First Images: James Webb Space Telescope’s New View of the Cosmos

hello everyone welcome to what i think many of you know is a truly historic day for science for astronomy for really human ingenuity and the the passion to explore you know our our programming here at the world science festival is under the banner of big ideas the big idea series what we're talking about today is among the really biggest ideas because it spans not only trying to understand the cosmos but to explore the cosmos to observe the cosmos to measure the cosmos in ways that we have never done before of course i'm talking about the james webb space telescope you may recall that it launched back on christmas day 2021 traveled around a million miles out into space to the l2 point the second lagrange point for those of you who remember your classical mechanics then spent a nice period of time unfurling the sun shade that will protect the delicate imagery unfolding the 21-foot mirror with these 18 hexagonal pieces fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle and then began observing the cosmos and today the first images from the james webb space telescope were released and we're going to have a discussion with some of the key people responsible for this amazing technological scientific feat we're gonna have a conversation about those images what they tell us both about the capacity of the telescope as well as the insights that perhaps we are going to gain in the next weeks months years as it turns out even decades so joining me first for this conversation is someone who is familiar to many of you he's been on many of our world science festival programs in the past i'm referring of course to nobel prize winner and senior project scientist for the james webb space telescope john mather so john welcome to the conversation my goodness thank you for having us yeah and i can't imagine what it must feel like i mean you've been at this for what 25 years maybe actually more um it feels like a tremendous relief because something that was really pretty scary worked out very well in the end and um very exciting to see the possibilities coming because we never knew what this telescope would actually show us until we did it so we just finished setting it up on sunday so can you just take us through that we're going to bring in a number of your colleagues in just a moment to go through some of the the images that were released today but can you just set the scene for us i briefly went through the history but you know so from launch until today what's been happening well it took us as you said two weeks to unfold the telescope then it took us another um almost four months to finish setting up the telescope itself and then another two months to uh finish setting up the instruments so we know how to focus them all how to set up the exposure times all the things you have to do with a very complicated digital camera so there it is out in space and it's got all these filters to choose and the exposure calculator and all those things we have to verify that it's really in focus so we did that and now we are sure it's working and and were there moments when you metaphorically or literally were holding your breath because if such and such didn't happen it was over is that the kind of situation that you faced well of course it is but uh i'm not good at holding my breath so um i'm take a take it as as it comes you know we built it we did everything we could to make it work and as it turned out everything worked we didn't have to go to the backup plan for anything so it's a testament to the brilliant engineering that we did and the brilliant people that made that possible what about that that we heard certainly i i didn't follow it in detail because it turned out i'd gather to not be a big deal but a little space pellet rock something hidden yeah it did indeed we've actually had about six of them uh only one was really noticeable but even that one was about a thousandth of an inch across if you had it in your fingers you'd never know but it travels at maybe 30 000 kilometers sorry 30 kilometers a second you know that's fast enough to hurt so it did actually make a little dent and it's okay but it's okay all right well great and and and so before i bring in four of your colleagues to discuss some of the images in detail and i'm of course i'd love to hear your detailed comments on those images as well but overall i i mean are you over the moon with maybe that's not the right metaphor you know i should say you know the whole telescope or over the l2 point whatever the right metaphor is i mean the whole galaxy yeah we have done what we said we would do it was incredibly difficult it took forever it involved all our international partners in huge aerospace companies so a teamwork of twenty thousand people to put this thing together and make it twenty thousand twenty thousand people so our project manager bill oaks at goddard space flight center made that happen so um we were thrilled that he did that and you're going to meet the people that made this happen building up the instruments that are in the telescope or attached to the telescope i think it's maybe worthwhile saying we all had history before we got to this as was mentioned i worked on the kobe satellite at the same time we were building that my friendly competitors who were stealing the best engineers to work on the hubble space telescope and people were already planning the spitzer space telescope so at least two of us worked on the spitzer as well so wow when it came time to think about what are we going to do next after the hubble there was already a conference before hubble's launched that said this is what we think we need to do after we got the hubble fixed a committee wrote a book that said please build us this and we did what they said yeah it's amazing it's amazing it's a brilliant book it gives you goosebumps to read it yeah uh i'll have to check it out but that really is just a an amazing even summary story of uh an incredible achievement so let me bring in some of the folks that you just made reference to uh pierre farway george and marsha rieke they've spent i gather almost as much time devoted to the web telescope as you have maybe not quite as many years but uh certainly have devoted significant part of their professional lives over the past couple of decades leading the development of a number of the key scientific instruments that make the web telescope what it is so more specifically marcia is the principal investigator for the near infrared camera known as near cam which produced the stunning deep space image that many of us saw president biden react to unveil yesterday which was a which certainly was a fun moment pierre is the european space agency's project scientist for the near infrared spectrograph known as near spec which is using innovative technology to help scientists find the earliest galaxies in the universe and george is the science team lead for the mid-infrared instrument known as miri which measures infrared wavelengths that are beyond the scope of either near camera near spec has no doubt we will hear as we go forward so i'd like to welcome them to our discussion we also may have uh rene oh oh we do have everybody fantastic i wasn't sure if renee bayonne was here but he's the principal investigator for canada's contribution to the web telescope which can be thought of in some sense as a twofer it's a fine guidance system and also a near infrared imager and slit this spectrograph known as near s so let's jump right in first of all thank you all for taking time out for what must be an incredibly busy day to have a exploration and conversation about the images that were released i'd like to begin with the first the the deep space image that president biden saw yesterday and it was it was quite it's quite touching yesterday to see president biden almost like a little kid you know just so excited by all of the ideas that are embodied in this image so marcia let's begin with you because i think near cam your instrument plays certainly a key role in in fashioning this image can tell us what we're seeing here and and how you go about extracting the data that allows an image like this to uh to be shown to the world okay what you're seeing is a near cam image that's comprised of six different colors near cam can measure two colors at once so it took three different exposure settings to get these six colors and you can see if you look closely there are some objects that are very red and then some that are look much bluer you will also see some objects um just a little bit right of center that that look kind of like little arcs what we're seeing is a galaxy cluster that's about 4 billion light years away in other words we're seeing some whitish fuzzy elliptical shaped galaxies at the center that are the star cluster in the that is far enough away that the earth was hardly formed and it has the effect of its gravitational field bending light so we get these funny arc-like things that are actually background galaxies elsewhere in the image you can see little smudges that are very distant galaxies and when you have these six colors from near cam what you can do is make some what i would call guesstimates of how far away they are by the distribution of the colors and one of the ways that pierre and i have teamed our teams have come together to use web for a project that will be done in september is to take an image like this figure out from the colors which are likely to be the most interesting distant galaxies and then use near-spec to take spectra of them which is exactly what was done with this instrument this image as well so we're seeing as far as i can estimate not all the way back to the big bang but within a few hundred million years and we're hoping in timber that we'll get within maybe 50 million years and so einstein would certainly be thrilled by those arcs no doubt something that comes right out i mean you know any of us who teach the general theory of relativity we teach this to our students and you know to see it right there in the imagery is is really quite stunning but you made reference to pierre's work and near spec so so pierre can you tell us i mean i i think our audience probably already knows but quickly what is a you know what does it mean to do spectroscopy what does that word mean in this context and then what do you do with sort of an image of that sort to take the analysis even further and perhaps image on our team image 17 might be a good one to bring up when pierre is describing it i think trying to explain first uh in fact it's a nearby this one a nearest image and accompanied by a nearest spectra so to explain basically when you take an image marcia told about these different filters so you you look at different colors spectroscopy you push it further you break down in colors but in very large very large number of small color amounts basically from a few hundreds to thousands and you create a spectrum and it's very similar to what happens okay when the raindrops split the light of our sun into a rainbow as a clear rainbow is a spectrum of our sun okay so both near east near spec they are more sophisticated than raindrops much more more accurate also so we use what we call grisom or prisms or gratings to to split the light in its colors and you get this spectra so then the game is really to look at is there what which amount of light do you get in any color we call them wavelengths so on these uh diagrams this is the x-axis wavelength and what you see here is that at some wavelengths at some colors you get actually a spike of light more light and it's actually the fingerprint of some elements in this case the oxygen and hydrogen and we know where these these lines are expected these lines they are expected and depending on where we observe them we can actually figure out or all this galaxy moves to uh away from us in this case and in fact from that get their distances and this example is striking because you were talking about einsteins and the gravitational uh lensing here you have a two inverse small squares you can see two distorted galaxies some arcs which are actually two images of the same galaxy we think it's the same uh galaxies and when you look at the spectra from nearest you look at them and you find that indeed this line they fall exactly at the same place as the same wavelength really giving us a stronger proof but this is the same galaxy okay they don't have to be of the same amount of light because when they get length they get magnified differently so they may one may be brighter than the other but really the telltale sign is the position of these lines and spectroscopy as you can see brings additional information about what is inside this galaxy so that's kind of usually terrible yeah okay that's wonderful so so renee so nearest is a instrument that is close to your heart can you take us even a little bit further into what what we're seeing and what how does the way in which your instrument takes the spectrum how does that differ from say near spec so there's two of these spectrum instruments how do they differ okay so the the image you just shown that that was a an image from uh in fact some spectroscopy data from nearest so this is one of the four observing modes from nearest so in this mode we can take spectra everything everywhere in in the scene now near spec does it by taking little slitlets by selecting the object that's the near spec data here and in fact to do spectroscopy that's the way to do it you really want to isolate your objects from any background contaminations from other sources even the sky the sky background is bright and you want to avoid these contaminations now so near spec can take you know a few hundred objects at the same time now in nerius we don't have any slits so we take spectra of everything in the scene now you do it with less sensitivity but instead of looking at you know a few hundred objects you're looking at maybe you know thousands of objects at the same time so it's very complementary to to uh uh to to an airspace to do spectroscopy and pierre um and so it's a way to actually find candidate pirate ship object very distant objects and then tell new spec and maybe look that's an object of interest so you should put your slit on it to get much more detail so you have a very good example here uh this one that has you know show oxygen but which better the definitions it's an object that has a look back time of 13.1 billion years so that's one of the uh uh observing mode and what i like of this of this image of the deep field is that it's it was observed on all four sciences instruments it just shows how the four science and sentiment are complementary with one another to do one common science team in this case study the most distant galaxies in the universe so let's bring in the fourth instrument if we could so george you're dealing with wavelengths that are a little bit different than the others can you tell us well in fact why don't you even tell us why infrared we haven't actually said that so that might be a good thing and why the particular range of wavelengths that miri focuses upon so i'm representing the mid-infrared instrument that starts at five microns that's about 10 times longer wavelength than visible light and goes out to about 25 microns and that is a very difficult wavelength range to observe from the ground because that's where the infrared emission of the atmosphere and your telescope just off the detector and in fact we learned how to detect sources that were maybe 100 000 of the total flux coming onto the detector that in itself was miraculous that gave us hints of what to look at that's where you look for planets for example planets are right at the temperature that glows bright to the mid mid-infrared instrument it's where you look for forming stars because the material that's falling into the forming stars warms up to exactly that kind of temperature so it kind of opens up your sight to a whole new set of phenomena it's not dominated by stars and the stellar emission is dominated by other things and that's what's so exciting looking with webb that it's above the atmosphere so it's cooled down so all of this emission goes away and it's big big is incredibly important because the sharpness of your image depends on how big your telescope is and so the the resolution element of web is 150th the resolution element of the best previous cold telescope we had in space think of it it's like going from 20 megapixels going well it's like going from half a megapixel up to 20 megapixels with your camera to give you an analogy yeah and so we're just seeing things we never saw before this wavelength region and that's what's going to be so so so excited i guess i could add at the beginning mary was kind of an optional extra on jwc it wasn't one of the regular instruments i heard you had to argue for it oh we had to argue for five or six years that's quite an argument it was a long-standing argument but ten european countries stepped forward and made contributions uh nasa eventually decided to buy the optional extra and the early release observations show what a smart decision that was because it's opened up this whole set of new phenomena that you just don't see with the other instruments yeah so jumping off from that john this is this image that i um i'm sure it's uh everyone has seen it i think we have it which kind of does a comparison and as you mentioned various other projects and telescopes that you've worked on can we see that image image number 20 that just gives a sense of the uh the resolution change not not this one image number two yeah thank you that one right there so so yeah tell us what we're seeing here yeah so this is a comparison of three telescopes we've had in space the wise telescope is a small one uh sort of a mirror is about big as your hand a little bit bigger the spitzer telescope is uh quite a bit bigger and much more sensitive and it showed us that even though it was small you could see pretty far galaxies pretty darn close to the big bang not all the way and then you see in the right-hand picture the area of the same thing is so much sharper and so much clearer and it reveals features that are now obvious that weren't so obvious before which are dust clouds in space not only are there stars but there are these wispy things out there which are really important to our story of where do stars come from because stars get old and they blow up and stuff comes out and it gets recycled into clouds like that which will then get pulled together by gravity to form the next generation of stars with planets so this is uh why this is such an important story to look into and and to begin to begin to tell yeah i mean one telescope is not listed there but i think it's probably the most familiar to those in the audience is the hubble space telescope maybe just to give a sense like what's the size of the mirror of hubble compared to the size of the mirror of the james webb okay well hubble mirror is 2.4 meters across about eight feet and the web is uh six and a half meters across almost 21 feet so it's about seven times the collecting area but you can see what a spectacular difference that makes yes also the hubble can't see it these long wavelengths that are in this picture you can't see at all because it's warm right it glows like a light bulb yeah the spitzer telescope the middle one in that picture was three feet and that was the most sensitive telescope that we've had at these wave wax and so you go from three to 21 feet and you actually go as the square of that ratio that's how you get the 50 times sharper image and this picture makes it show that that you're just seeing things you never saw before and that's what this telescope is going to do for us yeah speaking of things we haven't really seen before at this kind of resolution let's look at another image that was released the southern ring nebula if we can sort of bring that up and let me continue with you george because i think miri played a pretty critical role in in getting this together so why don't you tell us about this and then marcia maybe you can give us some near cam insights into what we're seeing so this is actually the neurcam image maybe marshall should describe this first yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah one you probably that marshall first time you can go absolutely okay so in the center you see a bright star but it turns out that's not actually the one that died here you'll see that in the miri image what you see around the outer edge is kind of a chocolate colored very structured filamentary material and what this is evocative of is how this the central star died in a series of convulsions and released kinds of dust that you can you can see in this orangish chocolaty like color and there are kind of like little tunnels holes in this structure that let some light get further out and another thing that i find very amusing about this picture which has nothing to do with the planetary nebula but along the left hand side there's something that looks almost like a little scratch and that's actually a galaxy and what we're discovering with web is that web is so sensitive in the sort of three microns and longer regime that we're very good at picking up all kinds of galaxies so all of our pictures are getting photobombed by galaxies so that's like a edge-on galaxy i gather right that like little edge line there yeah amazing yeah that's amazing and can we bring in the um the the miri version of this maybe a side by side i think was released and we can sort of see those and maybe georgia can tell us what it is that we're seeing differently when we look in the different wavelengths on the right hand versus left-hand image so the mirror image highlights these widths and shells and scallops and so on and those are heated up aromatic molecules those are kind of in between what we normally think of molecules and dust and actually they're quite common in automobile exhaust and they're called aromatic because they don't smell very good but anyway there and they get released when a star like the sun or a little more massive than the sun gets too old for the hydrogen to sustain it it it's it's easiest to give the star personality it desperately tries to keep itself alive by burning helium by burning carbon and there's a stage where all this stuff results in big flows of gas inside the star it becomes unstable it starts to oscillate and each time it oscillates it throws off a little more material and so what you see are these shells are the past episodes of material getting thrown off the star and so by looking at this you can actually do archaeology on the history of the star which you can now see is this uh white dwarf the it's still to the left of you as you look at this image the slightly fainter star in the center and the reason you can actually see it with mary is it still buried in some of the dust it threw off so it's heated up to be brighter for mary relatively speaking than it is for narcan that's just another illustration of why these this wavelength is so neat but just look at this picture and think that each one of those filaments each one of those shells represents a spasm of this tiny star until it finally collapsed down to the white dwarf that's the the star that's at the center and is heating up the rest of the action here and this is a similar fate that presumably our son is facing not imminently but in some five billion years or so right is this the uh similar death rows that we envision yeah it's first going to blow up to about the size orbit yeah and and then it will go through these spasms and then the core will separate from the rest of the star and the coral will become a white dwarf like the ones in the center of this nebula and the rest of the stuff will be in a planetary nebula just like this one so rene pierre have you guys done any uh spectrographic studies as yet of uh this particular source not as we swear no this one no no doubt it'll be coming up so let's also turn then to um another really beautiful image uh stefan's quintet if we can bring up i think that for us is uh image 24. uh so this i gather uh correct me if i'm wrong but this is now a composite image from near cam marsha and and from mir is that correct this is putting both data sets together to create this image it is and the the near cam part is kind of the fuzzy whitish colored stuff and the really interesting part with all the structure is mostly from miri it but there is one very interesting thing the left-hand most galaxy if you zoom in on it it's actually closer to us than the other four which are actually at the same distance and interacting with each other but this foreground one if you look zoom in the near cam image you can actually see some of the individual stars in that galaxy which is again just amazing and a testament to how well the optics are working on on web how far away are are they how far away is the close one and and the four that are further away ah 40 million i think the closest one is 40 million uh light years and the the group the actual group is close to 300 i think it's 290 something like that right so so there's a huge difference so it's just coincidence that they uh project on to the sky in the same location there's no there's no relation between the the left one and the others is it unusual though to have even a grouping of four that are so is that part of what you're going to try to be figuring out as these images are further analyzed actually um galaxies tend to come in groups or clusters so it's not that unusual um i think the average size of a group maybe even 10 galaxies so it's not it's not that remarkable but what is remarkable here is that these galaxies are close enough together that they are starting to merge together which is a process we think might be very important in the early universe and so getting to see these in a somewhat closer example may teach us a lot about the physics of how these galaxy blobs come together to make a bigger galaxy yeah if we go back to the image if we can bring it back up maybe you can just point it out i gather it's in in the more or less in the center of the group of four there's two that are quite close together and gather those are the two that are on the uh verge or post-merger yes yes they're the ones that are getting the closest to merging and and you can also see that there's kind of um pinkish glow along part of the kind of wispy arms and that's showing where some star formation is being induced by the gas compression from the galaxies coming together and if we remove say the near cam contribution i gather that then exposes the the miri contribution more directly can we see that i think that is that image 25 uh on our list yeah so so george is is this the the miri data uh without the near cam uh contribution yeah i mean looking at this i think you just have to say wow this this is this is it right and this this explains better than a million words could why the optional extra was such a good thing to buy because look how different this is and in fact if you had stripped these out of the previous image it would have mostly just seen stars and it would have just like i'm sorry marcia it would have looked just like all the previous images rather than something that was well it would be sharper you see the individual stars but to the untrained eye it wouldn't look that unique whereas you you look at this and you say what is that and that's because all these aromatic molecules again are being heated up by young stars and this trace is where all the young stars are forming and in fact there's this one object over to the right that hardly looks like a galaxy yes it's so busy with forming stars the object to the left is another galaxy that looked like a kind of normal galaxy and now you see that it actually is just full of these regions of young stars heating up these aromatic molecules and glowing force so so john were you sold early on on on on yeah i had no doubt it was the necessary supposedly optional add-on because it was so different uh if you just uh extended the hubble from what it could do out to five microns which the near infrared does for us now that's a factor of three in wavelength and it may be or maybe it'd not show you very different things but we knew from the very first moments that we knew that this was a possible instrument that it would show you come something completely different that objects are just too cool to shine in their own visible light would just be different so one thing that's really remarkable about this picture is it's got a quasar in it it's an act it's got a black hole in the top and george can tell you more about it how way we see it as we do in the mid infrared um but it's different so as yes everybody knows we have a black hole in the middle of every galaxy and some of them are active which means things are falling in and it's getting compressed and hot and anyways sending out jets so george what do we see here in this top one that's different from what we knew before yeah i want to start by saying a whole lot of people saw how neat this optional lecture would be a lot of engineers on the project help too so what we see at the top is it may be triggered by this interaction you it's a little hard to figure out how this gets started but gas has been has fallen into the influence of the black hole of course a black hole by definition is black so it doesn't glow so to make it glow you've got to have gas fall into it it orbits it as it does so it gets heated to very high temperatures it even emits very profusely in the x-ray and so we are actually this is the way we can find massive black holes this black hole is something like 10 100 million times the mass of the sun so it's a very massive spot spotted space that's heated up and in fact they're spectra that were part of the early release that show some of them just don't know where in the image this is the upper portion the the bright upper region it's it's the thing with diffraction spikes got it it's it's nicely isolated by yeah it's beautiful yeah and so suspects have been taken you say spectra have been taken of this uh is there any information you give us on what you learned from taking spectra actually i think there is one image where you see the spectra and they are actually from miri and near spec in this case and with quite spectacular spectra from miri this one i think george can comment on it it's quite spectacular yeah i'd love to hear it george so this again uh covers the wavelength range of mirrory the you can see there's molecular hydrogen that's heated up a really interesting set of lines are the oxygen line and the neon line you see the extreme right those are those have to have very very hard deep ultraviolet photons to excite those atoms and so those tell you that there is what we call an active nucleus in there that can't be excited particularly the neon line cannot be excited by stars and in fact these lines are going to be used a lot with the webb telescope to find active black holes that are buried so buried in dust that you can't find them in the in the visible or even the near infrared i see that's amazing and what's the uh what's the mass of the black hole you said but i didn't hear it 100 yeah yeah maybe about 100 million about 100 million um so um yeah go ahead and please go ahead no no and i think there is basically a next the next image corresponds to the neospec version basically this one has been observed also within your spec yeah do we have the near spec image of that yeah and here it's not presented in the same way and i think it's quite interesting because we already talked when we talked with rene we presented two ways of doing spectroscopy with generosity and actually miri and nia spec include another way of doing it i call it the spectroscopic toolbox okay scientists can just pick the best way to observe objects and in this one what you do is you actually get spectra but not along the slit or not with everything open but you can get a small image and you get this clean spectra on the basically to get a detailed view spectroscopic view of your objects and in this case what you can do is you can reconstruct images at plenty of colors plenty of wavelengths and this is the example and what you see is that depending at which line you know these lines of uh you're looking at some of them are going to to correspond to ionized hydrogen some of them to iron some of them to atomic hydrogen then molecular hydrogen and actually they correspond to different parts of the galaxy and in this case actually to different parts of regions where this black hole and the gas the the impact of the black hole through ejection or even radiation impacts the gas of the galaxy and you see this different morphology and from there you can understand really what happens in the core of this active galaxy a sense of the technological feat of like near spec how many shutters how many slits do you have and and and how many and how many do you control can you turn them on and off in order to fine-tune what it is that you're actually taking the spectrum of yes for the spec it's the over mode it's the one we used uh for the you know for the first image where we we have a technology actually developed at the goddard space flight center which are tiny micro shutters so the the thing because remember what ronnie said the expect needs to select the object to pick the right one and just mask everything else and in this case what we have is four arrays in total it's a quarter of a million almost of uh some micro shutters they are not larger than the width of air so it's really really micro shutters and you can command them individually so basically you just look at all the image from nirkham okay martial and nirkham they always set the stage for their spec you you take the image you know where the object is going to fall and you say oh i'm going to open this one this one this one and that's what the observer the scientist will do and from there we get the spectra so that's the very novel uh technology actually and quite impressive yeah i think impressive is an understatement it's a standing feat uh if we can turn now we have two other images that i i want to get to before we conclude our discussion here i know that john has to uh leave at 4 30 so i'm mindful of the time i want to turn to the image that was released having to do with an exoplanet and one of the questions that humanity has asked since the time we look skyward is whether we are alone whether there might be other life out there in the cosmos and the first step in that direction of course is to begin analyze in detail possible atmospheres around the exoplanets that have now been in our realm of discovery since the early 2000s so this particular image is a is a quite beautiful and maybe um maybe renee i think nearest played a key role in this can you give us a sense of what we're looking at and what it means yeah so here we're looking at a uh the spectrum of the atmosphere of a uh a gas giant in fact this is a planet uh about the the mass of saturn but uh bigger than jupiter because the planet orbits its star in only three days and it's really really heated up and it's it has a very warm atmosphere and the uh and so this is a transiting exoplanet so this is a very special class of planets where from our perspective the planet goes in front of the star wants every orbit and in fact you know when uh george were having prone to sell miri to their project back in the early 2000s the very first transiting exoplanet was discovered in 2001. at that time we were not planning to study exoplanet atmosphere but that's a that's a science team that's imposed itself and because of the power of probing atmosphere so the game here is actually quite simple but also very challenging so we we have to measure the the uh the dip of this of the light as the planet goes in front of of the star and you do that with spectroscopy with every colors so uh if the atmosphere has some you know molecules like water for example well at that wavelength that color the planet will appear slightly bigger and it's what you see here and if we see bumps and wiggle that our telltale signature of molecule in the atmosphere and all these bumps here are water but in the nearest wavelength range from 0.6 to 2.8 microns we can also we're sensitive to carbon monoxide and also methane and that's only one view of the worldwide range but all four science instruments near cam near spec miri can also take their part of the spectrum so this is a very important science mode with jwsd uh that will allow us to study exoplanet and of course uh we're not just interested looking at uh gas giant planets we're interested to look at much smaller planet uh rocky planets that are in the uh in the uh temperate regimes uh and we have targets like this you probably have heard of this famous planetary system the typist one system that has uh seven planets orbiting a very small star not much bigger than jupiter and uh they all transit their their their star and three of them are right in the habitable zone so the big question is is there any atmosphere around this planet and if so what what are they made of and so that star that plenary system all these planets will be observed quite a lot in the first year with all science instrument to try to answer that question are there any atmosphere and if so what what it's made of that's a very that's a phrase very first step to assess the the ability the the habitability of these of these planets so this is proof of principle that you can do these kind of incredibly subtle measurements what other biomarkers would you be looking for what would be the moment when you say wow this is starting to look like it may support the conditions necessary for life well it is very speculative but i mean over the whole weed length range i mean we can detect we can we are sensitive to oxygens in the nearest woodland range but we know that it would that would require a lot of observation to detect that in the mirror with length range there's ozone you know three oxygens together uh that we could potentially detect that but we know that this this would take a lot of upcoming time to detect this but it's uh you know we don't really know and again the very first question we want to answer perhaps this first year i hope is uh is there any atmosphere around around these the these planets amazing and you know the about 24 25 percent of all upsetting time in the web in first year will be dedicated to exoplanet a large fraction of which to do exoplanet atmospheres but there's other modes that we haven't discussed yet and yet are very powerful nearest uh near cam and miri have specific modes to do uh high contrast imaging and the ability to detect very faint companion exoplanet very close to their star and that's a major science team also that's going to take quite a lot of time in in cycle one in first year i see spectacular in the remaining time i'd like to turn to uh the final image one that folks who are fans of space imagery will know a version of from hubble i believe the uh the uh carina nebula can we bring so this is the hubble image and i you know if we had time i'd pull the audience to see how many people are familiar with i suspect it's non-trivial but it's nice to bring this up first because now if we transition to the new image you really wow right i mean again it's just sort of a a startling moment when you see that kind of resolution i don't know who wants to start us off uh uh maybe marcia do you wanna tell us what we're seeing here um we're seeing again a multi-colored image and off the top of the image where it it looks almost like a blue sky there are some um very young hot stars that are emitting so much ultraviolet radiation that there's their photons are starting to eat into the edge of this surrounding cloud that was basically the birthplace of all these stars and so this is sometimes called the cliff but what's very interesting is that when you start zooming in you will see some areas that um are not stars because they don't have the diffraction spikes they don't look like little snowflakes but are sort of this yellowish color and some of those are regions where a a baby star not yet really a full-fledged star we call them protostars have jets coming out that are crashing into the surrounding gas and exciting shock waves that light up in molecular hydrogen and near cam has a has a filter that is tuned to exactly the wavelength that that molecular hydrogen emits and so we can find these jets and when we start looking around in here we see all kinds of funny little structures it's going to take everyone quite a long time just from this one image to parse out all the things that can happen in a star-forming region and that's a pure cam data set yeah this one is and there is a version of this i gather which also has miri data composited too is that is that is that this one here is this just george can you tell us what we're seeing here yeah um this brings those aromatic molecules to the fore and so you could see how i mean it's almost like there's uh clouds creeping in over the cliffs from the ocean isn't it that's not exactly what we're seeing but that's what it's reminiscent of and and so you're seeing a whole different dimension of what's going on in this this complex of interstellar material and forming stars and i guess i should add part of the secret of what you're seeing the the last infrared telescope we talked about a little bit the spitzer telescope had one moving part among all of the instruments and what this discussion is benefiting from is we have very very sophisticated instruments on jwst in addition to all those other attributes so this is not just a big telescope not just a cold telescope but it's a very sophisticated observatory and you're seeing all kinds of aspects of these sources that it reveals because of that yeah you know it's absolutely amazing so john before we wrap up obviously this is kind of day one right this is the the starting line the shotgun has gone off and now scientists are going to be analyzing this data with great passion great interest how how is the observing time allotted i i saw a pie chart i don't even know if we have it that sort of gave a sense um oh yeah there it is so uh was there some committee i presume that got together and tried to figure out which project should get which time going forward how do you make these kind of decisions yeah yeah we do it with committees so we announced the opportunity for the entire world to propose we told them the rules and when everything was due and what objects had already been claimed and so please send your proposal and by the way write it so we can't tell who you are when we're reading the proposal this should be called anonymous so uh if you're a dog on the internet and you can spell you can send in your proposal so what happened actually is uh it was much more equitable in uh judging than before and even got about i think 10 of the of the winners were graduate students so we're welcoming great many new investigators because they had good ideas so now i know yeah yeah i noticed it obviously by percent which is percent of the total viewing time i gather you got an incredible dividend from the launch being so spectacularly precise that you used a very little fuel to get the telescope into the correct position so i remember we spoke about this in a program i guess i don't know november or something and you were hoping for for 10 years there but you said maybe more now now what's your view where do things stand right away we thought well we think we got 20 years and then it turns out we're not spending fuel very quickly so maybe even more so really i'm keeping our fingers crossed that we are driving our telescope conservatively and cautiously and fuel economy is good for us wow so if that's the case conceivably there are there are graduate students of the future yet to be born is that yeah right who may actually be using this machine wow that's an amazing thing well you know it must be uh it must be incredibly thrilling to do just people that you're seeing on the screen besides me all have observing time that that they are going to keep on going uh the observations will be taking every day and so we have a full program every five days we'll have twice as much data as we had yesterday so and uh documentation will be published today and uh the images will be available for scientists to analyze tomorrow and so um we are so thrilled to see this happening and welcome all of the people to look at those pictures and say look what i found you didn't even tell me that was there and so uh we are thrilled and so we've done our job as instrument builders and telescope builders and now it's over to the science world to do what scientists do and take pictures and figure out what they mean so before we go on that inspiration i'm just wondering would anybody want to pause a guest or maybe in your wildest dream what what insight do you hope in your wildest dream that the web will provide does anyone have a a a a pet question or a pet goal that may be achieved in the in the not too distant future i mean i really hope that we can finally settle the arguments about what kind of object was the first kind of galaxy like thing to form after the big bang there's been lots of theories this way in that way and i hope we can settle that one for sure sorry yeah i myself i'm looking forward about these atmospheres and what we're gonna we're gonna learn and uh i suspect there will be some surprises there amazing and pierre uh i joined uh martial actually because near spec has been designed really to look for these these objects and finding the spectroscopic signature of a different composition of this first object is something that is a kind of holy grail for for a lot of uh high rate shift galaxy aficionados so yeah same as martial george any thought on that i want to well i want to find where the first of these supermassive black holes came from we've found quasars at such a high riches so close to the beginning that we're having a lot of trouble explaining how to grow a black hole fast enough to power these quasars so that's a big mystery so so john give me a final word and just by preface it by saying you know you use the kobe satellite to give us insight into the microwave background radiation giving us insight into the big bang itself what would you dream of happening with oh my goodness i would hope that we uh well sort of as an observer i would hope to find something that we know we're never guessed was even supposed to be there so but aside from that where should we hope to find surprises we know so little about the actual formation of stars so little about the actual formation of galaxies and black holes we have lots and lots of theories we're getting better computer simulations but um when i ask uh the computer scientists well when you're going to show us what we're going to see before we see it and they say we can't it is too hard so my expectation is we're going to get surprises every few days that things are not as we thought amazing well you know i look forward to hearing about those surprises and again thank you well number one congratulations to you and the entire team thank you so much for taking the time out to give us some insight into this first release of images and i think i speak for the whole world of saying it's so exciting to imagine what might be coming down the pike as the james webb telescope continues its mission so thank you all so much for joining us and to the rest of the audience let me just quickly note thank you for being part of this conversation you should follow the world science festival there's a little button where you can click in to follow us through our newsletter we have programming both of this sort but on all manner of science topics under the sun that will be released in the coming weeks and coming months but yes today is a a real critical moment the the first step in a new view of the cosmos that imagine the james webb telescope will provide us so the whole world thanks to team and thank you and the audience for joining us signing off from new york i'm brian green thank you brian thank you [Music] you

Channel: World Science Festival

Views: 263,942

Keywords: James Webb Space Telescope, JWST, Brian Greene, NASA, Space launch, JWST launch, What is JWST?, infrared telescope, Hubble, space telescope, sunshield, Goddard Space Flight Center, Near InfraRed Camera, pictures of the universe, John Mather, Natalie Batalha, Adam Riess, Ewine van Dishoeck, World, Science, Festival, Big Ideas Series, New York City, Kavli prize, exoplanets, SpaceX, astrophysics, cosmology, Astrochemistry, Official NASA Broadcast, #UnfoldTheUniverse, The Matrix Resurrections

Id: 5sMZw_DM5eA

Length: 56min 47sec (3407 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 12 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/AgentBluelol]

Unfortunately his Zoom audio is messed up for quite a while but gets better around the 26min mark. The rest of the scientists sound good. Skip to 1:35min for the start.