Notable images of the cosmos released this week are “just the tip of the iceberg,” says Gary Boyle.
Gary Boyle iHe is an astronomy educator, guest speaker and monthly columnist for the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (RASC), as well as former president of the RASC Ottawa Center.
It is often said, a picture is worth a thousand words and the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope did not disappoint.
During the press conference on Tuesday (July 12), the world had a seat in front of the most remarkable images of the universe ever taken.
During the hour, five images have left us wanting more. This is just the tip of the cosmic iceberg.
The deep field image showed thousands of galaxies, including some that appear to be extended. This is not a defect of the telescope.
It is the distortion caused by the gravity of a large galaxy in the foreground. Albert Einstein predicted this deformation or curvature of the fabric of space-time, like someone standing on a trampoline where the rubber mat is distorted. The larger the object, the greater the distortion of light.
To show the power of James Webb, the area of space where the deep field image was taken was as small as a grain of sand held in a long arm.
This cluster is 4.6 billion light-years away. This is the amount of time it took for light to reach us and when the sun and planets were slowly created from the solar nebula.
Launched on December 25, 2021, the powerful Ariane 5 rocket delivered the seven-ton telescope into space where it was deployed and gracefully continued its journey.
It traveled for another 30 days to its final position known as Lagrange 2, a point in space about 1.5 million km from Earth or about four times the earth-moon distance.
Unlike Hubble which was launched in 1990 with a faulty mirror that required a repair mission in 1993 equipping it with corrective lenses, James Webb is too far away for a service mission.
Who knows if there will be such a mission in the future if necessary, but for now, there are no plans to ever visit the telescope.
The $ 10 billion project is a collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency along with other companies.
Canada’s contribution is the thin guide sensor (FGS) used to aim the mass telescope, as well as the near-infrared image and the slotless spectrograph (NIRISS).
Thousands of people around the world worked on this project that began in 1996 when it was first called the Next Generation Telescope. In 2002, the name was changed to James Webb Space Telescope, which was the administrator of NASA from 1961 to 1968.
These were the early days of Mercury, Gemini and Apollo.
The Webb project suffered setbacks along the way, such as a redesign and the COVID-19 pandemic did not help.
When completed, the 18 gold-plated six-sided honeycomb-style mirrors measure a total width of 6.5 meters wide compared to Hubble’s unique 2.4-meter-wide mirror. This translates into more light-capturing power along with its infrared ability to observe heat signatures through interstellar dust clouds.
Another critical part of the telescope is the solar shield that measures the size of a tennis court.
Composed of lightweight material with special thermal properties, the five layers will provide a shield from the heat and sunlight as well as the heat of your instruments, allowing the sensitive infrared to operate without interference.
The mirror will operate at -223 C and the rest of the equipment close to absolute zero or -273 C.
In the wise words of Carl Sagan, “somewhere, something amazing is waiting to be known,” the James Webb Space Telescope has opened a new portal to discover.
Will we ever see the first child stars and galaxies dating back 13.8 billion years? Only time will tell.
The clear one.