. But the launch and deployment went flawlessly. Now, she said, “I’m living the dream.”
Dr Garth Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who in 1989 chaired a key meeting at the Space Telescope Science Institute that ultimately led to the Webb, said simply, “I’m just blown away.”
At a reception after the first day of the meeting, Dr John Mather of Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Centre and Webb’s senior project scientist from the start, raised a glass to the 20,000 people who built the telescope, the 600 astronomers who tested it in space and the new generation of scientists who would use it.
“Some of you weren’t even born when we started planning for it,” he said. “Have at it!”
SOURCE: NEWS AGENCIES