A marvel of engineering, Webb is able to look beyond the cosmos than any previous telescope thanks to its huge primary mirror and infrared-focused instruments, allowing it to look through dust and gas.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said Wednesday that the agency will reveal the “deepest image of our universe ever taken” on July 12, thanks to the newly operational James Webb Space Telescope.
“If you think about it, this is further than humanity has ever looked at,” Nelson said during a press conference at the Baltimore Space Telescope Science Institute, the observatory’s 10,000-operations center. million dollars that was launched in December last year and is now orbiting the Sun a million miles (1.5 million kilometers) away from Earth.
A marvel of engineering, Webb is able to look beyond the cosmos than any previous telescope, thanks to its huge primary mirror and its infrared-focused instruments, which allow it to look through dust and gas.
“It will explore objects in the solar system and atmospheres of exoplanets orbiting other stars, giving us clues as to whether their atmospheres are potentially similar to ours,” Nelson added, speaking by phone while isolating himself with COVID.
“You can answer some questions we have: where do we come from? What else is out there? Who are we? And, of course, you will answer some questions that we don’t even know what the questions are.”
Webb’s infrared capabilities allow it to look further back in time to the Big Bang, which happened 13.8 billion years ago.
As the universe expands, the light from the first stars shifts from the ultraviolet and visible wavelengths at which it has been emitted, to longer infrared wavelengths, which Webb is equipped to detect with an unprecedented resolution.
Today, the first cosmological observations date back to 330 million years after the Big Bang, but with Webb’s capabilities, astronomers believe they will easily break the record.
20 years of life
As better news, NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy revealed that, thanks to an efficient launch by NASA partner Arianespace, the telescope could remain operational for 20 years, twice the service life of initially anticipated.
“These 20 years will not only allow us to delve deeper into history and time, but we will delve deeper into science because we have the opportunity to learn and grow and make new observations,” he said.
NASA also intends to share Webb’s first spectroscopy of a distant planet, known as an exoplanet, on July 12, said NASA chief scientist Thomas Zurbuchen.
Spectroscopy is a tool for analyzing the chemical and molecular composition of distant objects and a planetary spectrum can help characterize its atmosphere and other properties, such as whether it has water and what its soil is like.
“From the beginning, we will look at these worlds out there that keep us awake at night as we look at the starry sky and ask ourselves as we look out there, is there life elsewhere?” said Zurbuchen.
Nestor Espinoza, as an STI astronomer, told AFP that previous exoplanet spectroscopies performed with existing instruments were very limited compared to what Webb could do.
“It’s like being in a very dark room and you only have a small hole through which you can look,” he said, about current technology. Now, with Webb, “You’ve opened a huge window, you can see every little detail.”
The first full-color scientific images from the Webb telescope will arrive in July
© 2022 AFP
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