Secrets Revealed by the Webb Telescope: Looking at Ourselves from the Beginning of Time

thanks so much and hey what an awesome uh privilege it is to be here this is such an amazing Institute with everything uh The Institute does um I'm a big fan and it's just a great honor for me to be here tonight I'm looking forward to this talk and answering some questions uh later on um before I get going um I am going to talk I I wanted to tell you a little bit about myself and uh and then I'll jump in and talk about uh the web telescope and some of the amazing things we're seeing with it um so I thought I'd put this sort of uh Cosmic perspective map up here and talk a little bit about myself um so I'm coming from the University of California Irvine if you don't know if You' never heard of that school um it's because we're a little bit young we're uh just over 50 years old um part of the University of California system along with University of California Los Angeles and Berkeley and those places is uh we're the youngest um we were the youngest Institute uh ever admitted into the the aou which is a sort of you know R1 uh research University very proud of our trajectory and that map we are the highest ranked um minority serving institution uh in the world um and we're proud of our thank you um ranked by the New York Times and four among other as the university doing most for students and helping them Reach the American dream so this idea of lifting students up uh and allowing them to be more successful than their parents is something we take very seriously as a landr institution as part of the University of California system uh we have access to the amazing kek telescopes in Hawaii which are some of the most powerful telescopes in the world which is one of the reasons why I ended up coming to UCI in the beginning um when I one of the things that I have done is I formerly chaired the the user committee for the James web Space Telescope where we oversaw a sort of policy to try to figure out what the heck we're going to point this telescope at um and figure out who's going to get to use it and all that kind of stuff so I know a little bit about its history and I'm going to tell you a little bit about that story today but before I do that um I want to talk a little bit about even going farther back in time than a 50- year-old University a little bit farther back than that um I was born in a in North Carolina and my whole family is from a place called Granville County which is sort of in the northern it's in the peont area of North Carolina my family was a bunch of farmers uh and um by the way where I am right now a long way from from uh from that uh and but you know when I was a kid I remember my dad had borrowed a telescope from a friend of his and he brought it home and put it up in the yard and let me look through it and it's one of those things you it's one of my earliest memories of looking through that telescope and seeing some stuff that I had never seen before and it sort of opened my eyes to the Wonders that are out there right and you start asking yourself these questions like well how did I get here and you know what's the Earth doing with respect to that thing with Saturn I can see its rings I mean there's more out there than you can see with your naked eye right so it starts to sort of lend itself to these questions and you know opportunities for children then to explore those question questions and sort of help Humanity figure things out is something that you know I'm proud of what UCI does and I'm super grateful that I've had a life where I get to sort of learn these things and happy to share some of those things uh with you tonight so here's a picture of the globe now what I'm going to do now is I'm going to go even oh actually before I move I want to go back in time a little bit more to the same county so about 70 years before I was born in that area of North Carolina another person named James was born uh and he also looked up and saw a night sky not too much different than the one that I looked at when I was a kid uh he worked real hard and got inspired and eventually he became administrator uh of NASA under JFK and he convinced JFK that NASA ought to be about more than uh sending astronauts into space but also spend money on science and that guy was named James web uh and that's what the James web James Webb Telescope is nam Nam after another another boy named James from this this part of North Carolina um so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to move even farther away to Easter Island and I'm GNA try to take you back even farther back in time so the people who built those statues living on this island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean thousands of years ago more than a thousand years ago um would look up and see whoops would look up and see a night Sky again not that much different than the one that I looked at when I was a kid the one that we look up at tonight and it's hard to believe that those people were not asking themselves those very same questions uh what is all that how did I get here how old is this universe that I'm looking at right and so today what we're doing scientifically is trying to answer those exact same questions so now I'm going to show you a slightly different picture also from Easter Island over here you see that band there that that on a very dark night you can see this band sweeping across the sky that's that's the milkyway Galaxy so we live in this vast disc of stars and uh we live and it's it's a dis and we're looking at it on edge so the reason why all the light and stuff piles up along this Edge we're seeing gas and dust so imagine we live in a you know something like we're sitting on a pizza and the pizza has some some thickness and we look along the edge of the pizza we see lots of stuff and we look up out of it we see less stuff and that's kind of why we see that band of stuff because we're living in it when we look out this way we're sort of looking out away from it so we're we're we're embedded within the Milky Way but we we sort of see that we live in this disc of stars by just kind of looking out and seeing it now if you could fly up in a magical spaceship and fly up above the Galaxy you would see something like this and where the Sun and the Earth are in the galaxy is up here in this local spiral arm right there now the Galaxy is incredibly big and when we talk about the size of our galaxy we have to use different units then we can't use miles or kilometers because it won't make any sense and so we use light years now a light year is how far light can travel in a year so we try to put this on the time scale that we might begin to understand uh light could travel around the whole world 10 times in a second the Moon is about one light second away so we see the moon when we're looking at the moon we see the moon as it was a second ago we see the sun as it was eight minutes ago and the nearest star you can see by eye at night we're seeing it as it was several years ago so whenever you look out at anything that's far away we are looking back in time right but when we look back in time at the moon it's not that big a deal because it's a second when you start looking at things at cosmological distances then it starts mattering you start seeing things th as they were thousands of years ago Etc so when I talk about light years that's what I mean so our galaxy The Milky Way galaxy is a 100,000 light years across that's very big uh and so another way to think about how big it is is imagine you took the Milky Way galaxy and you shrunk it down to the size of the Pacific Ocean so all of the Pacific Ocean that's the Milky Way galaxy the whole solar system so I'll give you Pluto so let's I'll give you Pluto that that would be the size of a of a leaf floating on the ocean now imagine a bee that's landed on that leaf a piece of pollen on the leg of the bee that's the Sun and the Earth is microscopic now the nearest star to the sun is a mile away on another leaf and there are more than 100 billion of those stars in the galaxy so it's very big very very big now for a lot of people that makes them feel insignificant but I want to tell you I want to remind you of something that you're a member of the species who figured that out floating on that little leaf figured all that out so you know now if you look over here there's some other plops in the sky here it almost looks like a piece of the Milky Way broke off into these two little little circles you see that those things actually are not part of the Milky Way those the only thing in that picture that's not part of the Milky Way those are actually other galaxies those are called the large and small melanic clouds so in fact if you zoom out from the Milky Way now now this is 10 million light years across there's our Milky Way galaxy and there's all these little dots around it they're all these little galaxies orbiting around us those are called satellite galaxies and over here about oops I gave it away uh over here there's another galaxy that's about as big as ours that's called the Andromeda galaxy that's M31 you can actually see that by eye if it's very very dark in the northern hemisphere you can't see those others those large and small melanic clouds unless it's extremely dark and you're in the southern hemisphere you could see them from Easter Island you can't see them from here but you could see the Andromeda Galaxy from here if the Milky Way were the size of a quarter androma would be the size of another quarter they'd be about this far away so they're actually pretty close compared to stars and in fact that's why galaxies sometimes slam into each other and I'll show you some pictures of that later and in fact we're headed right at each other in about five billion years is g to be cool okay so this is 10 million light years across I'm going to zoom out again a factor of a 100 now I'm a billion with a B light years across this is called the loc these are local superclusters you can't even see the Milky Way it's in there in this red thing somewhere these places these things have names uh they're named after the constellations you have to look through to see them on the sky so this one's called the Ursa Major supercluster for example and after this by the way if you it keeps going it keeps going way out Beyond this point and but we don't give stuff names anymore after that because it just gets ridiculous I mean they actually have names but they're like x55 22544 something like that um okay so that's where we are now a lot of times you see pictures like this maps of the universe and that's one thing and you see them as like these static things but the thing to keep in mind another amazing thing that we've learned is that the universe is not static like I said the Milky Way and Andromeda are moving towards each other but most galaxies in the universe in fact almost every galaxy in the universe is moving away from every other Galaxy and what that means is that the universe is expanding and so in the 1920s Edwin hub discovered this fact and ever since then we've seen it over and over and over again that all galaxies basically are moving away from each other and it's evidence that the universe is expanding not too long after that um a uh contemporary of Edwin Hubble by the name of Albert Einstein uh was working on the general theory of relativity in the context of that theory it was very much expected actually that the Universe should not be a static thing it should actually be moving in some way and when Hubble discovered this expansion it fit very naturally within the context of that that theory of general relativity so then the context of that theory and actually a bunch of work since then we've come to develop this model of standard cosmology that builds on the fact that the universe is expanding and if you go backward and backward and backward in time everything at some point gets together in a single instant when everything was small everything was extremely dense and that point that mathematical idea is called the Big Bang today we have a fairly well-developed model of cosmology that's called big bang cosmology and the way it goes is like this time and space began about 14 billion years ago 13.8 we think so that was all time and space so I know at the end someone's going to ask me what happened before the Big Bang and the answer I'm going to tell you is according to to the standard Big Bang Theory there was no before because time began then I know that you don't like that answer but that's now we don't actually know for sure that time began then and we don't know for sure that this Theory actually works all the way to zero and so there's sort of cutting edged physics and cutting edged theories about what was going on in the very very early times but I we do know for sure that the Universe began extremely dense and extremely hot but also extremely simple because it was so hot and so dense that not nothing complicated could exist um if you take something and you turn up the heat right it melts if you keep turning up the heat the atoms disassociate you know the molecules can't hold together you have atoms you keep turning up the heat even the atoms break apart into protons neutrons and electrons you keep turning up the heat things keep breaking down to sort of very Elementary particles Things become simple so it's this very primordial soup that we sort of were born with in fact just after the big bang the only atoms actually that could exist were hydrogen and helium and from this very very simple beginning of hydrogen and helium emerged all the complexity we see around us today what stars do the way stars shine and how they create energy is they're fusing atoms and so when they fuse lighter atoms into heavier atoms as long as those atoms are lighter than iron when you fuse light atoms together they produce energy through Fusion that's E equals MC s energy it turns out and that's why stars shine infusing energy what what is that that's making new atoms and at the end at the life end as as as stars end they end in catastrophic ways and when that happens they produce heavier and heavier elements over time so while stars are for so in the very beginning we have hydrogen helium that hydrogen helium begins to form into the first Stars we don't know exactly how that works I'll talk about that later that's what Webb is trying to figure out those those stars in those galaxies fuse heavier and heavier elements and we know through this process over the last 14 billion years emerged at least one star around which there was at least one planet and on that planet there was copious amounts of these heavier elements made in generations of stars carbon nitrogen oxygen phosphorus Etc these are the building blocks of DNA and somehow on this planet emerged not only Simple Life but intelligent life that could look back up at the stars and put this story together right so in that sense we are the universe looking back at itself trying to make sense of it all this is the story now there's there's there's holes in the story we don't know how life began we don't know exactly how the first galaxies formed we don't know what the nature of the Big Bang or this earliest time was so that's kind of the scaffolding and we're working really hard to try to to fill this picture in so this is quite an amazing Story and there's even more amazing things that we've learned and one of the more remarkable and amazing things we've learned about cosmology over the last several decades has been that we are just a very very small fraction of what's out there so if you take all of the mass energy density in the universe and you divide it up into this pie chart turns out that only 5% of the stuff in the universe is in the form of anything we know about that is everything in the periodic table all of chemistry is in this 5% so this is known stuff 25% of the universe is in the form of something we call Dark Matter dark matter is has gravity but it doesn't interact with light and it doesn't interact with normal matter very much but we have very very good evidence that it's there and in fact we think without it there would be no structure in the universe at all we think it's essential for making galaxies and therefore producing life 70% of the universe is in something called Dark Energy dark energy is actually driving the universe to accelerate in its expansion so it's sort of powering this expansion that we see right now and I will just say that is even more mysterious than the dark matter we've given this stuff names which makes it sound like we know what the heck's going going on now within this sliver actually the known physics part it's also quite interesting people seen this before this is on the dollar bill this is called The Eye of Providence there's the sort of all knowing eye so if 5% of the stuff is uh all the atoms in the universe the vast majority of that is hydrogen and helium only 0.001% of this stuff what I would call complex atoms that are available to do complex chemistry put it another way um whoops oh I gave it away again keep doing that close your eyes um this is us right that's us we're made of carbon nitrogen oxygen phosphorus so this these these complex chemistry is the very very tip of this pyramid and you another way to think about this is this pyramid goes deep underground and that's the dark matter and dark energy so the this so if you want to flip things on its head you know you know we're special right in this vast sea of Unknowing we're looking back and trying to figure out what this is okay so we have this Quest this is what we're all about right we're all about this right we we're good at thinking we're good at collaborating and in fact over the last two decades Humanity got together many many countries many many dollars were spent in fact 11 billion dollars to put together this telescope called the James web Space Telescope and it was with an effort to figure out these questions and it was we did it because we just want to know the answers to these questions and we can and I regard the web telescope which was a successful launch and I I'm happy to talk more about that story how it was built the amazing engineering uh accomplishment it was I think uh web is comparable to sort of the Great Pyramids or anything great societies have ever have ever accomplished it's a tremendous tremendous engineering feat and now we have this machine that we're trying to figure out what's out there so this telescope is currently a million miles from Earth um the Hubble Space Telescope which you may have heard of is orbiting in low earth orbit very very close to Earth this thing is beyond the moon um it's got kind of a funny orbit it's orbiting in this orbit called L2 so it's sort of tracking the Earth around the Sun and it's doing this little loop-de-loop and it turns out that's like a gravity well where it's actually still in orbit around around the Sun um it's got this big uh sun shield which you can see here and that what that's doing is it's all that's always pointed towards the sun and that's to keep the telescope and its instruments cold this telescope actually views light in the infrared it's not studying visible light it's studying infrared light and the reason why it was designed to study infrared light is because the universe is expanding and one of the things we try to do with this telescope is look way back in time to the galaxies that are so far away they're receding from us at really really high velocities and so when a Galaxy when anything is moving away from you quickly it turns out the the light that it emits gets red shifted and so it stretches out and that's the same phenomenon as the Doppler shift if you have a car go by and it goes right the pitch drops as it's moving away that's the sound is being stretched it's the same thing with light if you have something that's moving away from you very very quickly the the wavelength of that light will stretch that red shift and so visible light things because they're so far away in the universe we're looking at them that light is shifted in the infrared so we have this infrared telescope because it's infrared infrared is the same as heat it has to be very cold and that's why we put the sh sun shield here to block some of that sun and keep it cool it actually drops hundreds of degrees across that sunshield so the technology of developing that sunshield getting into a rocket unfolding it all that kind of stuff is an amazing achievement and remarkably this thing work worked it was launched on Christmas morning 2021 um it was a if you remember 2021 it was not the the best year um but I tell you what it was a home run I it was a grand slam it was perfect I was so nervous I did not want to wake up for it I was like uh but then my phone started going crazy and I was like I was awake and I watched the launch and it was perfect I was so nervous uh but it was magic and this thing has worked to Perfection thousands single point failures they all worked every one of those people who worked on this telescope thousands of people from all over the country and all over the world worked on this thing and it came off and it's just it's it's a testament to what Humanity can do so what I have this challenge is now trying to tell you what the heck we've seen with this thing um here we go so what I'm going to do is I'm going to step out in distance I'm going to start around the Sun and everything I'm going to show you next is all within this little circle okay uh so we're going to start with planets we're going to start with a planet this planet uh it's an exoplanet and it's Rocky it's got this name this planet is about you know 40 light years away uh that's pretty close by turns out and um it's Rocky which means it's like the Earth it's very interesting it's it's going around its hostar uh pretty quickly how do we know it's there it's really really hard to see these things it turns out you can't just take a picture of it the reason why you can't take a picture of it is if you compare the Earth to the Sun the Earth is a billion times fainter than the sun right because the Earth isn't glowing it's just reflecting light from the Sun so if you're looking at our solar system from afar it's like looking at a fire it's like looking at a firecracker or a lightning bug or whatever like a tiny little bug next to a nuclear explosion that's what we're trying to take a picture of okay um but instead of taking a picture of it directly uh one technique astronomers use is is uh the idea that you look at the star and you study it and you study it and you study it and when the planet goes in front of it it gets a little bit dimmer for a little while so that's what's plotted here it's observations of this star of this star over and over again over time and then there's a brief period of time where it gets dimmer and then he gets bright again and that's what you're watching and this is many every point is it's you're watching it over and over again it always gets dim at that time can anyone read these numbers here what do we see call out what that number is9 99.9% so this is 100% bright and it gets so dim it it gets 0.1% dimmer right so that's what you have you have to have that kind of ability to measure things to see these planets but here it is right right we know it's Rocky we figured out its dist it's its density and you're able to confirm that this thing has a planet there so that's the kind of thing this telescope does I showed you this because I want to show you the next thing which is much cooler there's a different planet and this planet is a little bit farther away 700 light years now this is a bigger planet now what's shown is the same kind of thing over time it gets dimmer but you notice there are these different colors of dots the different colors of dots are different wavelengths of light so they look some light a little bit longer wavelength than others and you might notice here that the red dots are higher than the yellow dots so what's going on actually is this planet is blocking light right so it's going in front of the star and it's getting blocked but some of that light has to go through the atmosphere of the planet and the atmosphere lets the red stuff through more easily than the than the blue so it's block bling the red light and letting the the shorter wavelength light goes through so different wavelength light are getting through that atmosphere more easily it turns out we can use that to figure out what atoms are in the atmosphere of this planet because different atoms and different molecules absorb different wavelengths of light more effectively so what this means is you can actually build the spectrum of the atmosphere and from that you can figure out what the atmosphere of this planet is made of and that's what's done here so what's plotted here is this is how much light's coming through as a function of the wavelength of the light and you see there's all these patterns it looks like a you know these Peaks and troughs and it turns out these Peaks and troughs are tail taale signatures of different molecules this one for example is carbon dioxide there's a lot of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of this planet um and there's water there's a lot of water vapor in this planet um so this oh and the big thing it turns out sulfur dioxide was discovered in this planet turns out that's very interesting for lots of different reasons so the point is that you can look at a planet that's 700 light years away and know what it's made of know what the atmosphere is like now we can't do this yet but we hope to do this with earthlike planets with the next generation of telescopes and look for signatures of life on this planet uh if there was no life there'd be no oxygen in the atmosphere right so if the plants were not here all the oxygen would immediately just rust out into the rocks and we' have no oxygen in the atmosphere at all so if we find another planet orbiting a distant star and it's got booming oxygen lines in it people are going to get very excited and try to figure out okay we got to go that's where we got to go right so it's with these kind of techniques that we can and sort of learn things about objects that we could never visit I mean 700 Lighty years is a long long long way okay so we're done with planets okay 6,500 Lighty years away these are called The Pillars of Creation they're about five light years across so not so big only five Lighty years across um and you see here on the left it's what this thing looks like with Hubble invisible light that's the Hubble Space telescope's picture and on the right this is what the web picture of exactly the same thing is and you can begin to see why it's so cool to have telescopes of different wavelengths up there what this is It's a Giant gas cloud and it's where new stars are being made and born um you can see a new star being born right here right there and it's eating up all its it's it's emitting all this radiation it's eating up the gas that's all around it um the other thing you can see because this is in the infrared you can see see there's all this dust here it doesn't look like there's many stars in the background and that's because there's dust and gas that's blocking the light from those stars but all the light from those Stars that's coming out in the infrared shines right through and so you can see all the background Stars you can see holes in these pillars that you can't see so it turns out there's a lot of fun science you can do if you can go in the infrared and and look both here and here and you can kind of disentangle what these kind of objects look like so Pillars of Creation this is where new stars are being born they probably don't have planets yet but they will okay now everything I'm going to show you is within this circle so now we're back on this map where this is 1 billion Lighty years we're looking at Super clusters and I'm everything I'm going to show you now is somewhere within this this circle so we're going way out this is another picture this is now from Hubble again because I want to show contrast with what jdsd saw um this is 32 million light years away m74 this is a famous Galaxy it's beautiful so-called Grand Design spiral these red dots are where new stars are being made okay this is what this G now this looks like a Galaxy if you've ever seen like pictures of galaxies or on a t-shirt or something right this is sort of what you expect let me show you what this same galaxy looks like with web yeah that's exactly what I did when I saw it too like whoa there's a big hole in the middle in the infrared it turns out there's no gas in the middle of this galaxy there's a black hole or something or a star cluster in the middle that's blowing that gas out and the other thing you can really there's just all these bubbles so what you're looking at here is you're looking at gas and dust in this galaxy that's got that's very got these Bubbles and all this structure that you just don't see in the Stars so again by looking at this you just there's something that we thought we knew all about that we didn't because we didn't look in the same wavelengths that um that web can can see I love this picture 32 million light years away now 290 million light years away this is called Stephan's quintet so there are five galaxies here uh there's one there there's two that are merging here remember I talked about merging and there's two more here they're all dancing around each other in a group now I am going to bet that almost everyone in this room has seen these galaxies before now you're shaking your head some of you some of you are suspicious let me see if I can uh jog your memory a little bit who has seen this wonderful life everyone ever seen that movie so in the movie there's uh Joseph right and a sen they're talking to Clarence and they're these stars in the beginning of the movie and they light up and they talk to each other this is heaven talking the Angels people remember that part I do um that's these galaxies here now of course in 1946 this was the you know this was the Pinnacle of astronomy so this is what they looked like right same galaxy is what they look like with whip that's cool right now you can tell now when you watch it this Christmas you can say hey okay so then then you start wearing about light travel time for how are they talking and it's 290 million light years away but they're Angels they can do whatever they want okay okay now everything I'm going to show you is outside of this because I don't have a picture right so now I'm going way out so now this is what this telescope was built for we're going to go Deep Field we're going to point the thing and we're going to see amazing new stuff that's never been seen before okay this is pointed at a Galaxy cluster this was the first at leased on the first day that web released images this was one of the images that was released um and it's I think it's still my favorite one I have sort of geeky reasons for liking it the best this is a very deep field it's centered on a giant cluster of galaxies so all the there's lots of different stuff going on here so let me talk about it for a second first of all there are these spikes here you see these those are just Stars so those are stars in our own Galaxy that we're trying to look past to look at this cluster okay so these are just stars in the galaxy that sort of Annoy Us because they're that's not really what we're looking for but they're pretty and they have these giant defraction spikes okay so we're looking through the Galaxy and the telescope is pointed right at this galaxy cluster and all the stuff that's kind of white like this thing and these sort of whitish looking C blobs those are galaxies those are called elliptical galaxies they don't look like spirals they're more like balls of stars and clusters of galaxies tend to be made up of those so there's lots of galaxies swarming around each other orbiting around each other in there and then if we look deeper I'm G I'm going to zoom in now there's all kinds of other stuff going on here's another one of those stars and then there are these arcs now this is the coolest part these arcs are not galaxies don't look like that so that's not what those galaxies really look like what's happening is they're a normal Galaxy they look sort of like the ones I've already showed you but the light from those galaxies is passing by this really really massive Galaxy cluster and the Galaxy cluster has so much gravity that it's bending the light into something called a gravitational lens so if you've ever held a wine glass and kind of tilted it around a candle or something sometimes you'll see the the light kind of spread out into arcs that's exactly what this is and so it turns out that the reason why uh the telescope was pointed at this cluster is to use it as a gravitational magnifying glass and to see things behind it that you could not otherwise see so you're use you're sort of putting binoculars on Hubble and allow it to see even farther and that's what these arcs are and you also get some just amazing stuff like do you see this thing I saw that and I was like what so that looks kind of like a pancake that someone has thrown up in the air and it's like flopping but what that is is that's being gravitational lens by this galaxy independently and it's causing its light to kind of warp and it turns out that you can use the amount uh of the size of these arcs and how much they're stretched out to figure out things about the cluster that you didn't know before and that's one of the reasons why we know this thing has so much dark matter so it turns out there's this there's not enough mass in just these galaxies to create these kind of arcs you need the extra Gravity from the dark matter that we couldn't otherwise see to create these gravitational lenses and that's one of the reasons why we know that there's all this dark matter there if you keep looking the little dots that are very very very red they're red because their light is red shifted so we're already looking in the infrared and then we're mapping those colors to things you can see with your eye and so the things that look red in this picture are very high red shift they're very very distant and they're moving away from us so fast that their light is stretching them even more and so the redder objects here are very very very distant galaxies and it's finding the very first galaxies to form after the big bang which was one of the main motivations for building this telescope in the first place and that's why you know that's another reason why this was pointed here to try to boost Hubble and try to see sorry try to boost jwst and see these things so now I'm going to move on to the the record so far um these two galaxies actually these four galaxies right here are the most distant confirmed galaxies that web has ever seen um these uh to put this in context um the Hubble Space telescope spent a considerable amount of time and resources looking for the most distant galaxies the most famous image is called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field if anyone's ever heard of that and what happened there is Hubble was pointed at one spot for 10 days straight with an open aperture just collected light and after 10 days it built up enough light that was able to find the most distant galaxies we've ever seen and that campaign lasted over the course of a year because analyzing the data took forever within five days of the first images being released from web it broke that record and that's why you know we anticipate finding even more so right now the four most distant ones are here um they we are seeing these galaxies uh as they were when the universe was only about 300 million years old so and that's it's not much to look at but but there it is right there's a Galaxy um it has about 100 Million Suns 100 million stars remember the our galaxy has like 200 billion stars so it's a tiny little thing and you know it's early on the universe didn't have that much time to make them so that's why it's so small it's actually about the same size as one of these little clouds that I talked about in the beginning same about a mass and this thing is this thing except this is 13.8 billion years after the big bang and this is uh 325 million years after the big bang so let's remind ourselves of how long ago that was so um the Earth formed about 4.6 billion years ago uh so this thing was way before the Earth even formed um the dinosaurs lived 65 million years ago 65 million years ago there formed 4.6 billion years ago this was about 13.5 billion years ago when this light sorry when this when this thing existed now just to keep talking about this and sort of be more even more confusing notice how I said this thing is 30 billion light years away but I also said the universe was 13 and a half billion years old when when the light left it how is that possible it's possible because the universe is expanding so when the light left it it actually has been expanding since then away from us and so right now this galaxy would be about 30 billion light years away that's why it's the most that's why I put 30 billion there okay so here this thing is it existed before the earth existed but not only that it existed before most of the atoms in your body existed like it existed before the iron in your blood existed because remember in the very early times there was hydrogen and helium mostly so the atoms that make up uh the oxygen and the water you drink or the air you breathe did not exist when this galaxy existed and so one of the reasons why we're so interested in studying these galaxies is we want to understand when did the first heavy elements get made what is you know were there many heavy elements in a galaxy like this uh what kind of stars were forming what were the next Generations of stars to form as we try to put together this picture so we're really really very early way back in time um but to put it together you know we're seeing galaxies that are about as big as this one uh but the light's been coming to us for 13 and a half billion years is this the first Galaxy that the Universe ever made almost certainly not right um you know we we we think that you know you don't just make a 100 million stars all at once so there had to be a smaller version and a smaller version and a smaller version but again this was all within like the first year of using this telescope so stay tuned we're hoping to go back even farther see even more early galaxies and sort of put this picture together even more clearly okay and with that I'm done thank [Applause] you so I I I think we have about 15 minutes for questions um and there's microphones uh let's go we have a question up here in the front and there's one right here why don't we do these two someone right there um you go first hi um so my question is you showed the Pillars of Creation creating billions of billions of stars and of course the sun is a star and the Earth couldn't exist without our star yeah why why are so many billions and billions of stars created you said they'll eventually have their planets but then why are those planets even exist well uh you know that's a that's a that's a very deep question you know why why does anything exist sort of um I'm going to answer it I'm gonna answer the easier version um I can tell you what we see so what we see uh if we study the universe at the very very earliest times we can and the way we do that is with the cosmic microwave background so that's the the microwave background left over from The Big Bang we know what the Universe was like this is even closer to the beginning about 400 million years after the big bang and we see that it had structure at that time we see it had little clumps and little ripples those clumps mean that there's there's areas of the universe that have a little bit more stuff than others now gravity is interesting right because gravity if there's a little bit more stuff here than there gravity will make that overdense region get even denser so gravity always makes the the rich get richer with gravity you're always grabbing more and more and the place that has less gets less and so if you have a little region in the early universe that's a little got a little bit more mass than another over time it gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and we think that as the universe expanded those re those regions start expanding a little bit more slowly than others and eventually they break away from that expansion fall back in and begin to form overdense regions of gas that gas because of gravity it can start to cool as it cools it begin to Clump and clap collapse into things and when that collapse gets dense enough it starts to make a star it gets so dense it starts to fuse and so the short you know the short answer is the reason why there's so many stars is because of gravity now where those original ripples came from we we think it came from something called Cosmic inflation and it was driven by quantum mechanics it turns out without quantum mechanics there would be these ripples wouldn't be there so it's actually Quantum fluctuations that are blown up into Cosmic scales why inflation happened I can't answer that you um you've used the term gravity a number of times and is Gravity the same thing that you're describing that we experience here or do we understand gravity yeah that's a great question do we understand gravity um the best theory of gravity we have right now is is uh Einstein's general relativity um and it it describes gravity as a warpage of SpaceTime and it does better than Newtonian gravity for lots of things um on the scale of the solar system Etc and there's this constant thought that well maybe there's some Theory Beyond general relativity that that we just don't understand and and that's one of the reasons why we think there's dark matter we think the universe is expanding all this stuff and maybe it goes away if we don't understand if we try to build a better theory of gravity the thing I'll tell you is there's a tremendous amount of effort in the field of cosmology to test general relativity and to try to come up with theories that could possibly explain what we see in the context of a different theory of gravity without dark matter and while those theories can do okay with certain observations uh they really can't explain the large scale structure of the universe you can't explain gravitational lensing all those arcs that I showed you perfect with general relativity it's exactly what you would predict so so far uh actually in an annoying way general relativity has not been broken and we actually think as far as we can tell it actually works I mean even the expanding Universe was kind of there already Dark Energy fits with it really well um people you know right over there right across the yard uh you know there's physicists who are trying to think hard about figuring out a new theory for Gravity but so far they haven't and you know if I didn't have to say explicitly there's big rewards for physicists who could break Einstein's theory of gravity you know there so people it's not like people aren't trying yeah uh we got one here and then a couple over there thanks that was fascinating um my understanding is that some of the distant galaxies that have been observed um are believed to have a structure that would have taken more than say 300 million years to form and therefore or um there's some there's an inconsistency with our understanding regarding the age of the universe or galaxy formation uh so um what do you think how does that get reconciled or might there be some other phenomena causing red shift other than Doppler okay great question so it there are some interesting intriguing things about some of the first galaxies we're seeing there's two there's sort of three things um one is that they're even there so there are some fairly massive galaxies that exist earlier than we would have would have naively thought based on what we saw from Hubble when those announcements came out there were a lot of stories in the press that this breaks the Big Bang oversold like not really no astronomer really thinks that and in fact there was an original nature paper that sort of hinted at that in a title and that those authors have gotten a lot of grief in the field the real situation but nevertheless it's still very interesting and what it's basically telling us is um there's plenty of mass that should have clustered and collapsed into these Galactic regions there's there's not a there's not a a deficit of mass when I talk about this gravitational collapse the trick is once you get the mass there does it turn into stars because it's got to turn into stars for us to be able to see it now the local Universe we find that that process is super messy this is an image of a galaxy of a star sorry a single star that's beginning to form and it's accreting lots of mass along here to make it grow but it's also spitting out a crazy amount of gas this way the very messy eater right so stars are really inefficient at at being born and we see that uh over and over again in the local Universe it's a very inefficient process and so what a astronomers thought like you know just first order it's like well probably star formation in the early universe is just as inefficient as it is locally but what we're seeing is it actually might not be it actually might be much more efficient and it's like 10 times more efficient in the early UN in order to explain what we see we have to make Star formation about 10 times more efficient than it is locally given that star formation's really hard and we actually don't really understand it that well um I think that's sort of the aome aam's razor answer I was just at a conference in Santa Cruz three days ago where we were just talking about these things and you know every single talk was you know this doesn't break cosmology but we need really really efficient star formation and these are my ideas about how you can make Star formation more efficient in the the universe and it turns out that if there are very few heavy elements it's actually easier to make Galaxy or stars star formation more efficient it turns out the winds here are basically what they're doing is there's radiation coming off the star they push off the heavy elements and blow winds and almost like radiation pressure like a solar solar sail if you don't have those heavy elements there there's nothing for those winds to push on and the stuff can collapse and make the Stars grow faster so that's probably what's going on there are a few other things it looks like Galaxy's a little bit more discy than we thought they were going to be that was surprising um there were a few other thing the black holes seem to be a bit more massive than we thought um but in terms of the age of the universe itself um it's probably not that that doesn't seem you know that that would require just turning everything upside down and there's so many things that work it's probably not the age it's probably this kind of how galaxies form questions more than that how you know but to sort of back up even more it's great that we saw stuff we didn't understand if everything we saw we were expecting then why did we even build this telescope right so it's super interesting Yeah you mentioned that um you know we are now really the universe conscious of itself and it seems to me that the big change now is the emergence of being conscious of Consciousness and I wonder in your studies is there any evidence of pre-existent Consciousness that we are actually channeling something that was already there and witnessing something in the universe that was already there to witness yeah that so it's very hard to comment it's very hard for me to say from those direct observations know commenting on this nature of Consciousness the thing I will I will sort of yes and you with is the idea of Consciousness is probably the hardest problem in all of science you know we understand what was going on in the early Universe a second after the big bang quite well nobody understands how Consciousness emerges at all no one gets it it's very very hard and there are lots of different ideas to think about how do you go from these inanimate cells these neurons individual neurons right they're just transmit electricity why is a collective Suddenly It's conscious there's lots of different ideas there are ideas that actually what it is it's like an antenna and it kind of picks up some Universal Consciousness and that's you know I think that's where you're getting at there are other ideas that it's emergent within individual heads um and just I would just say do not know uh super interesting question and I think as a cosmologist it's these deep questions you know that's why we get up in the morning but I don't have a good answer for you unfortunately uh we've got I'll let you pick with the microphone there's several along here we got one in the middle uh you said the universe is expanding and that seems to imply that the Universe has an end point um what do we think that Endo is uh it seems like do we bump into a wall like in The Truman Show or is it something different from that so right so um there so the we don't know highly unlikely we will bump into anything um so the what we do know about the universe and the nature of its expansion and its size is it's much much bigger than the radius out to which a light could have traveled in the age of the universe that is it's bigger than our causal sphere so we see no Edge effects out to what we can see in the cosic microw background so there's no evidence that running into anything or that even it's got a weird geometry where it might loop back in on itself so within the observable universe there's no evidence of any of that that's one two you know within the context of the way you think about the geometry of SpaceTime um it's it's super confusing because you think of it as being contained in something you know I was showing you pictures of maps of galaxies there was always an edge to that map that doesn't necessarily have to be the case case space actually could be looped in on itself so there effectively is no Edge because it is everything it's like being confined to the surface of a balloon there is no Edge to the surface of the balloon you can just keep going around and around and around if it's finite so there's one idea that the universe is finite and then you know if you traveled 100 billion light years in One Direction you might actually come back to where you started um there's ideas like that there's other possibilities that it literally is infinite that it that it's possible that it could be infinite um and we don't no so the one thing I'll just say is there's no scientific evidence right now that anything funny is going on it looks like there's no edges that we can detect there's no curvature even that we can detect it just sort of looks you know geometrically flat and expanding that's all I can say uh down here in the front on the right so there's a lot of uncertainty but the co the composition of the atmosphere where you show that we see water we see sulfur dioxide and all that are those for sure or could it be a totally different periodic table oh um that's a great question is it a different there's a there's a strong conjecture that it's the same physics and same chemistry throughout the Universe um the one thing I would see would say is uh it's amazing how everything fits together if we assume the chemistry is the same things work really really well right and so if and even in the context of our cosmology you know we assume that the laws of physics are the same throughout the Universe and then we build you know we're able to explain most of the universe we see So within the context of our cosmology we would not understand how you could possibly have different chemistry on a different planet what I the other thing I would say though it's it's still a great question because the fact that that is seems to be the case is amazing right it didn't have to be um if it was different chemistry somehow you know God's playing a trick on us basically it would have to be incredibly lucky that the the lines of excitement and all that stuff are exactly what they would need to be to have look like carbon dioxides because for example carbon dioxide isn't just one line it's like many lines that all have exact the same separations and you see it so it looks very very much like that's what it is that it really is like carbon dioxide sulfur dioxide and stuff it's a great question though I think we have time for one more we got one here so I have like a psychological question for you as a human being oh geez okay how how do you Rectify in your mind whatever faith that you have or whatever just general sense of self that you have with this infinite how do you have that conversation with yourself because I'm sitting here listening to you talk and I'm like my feel like my brain's going to explode how do you deal with that every day yeah that sounds like another talk for a I should pay you then I can tell you about all of mine um I mean I'll just say this I mean you know scientists like me are people right most of our time has spent debugging our code and checking our email and uh trying to remember to you know pay the bills on time and stuff right I mean that's what we do but we do pause occasionally and get to remind ourselves that we have this privilege of being able to think these kind of thoughts I think what it actually does to me psychologically is it grounds me tremendously and it makes me feel like these you know these sort of day-to-day problems are really not that big a deal you know I mean we're you know and I and I and I think it's healthy to think that way and the other thing I would say is I really do have a cosmic perspective you know I mean we live on this globe we all look at the same Sky we're all trying to figure out the same problems you know the same questions we're asking the same deep questions I believe and I think if we remind ourselves of that that's helpful so that's [Applause] all

Channel: The Aspen Institute

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Id: 2AU0dsqpQ1A

Length: 59min 41sec (3581 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 11 2023