Webb space telescope keeps delivering cosmic surprises
The latest made-ya-look image from the James Webb Space Telescope has arrived, and it looks like … a penguin. A giant penguin in space.
NASA officials on Friday marked two full years of scientific results from the telescope with the release of the image, which actually shows a pair of intertwined galaxies, known as Arp 142, and nicknamed the Penguin and the Egg. The first is a spiral galaxy; the second is an elliptical galaxy.
“The galaxies’ ‘dance’ gravitationally pulled on the Penguin’s thinner areas of gas and dust, causing them to crash in waves and form stars,” NASA said in a news release. “Look for those areas in two places: what looks like a fish in its ‘beak’ and the ‘feathers’ in its ‘tail.’”
The Webb telescope has done everything that astronomers had hoped it would do, notably looking deeper into space and further back in time than any previous telescope. And it has produced pretty pictures. The universe as captured by the Webb’s mirror and suite of instruments is beautiful, dazzling, flamboyant. These grabby images demonstrate the remarkable resolution of the Webb telescope, NASA’s $10 billion successor to the still-operating Hubble Space Telescope.
But the primary reason the Webb exists is to do something Hubble can’t do: look far into the infrared portion of the spectrum, enabling scientists to analyze the highly red-shifted light emitted by galaxies when the universe was very young.
That has produced a major surprise. Astronomers had assumed that the early galaxies would be small and faint. That’s not what the Webb saw.
Instead there is a remarkable array of big, bright galaxies, many containing supermassive black holes, that emitted their light just 300 million years or so after the big bang. (The best estimate for the age of the universe is 13.8 billion years.) The processes of star formation and the assemblage of galaxies were faster, more efficient or just different from what theorists had assumed.
This is how science is supposed to work: A new instrument with a novel way of looking at nature puts hard data where previously there had been only theories, computer models and notions.
“The biggest impact we’ve had so far is in understanding the first billion years. That was the elevator pitch to sell the telescope, and it’s been gratifying to me how well we’ve delivered,” said Jane Rigby, the senior scientist for the Webb. “The universe cooperated.”
The unexpected number of big, bright galaxies early in the universe doesn’t mean the Big Bang Theory is wrong, Webb scientists hasten to add.
“We have this deluge of data, we have all these interesting things that we’re finding, and we don’t quite understand why,” NASA astrophysicist Amber Straughn said. But this does not represent the discovery of “new physics” or anything so revolutionary, she said.
“The Big Bang is still the best theory of the universe that we have,” Straughn said.
The Webb has looked at the nearby universe as well, including observations of the intriguing Trappist-1 planetary system, where a swarm of rocky planets orbits a red dwarf star. This planetary system is about 41 light-years away, within our own galaxy and virtually next door in the cosmic scheme of things.
An ongoing astrobiological question that the Webb might answer is whether red dwarf stars are too stormy to allow nearby planets to hold on to an atmosphere and seem plausible as a place where life could prosper.
“So far, we haven’t found a rocky planet like ours with a life-sustaining atmosphere,” planetary astronomer Heidi Hammel said in an email. “That may require an even bigger telescope.”
Could this telescope find the first incontrovertible evidence of alien life? That seems unlikely, Rigby said.
“Personally I don’t think Webb is going to find life. It’s not built to do it,” Rigby said. “I think we can find potentially habitable planets.”
Garth Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California at Santa Cruz who was among the people who dreamed up the Webb in the late 1980s, said the telescope has assembled a vast amount of data on exoplanets - the worlds that orbit distant stars. That data still needs to be assembled into a coherent picture, he added.
“It is a little like an alien walking through an earthly zoo, looking at the vast range of animals and then trying to assemble the relationships and common aspects,” he said.
The Webb rocketed into space on Christmas morning 2021 and spent six months getting shipshape as it orbited the sun roughly a million miles from Earth. The big headline from that period was that the telescope overcame 344 potential single-point failures, including the deployment of a tennis-court-sized sun shield necessary for the cold-temperature observations in the infrared portion of the spectrum.
One of the telescope’s 18 hexagonal mirrors took a nasty strike from a micrometeoroid, but that had limited impact. NASA has since tried to lower the risk of such impacts by flying the telescope with the mirrors facing away from the direction of travel.
“We’re sort of flying it so that it’s not facing, quote unquote, into the rain,” Straughn said.
The telescope has also pointed itself at the worlds we know best, in our own solar system. Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, long known to have a deep subsurface ocean, is leaking carbon dioxide fitfully, the Webb discovered. And the telescope saw a 6,000-mile plume of water erupting from Saturn’s moon Enceladus, which like Europa has a hidden ocean under the crust of ice, Hammel said.
“The next 20 years are only going to be even more exciting as we really push the capabilities of this fantastic tool into the unknown and unexpected,” Hammel said.
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