We've never seen THIS before - James Webb Space Telescope

december 25th 2021 nasa launched the most powerful telescope ever made if you look at the deepest images from hubble what you see are they're these little teeny tiny red nuggets those reddest reddest galaxies are the edge but we know that there's something beyond that edge we need light that is more red than hubble can see oh that's so cool goosebumps when you think about like it drops off and beyond that the expanse of what we've never seen don't make me laugh too hard today i always keep a little mirror here just to check if i look okay i don't need it today i woke up this morning early to go surfing and i ended the surf session with a surfboard flying down from the heavens at my eye i honestly don't feel that bad i just have a little bit of a headache and four stitches and a bruise all over my eyeball but i'm fine so levi did you hear that just a little over a month ago we launched the most powerful space telescope in history do you know anything about it not a single thing wow that's so exciting so the james webb space telescope is what a lot of people call the successor to hubble if this is the size of earth is the size of a quarter where do you think hubble is like how far away i would think it's so close i wouldn't be able to you actually would be able to see it but it would be about a millimeter up so it'd be really really small where do you think webb will be i would think right next to hubble no so hubble's about 550 kilometers up above the surface of the planet if hubble's a millimeter then webb will be nine feet away nine feet so like outside of this room to that chair in the middle of our office yeah the things i'm going to tell you about are where it's located because it's a really unique special place what we can see with it that hubble couldn't see including why we can see so far back and i'm going to tell you the crazy engineering that it has to fold up like a little i've never seen it yeah it's so cool like a transformer like a transformer wait till i show you some of the photos of what we're gonna see with infrared so maybe i'll start there actually have you ever seen this nebula before it looks similar i think it's called mystic mountain this is what it looks like in the visible part of the spectrum and then this is what we see when we look with infrared you're seeing all this stuff that was obscured and then you can see straight through it all with infrared and you can see things that hubble couldn't see well a really critical thing about this telescope is that it's an infrared telescope all the instruments all the detectors basically like all of our camera sensors on web are all infrared sensors so you can see things like this here's you know a smoky image of a firefighter but then they can see right through the smoke to see the the heat signatures of a hot person there on the floor guy holding the trash bag and you can see straight through the trash bag infrared sometimes goes through things that visible light doesn't go through and we need that infrared capability to find the very first galaxies that first epic of galaxy formation after the big bang so one of the things scientists want to use web for is looking all the way back to the very beginning of the universe the farther we look away the further back in time we're looking because it takes like some time to get to us those galaxies are so far away that their light has been redshifted all the way into the infrared part of the spectrum red shifted always means just downshifted essentially yeah yeah longer wavelength there it is we're going that direction light is always essentially moving along that spectrum when it's moving through the expanding universe it is so even if we had like a super huge optical telescope in space much more powerful than hubble no matter how big it was it wouldn't be able to see these galaxies because their light now isn't all in the infrared so looking back in time here's the big bang which we obviously know from previous videos that it didn't happen at one spot but with hubble hubble only saw back to about here that's right at the end of the first galaxies for me so webb is going to be able to see all the way back to here to the very very first stars yeah that's cool it's super cool your face lit up i'm so excited we'll be right back with more space but a quick word from today's sponsor if space telescopes are a service to humanity then this sponsor is a service to the people in the room with you i've been using native deodorant for a few months now this one lavender and rose but they sent me a few different scents to try out there's lilac and white tea this one is coconut and vanilla which is like a beach party under your arms and speaking of down under your arms we've got eucalyptus and mint for all you aussie lovers but my personal favorite is the lavender and rose because i love lavender so this one wins and it always will deodorant nearly everyone uses it and we know if they don't but native has choices for deodorant that are more sustainable they offer this paper board packaging which is the same formula as their regular deodorant but they replace plastic with paper and they use simple ingredients so it's very smooth and dries quickly and it's not sticky plus it is cruelty free and vegan which i know is important to some of you so normally three plastic free deodorants would be 39 but if you use my link and my code physics girl all one word then you'll get them for 26 dollars which is over 33 off with my code you also can get 20 off of body wash or toothpaste and now if you'll excuse me i have to get back to editing this video for you it is a arduous task so some of these galaxies would actually be invisible to hubble how was blind to the galaxies yeah the early stars were 30 to 300 times as massive as the sun millions of times as bright they would burn super fast and blow up in supernovas some of them would maybe become the first black holes that would eventually become like the supermassive black holes at the center of our galaxies the oldest light you know this it's not the oldest because we've actually seen the cosmic microwave background so what's so special about getting to see here if we have seen here and know what's here we've seen here but not at a very high resolution so when you see that map that um cosmic microwave background map well it didn't have the smiley face but this is the light from there this is the cosmic microwave background cmb was was just from the result of neutral atoms first forming in the universe and light starting to escape there were no stars yet but this isn't very good resolution it's like if you took a picture of every single human on earth and you're like let's put everyone together into one circle this big it would just look like kind of a brownish blob you wouldn't be able to know that humans have eyes stuff that ended up making every single star and galaxy and person and amoeba and everything in our universe all in this little picture yeah it's a bunch of useless data with no control well it's not useless but in some ways people are like we've seen that far back but we've never seen this epic how come not in enough detail to tell us our basic questions we have about how the very first stars and galaxies ever in the universe formed this is one of the parts i don't fully know how to explain or fully understand i mean besides the obvious that these are the most distant and oldest galaxies in the universe like that's really cool to see what exactly is it about how they evolve and what they look like that we're so curious about it's sort of just trying to piece together the the big picture story of how the universe evolves if we look at galaxies in the nearby universe in general you know they're they're very organized the milky way galaxy has these beautiful spiral arms but as you start to look in the more distant universe you see a completely different picture galaxies are sort of smaller they're more clumpy and so that question of how we go from the sort of small clumpy things to the large organized structure that we see today is one of the central questions of how the universe works and of course we look around our milky way and we have planets and on this planet we have people and so it all in a sense you know connects to that question of how did conscious life evolve and that has to do somehow with how galaxies evolve it's like universe ancient lore it's like did you know there were like fewer stars and they were way bigger finding these first galaxies was one of the the very first sort of drivers for building a telescope like this so back not long after hubble was launched even before that we were astronaut well not we i was like a kid then but astronomers were thinking about what's the next big telescope what's the really big thing we want to do and seeing those distant galaxies has always been sort of part of that story and part of the motivation for why we built uh the telescope like we did we can't just look at our own galaxy to figure out how it formed we have to look at other galaxies in the past and then extrapolate from that i don't know what you look like as a baby but i can look at other oh you know those like weird apps that take a picture of you make you look like a baby the way that those work is that they look at babies and then they extrapolate what are all the baby features and then they take you and they're like you must have looked like this not quite the same it's like a baby filter for galaxies we also want to know where are galaxies heading but andromeda is heading toward the milky way for a potential collision so in the future it may be an andromedy way yeah oh so those are the types of things we might get answers to exactly we continually discover stuff and then that gives scientists new theories they're like oh we have to test this one now and then they look for stuff and that's that is just going to keep happening with webb and then the other thing the last thing the last science we're going to do is we're going to look at look for life essentially how would you look for life yeah i would look for uh water yes beautiful you would look for a specific element and how do you do that if you're looking at a planet really far away buy the next best telescope you spent 10 billion dollars instead of telescope called web out into space telescope costs 10 billion so you'll see a star and it's it's like luminosity how bright it is we'll suddenly go bloop and then it'll come right back up and be like what is that what could that possibly be and it's a it's a planet like just barely blocking some of the light and passing in front of the star you know stare at a star a distant star watch for a planet to pass in front of the star and then they look at the starlight that filters through the atmosphere what color is fanta orange orange so if i took a light and shined it through fanta you'd be like oh there's something orange in that bottle so i can see the colors of the stuff inside of the planet's atmosphere and knowing the colors will tell me what it's made up of long story short there's spectroscopy instruments on web not just taking pictures but we're also analyzing on web's instruments what elements what materials we're seeing on these planets and that's incredibly hard to do because the stars are bright the planets are tiny and the atmospheres are just minuscule and so getting that contrast is really hard but having this huge infrared telescope in space is going to again i think just sort of blow open uh the world of how we we understand exoplanets let me talk about like the craziness of sending this thing do you remember hearing about a space mission where astronauts had to go up to hubble and fix it yes we will not be able to do that with web so everything has to be perfect why i'm curious what you think why would we send web so far away to get away from earth flight ooh well that's one of the reasons yeah actually it seems crazy to me because you gotta get it right on the first time you can't fix it and it's 10 billion dollars yeah so why would you put it so far away that's crazy so the reason why is that when a satellite is orbiting earth it often passes in and out of earth's shadow and so is heating and cooling and heating and cooling there's this really special point that they're sticking webb or it's actually already there it arrived already and the point is called a lagrangian point so there's really really unique points okay so there's these five special points around the sun and earth orbit called lagrangian points these are spots exactly where the sun and earth the gravitational pull exactly match with the orbit of your object where do you think that web is going i mean i guess l4 or l5 that's a really good guess because these two are actually the stable points they're essentially like a gravity pocket yeah it's kind of like a gravity pocket but these ones are real true pockets that you really get trapped in asteroids and random stuff get trapped there well jupiter actually has millions of trojans they're decent spots to send a satellite but also you're running the risk of there being something there to run into it's actually here yeah it's going to l2 which is an unstable orbit it's going to need to keep using some fuel because it'll want to fall out but the reason we want it there is to shield the sunlight and shield the earth light here's my web it's got a sun shield down in the bottom and then it's got this array of golden mirrors here imagine this is web the size of of these sun shields is about a tennis court so this thing is huge so when the telescope was being built i could literally walk across campus and see the mirrors you know that's so cool for me i mean just the sheer size of this thing it is so big for the first time i went out to north grumman in california to see the sun shield being tested and they literally had a ladder there um you know and you could walk up the ladder and then look down at the sun shield and i'm like it's hard to believe that that thing is in space now because it really is it's so big we had to send it fold it up so we sent it an ariane 5 rocket there's so many people whose lives went into this and it launched successfully and not only that i loved watching the articles because then it was like the next step is we have to unfold the sun shield so that thing this part this like silver part had to be unfolded i mean the fact that these deployments have happened just like almost completely flawlessly so incredible 31 minutes in the solar array comes out and then high gain little antenna yeah the sunshield palette and this is four days after the launch it is literally a transformer levi and there's all these news articles going on like we've successfully deployed the space shield because we can't really there's no gopros on there oh love it okay i don't know if you saw but that was like these sun shields are a membrane of plastic incredible tech let me tell you about it real quick it's called cap ton this is actually really similar to like the space blankets that they used to keep you warm but what's so incredible about this is that these have to be tensioned and pulled out because they're really thin is like a half millimeter thick layer of caps on all the way down to 0.025 millimeters thick on the innermost layer on the hot side it can withstand about 231 degrees fahrenheit and then on the last layer it's going to be about minus 394 degrees fahrenheit super cold you've heard of absolute zero absolute zero refers to zero kelvin on the kelvin temperature scale so this is about 36 kelvin so that's really freaking cold so the last thing i want to tell you about is just all the amazing tech that's on this what makes a telescope really good is how big its mirror is this is hubble's primary mirror and this is james webb space telescope yeah it's huge since space is brutal i'm gonna give you some brutal statistics so each of the mirrors um there's 18 hexagonal mirrors each of them weighs 20 kilograms which is about the weight of four severed heads no have you been beheaded with three of your friends put those together it's one of these mirrors you know this whole thing has been very confusing until you just put it in perspective so the whole thing it's got to be a lot of severed heads brutal the mirror is coated with gold which is pretty cool if you take the mass of all of the gold coatings it's about the size of a golf ball spread over six and a half meters you take that golf ball so it's super super super thin it's about as flat as you would be if you were launched from a trebuchet and splattered against the castle wall oh okay brutal that did not get any more clear but thank you but actually that's not even accurate it would be it's way flatter it's about a thousand times less thick than a a coating of paint blood this is about a thousand angstroms why do they need a thin layer of gold this chart of reflectance of a couple different metals and check this out so here's wavelength so you're going this direction you're going like this is kind of like ultraviolet to the visible part of the spectrum and then as soon as you get past 500 nanometers gold goes from like i don't know 40 reflectance all the way up to almost 100 so it's better than aluminum it's better than what the heck is ag do you know what ag is silver yeah but look it's even better than silver it's even better than aluminum gold just jumps right up to nearly 100 so you're looking at like 99 reflectance it's so funny though as a physicist i read this and i was like i want to see what the reflections chart looks like and i looked it up and i was like oh look at that anyway they ended up making the rest of the mirrors out of beryllium it's just an incredible instrument so what's next well they've sent it into space it's there they're going to align the telescope so they have to check that all the mirrors are there and everything like they have to align them and test them and they're going to do that they're going to calibrate it using a star called hd 84406 which is part of ursa major you know bear constellation they're gonna get a very good look then they're gonna start looking at these galaxies at the very beginning of the universe they're gonna start looking through nebulas at planets they're going to start looking for forming stars and forming planets and forming galaxies they're going to start looking for how our universe came to be a huge moment for science and for engineers and for nasa and for you know international collaborations it's very exciting that's so cool what was so amazing about the hubble space telescope was that it showed us just these incredibly beautiful images of exactly what we would see if we looked with our eyes so but webb will have to translate the images we can't see infrared with our eyes so it's like hearing an alien language and having to translate that into human but you're still hearing a freaking alien language so it's super cool thanks for watching i hope you enjoyed and stay safe out there oh happy physics [Music] you

Channel: Physics Girl

Views: 1,405,173

Keywords: physics girl, dianna cowern

Id: nadkOPhS-Bs

Length: 19min 5sec (1145 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 11 2022