The Craziest Discoveries The James Webb Space Telescope Has Made So Far

for three months at the beginning of 2022 I had a tab open on my computer a tab that I checked literally every day it was the home page of the James Webb Space Telescope because after 20 years of development and hype and delays weblined successfully on Christmas Day 2021 but it still had a long road ahead because of its complicated unfolding process there were literally dozens of points of failure as it made its way to the L2 LaGrange point and any one of these would have disabled the mission and made all that time and energy and money go right down the drain but way worse also the promise of all the scientific discoveries that we were expecting from Webb the loss would have been incalculable so yeah I was I was pretty much obsessed with every step of that process thankfully as we all know everything went according to plan it nailed its orbit at L2 and its mirrors were carefully and painstakingly aligned and then on July 12 2022 almost exactly a year ago from when this video is coming out this happened this was first light the first image to be released from the James Webb Space Telescope it was the first time we were introduced to the now iconic six-pointed flares that would come to Define Webb's observations and it absolutely shattered our expectations as excited as we all were for those first photos they were only a hint of the discoveries to come and today we marked the first year of web's discoveries so let's celebrate Webb's first birthday with a look at what web has accomplished so far and some ideas of what's to come [Music] I'm gonna kick this list off with one of the earliest discoveries from jwst it also happens to be one of the most dramatic in July 2022 astronomers at Harvard spotted a Galaxy and a jwst image that may be the oldest ever known I should note here that July 2022 was literally Webb's first month of operation so yeah our boy Came Out Swinging this galaxy was initially named glass z13 glass was the name of the survey jwst was doing the z13 part refers to redshift basically a way to tell how far away the distant objects are it's since turned out the glass z13 is not quite as redshifted as they previously thought it's now called glass z12 and it's no longer a candidate for the oldest known Galaxy there are two reasons for this one is because other galaxies have been found by JB and SD that may be older forming within 300 million years after the big bang they're the reason glass z12 has fallen in the rankings is that a Galaxy discovered before July 2022 has been sort of kind of confirmed as older the Galaxy is called HD1 and ironically it wasn't discovered by Webb it was discovered by the Subaru telescope in Hawaii back in April 2022. data on all these galaxies is still being peer reviewed as the at the time of this recording anyway it may turn out HD1 is the oldest it may turn out that one of the jwst finds is older or maybe some other Galaxy may turn out that we don't even know about yet whatever the case the discovery of these galaxies supports some theories of how the universe formed and challenges others we're looking back 13.5 billion years when we look at these galaxies so there's a lot to sort out next on my list just happens to be one of the coolest photos to come out of web in my opinion anyway this is known as the Phantom Galaxy I'm I'm using air quotes because the Galaxy's official name is m74 it's also known as NGC 628 the Phantom nickname came from how hard m74 is to see it's it's super faint relative to others out there an Earthbound astronomer would be super lucky to actually see it on a very cloudless night also because the cool mask it wears but jwst drops the Phantom right in front of our face I also want to mention that there have been Hubble pictures that were taken to the family Galaxy there are composite images that combine the optical picture from Hubble with the infrared from web which is cool but I don't know that that web photo is just dope anyway that came out in August of 2022. the very next month another image was revealed that really got a space nerd's dangling so astronomers have found thousands of exoplanets since the first one was detected in 1992 but almost all of them were were too far away to directly image but in September 2022 NASA released Webb's first four direct images of an exoplanet two were shot with a near infrared camera or near Cam and two were shot with a mid infrared instrument or Miri all of them were of exoplanet hip65426b catchy name it's a gas giant orbiting it starred about a hundred times the distance between Earth and the sun the star hip 65426 is in The Centaurus constellation actually it's right where the heart of the horse part is of the Centaur would be which brings up questions about mythology which have nothing to do with this video much more relevant is its distance from Earth the star is about 385 light years away that's not super close as exoplanet hosts go so you might wonder why jwst looked there part of the reason is it's distant orbit the actual separation between the star and the planet makes it easier to see and the planet's no lightweight either it has a mass 6 to 12 times out of Jupiter but still a direct image of an exoplanet had never been done before and this was two months after it went online speaking of rare this next item is also something we'd never seen before now technically we haven't seen any direct images but the detection alone is the first also in September 2022 researchers reported the detection of silicate clouds now clouds are fairly common in the solar system uh but these clouds were detected on an object 72 light years away and the object wasn't a planet or a moon either it was a brown dwarf now basically Brown dwarves are kind of failed stars like they're they're massive enough to fuse heavier elements but not massive enough to fuse hydrogen VHS 1256 1257b is a brown dwarf 19 times the mass of Jupiter Spectrum analysis revealed silicate clouds in its atmosphere now silicate means sand so think less this and more this so sand clouds on Brown doors have been theorized but never observed so this was cool but VHS had some more surprises for us further observations detected CO2 in 1995 O.J Simpson was acquitted of murder the Hench and earthquake killed over 5000 people and domestic terrorist bomb they offered P Murrah building in Oklahoma City in slightly better news this came out this image is known as The Pillars of Creation it's one of the most iconic astronomy photos ever taken in 2014 Hubble took an even better photo so if astronomers really wanted to open her up and see what Webb could do this was the place to do it and boy did it deliver jwst's version is clear colorful and full of details Hubble couldn't see granted the colors are artificial but those details are definitely there it's also a perfect demonstration of Webb's ability to see through dust clouds with its infrared sensors jwst took the image using near cam which is how it was able to see through all that dust that obscured so much from Hubble and the murky background that was shown by Hubble looks like a swimming pool full of glitter to jwst the orange blotches and Hubble's pick look like Cosmic lava flows and they're actually more metal than that the fiery fingertips that you see in the image those are fiery Jets from hot young Stars is it just me or does this this wedge behind the tallest pillar make the whole thing look like a giant mummy hand in fact it kind of looks like a giant claw trying to pinch the star and pull it out but again the colors aren't what you or I would see with our own eyes they're mostly representations of wavelengths that Webb can see but we can't and honestly to me this is one of the most fun things about looking at the web's photos is comparing them to Hubble photos we've all come to know and love this really shows how far these telescopes would come but back to exoplanets another exciting Discovery was made on a planet called wasp39b was 39b is in our general neighborhood about 750 light years from Earth and in order to Star on the Virgo constellation called melmock not to be confused with Melmac where this guy came from this planet also goes by the name Boca Prince if you're wondering Boca prince's name for Boca Prince a beach in Aruba some cool sci-fi names around this planet but what really makes this planet special is its composition Spectrum analysis showed that its atmosphere contains carbon dioxide but not just that also water and sulfur dioxide what this means is that as far as chemistry goes anyway bokeh Prince is one of the most Earth-like exoplanets we've found I will say though that the similarity kind of stops at chemistry Boko Prince is about the size of Saturn with a temperature of around 871 degrees Celsius that's 1600 degrees Fahrenheit an aluminum can would melt in the atmosphere this is because bokeh Prince orbits way too closely for comfort and that makes it tightly locked so the hot part stays hot all the time but still but still the findings are really interesting to astronomers and it's thought that it could teach us a lot about how planets form so we expect to be investigating it further in the future but even though Webb was built to see the furthest edges of the universe it's also been used to observe things right here in our solar system in fact in September of last year it was watching when the dart Mission slammed into an asteroid Hubble Is Watching too actually so together these telescopes studied how the asteroid materials plumed after the impact web and hub will take pictures in different wavelengths so using both lead observers see different things but then in November of last year jwst collaborated with yet another telescope to image Titan Saturn's largest moon so Titan has a thick atmosphere that blocks visible light so jwst and ground-based Keck telescope they were able to use that to peer through the upper atmosphere and infrared and their images show clouds rotating from Titan's Dawn side to its dusk side Titan's been imaged before and astronomers have known clouds exist there in some forms since the 1990s but unlike Earth class clouds on Titans are pretty rare phenomenon so jwsd and Keck were lucky to catch them and scientists were happy to have this rare glimpse into this aspect of Titan's weather and last but not least Webb turns his attention to the Majesty of Uranus the planet seriously though Uranus is breathtaking in April 2023 a Webb captured footage of its rings and they're not as flashy as Saturn's but just look at that Clarity that separation also visible in the images is the polar cap the polar cap of Uranus appears and disappears depending on the season this is because Uranus is actually turned sideways you'll notice clouds in the images too and in the zoomed out view you can clearly see six of Uranus's 27 moons there's a lot more in the images that isn't as obvious but like I said in all the images on this list researchers are still probing all the details so I think for now I'm going to end my list right there there's a lot more actually and you can find them all in the James Webb discovery website I'll link that down below yeah you'll see the word unprecedented thrown around quite a bit if you go there and honestly um I think that's fair many of these pictures are things that we've never seen before or things we've never seen at this Clarity before anyway so yeah all in all it's been an amazing first year um there have been some problems worth pointing out there have been a few micrometeoroid impacts on the mirrors including one in May 2022 that was especially concerning but the web team was able to adjust for it maybe even more concerning was an issue with the Mary instrument apparently a wheel that switches filters between different wavelings got stuck and actually kind of threatened to disable one of the most important instruments on web but the team did find a workaround for them too so thankfully nothing insurmountable and hopefully nothing new that is insurmountable comes up but the bottom line is web has just continued to surpass expectations which considering all the hype around it is really saying something so what comes next for web well NASA actually just released in May with the next round of observations are going to be I've linked the full list down below but here's some of them that stand out to me Imaging Comet centaurs and other Kuiper Belt objects more exoplanets of course studies of distant Stars help pin down the age of the universe other targets include black hole supernovae quasars and white dwarf stars including a specific Quasar that may provide new data on dark matter and dark energy now back here in our solar system a surprisingly large water plume on Saturn's moon Enceladus was recently detected by Webb and there are plans to look at that again in the coming months yeah there were compounds that were found in those plumes like phosphorus that suggest the possibility of life and the underwater oceans and Enceladus which has always been a place of interest to astronomers but this just adds to that yeah we haven't actually sent a probe to encela distance Cassini when they did a flyby in 2015 so who knows when the next opportunity will be to get a close-up look but in the meantime jwsd will have to be the next best thing so I guess it looks like all that hand ringing over every last unfolding step in those three months may have been worth it now keep in mind when they launched web they were expecting it to be operational for just five to ten years but they nailed the launch so well that it could get 15 to 20 years out of it and we've gotten all this just from the first year alone yeah who knows what we'll find out next the web telescope has brought a Clarity to the universe that we've never had before Clarity is important Clarity of what we see obviously but also Clarity and how we communicate what we see unfortunately back here on Earth Clarity and science communication has become harder than ever before um it's something I talk about a lot on this channel you know the internet's brought a lot of amazing things to us but it's also made it really difficult to discern truth I've argued in previous videos that we're kind of heading into a post-truth world where whatever it is you believe in you can find it online and it's leading to information bubbles where different groups practically live in their own realities this leads to all kinds of polarization conspiracy theories it's a mess and it's it's something I actually worry quite a bit about which is why I was really happy to partner up with a service called Ground news which believe it or not was founded by a former NASA engineer named harleen core who actually worked on the web telescope in its early years so what they do is actually kind of Genius they basically aggregate articles from over 50 000 news outlets from all around the world and then they arrange them by topics so if you want to check out the news on a certain topic uh you just find the topic you're interested in you can browse the articles on that topic and right there where you're browsing it tells you how biased the article is these are rated by three Independent News monitoring organizations for bias and factuality so you can see for yourself where this information lies on the Spectrum sometimes it's left sometimes it's right but at least you know what you're getting they also have a browser extension that's really cool you just install it on your browser and then any article that you're reading it'll tell you how left right or down the middle it is because the problem is we've gotten so accustomed to our own news bubbles we don't even know anymore how biased our info is we just think it's the truth but it's almost always got some kind of bias and bias isn't necessarily bad it's kind kind of unavoidable really but with ground news at least you know how quality the information is there's also a newsletter that they send out that I get that's called burst your bubble and it gives you the information from a perspective that you might not normally hear and you may not agree with it and that's fine but I think it's important to know it's out there like honestly if I had it my way I would make something like this mandatory for for all news sites I think it would go a long way to you know improving the public discourse but in lieu of me having omnipotent power over all the media the best that I can do is to recommend you give ground news a try um you know we can't control what other people think but we can take responsibility for our own information sources like I'll be honest some of the stuff I read on there they make me uncomfortable and they make me question my own assumptions but that's important that's that's how we grow um if nothing else that's highlighted to me how insulated my own news consumption has become these are things we need to be aware of the plans are super affordable they start at less than a dollar a month and you get so much in return so just go to ground.news Joe Scott the URL is down in the description all right please do like and share this video if you liked it and if this is your first time here there's a floating video right here through the magic of YouTube that you can go look at there's also others on the side over here if you're on a web browser go check them out if you enjoy them I invite you to subscribe I come back of videos every Monday all right that's it for now you guys go out there have an eye opening rest of the week stay safe and I'll see you next Monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 320,069

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott

Id: A3KkalH4d-I

Length: 15min 14sec (914 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 10 2023