Spider Man? No. But there is a Webb Involved.
The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope brings mankind closer to discovering the deepest secrets of our universe.
What would you do with a time machine?
You might relive a pleasant childhood memory, watch a revolutionary historical event, or maybe even go as far to see the dinosaurs who roamed our planet hundreds of millions of years ago. The importance of learning about our past is evident in our society, as historians, archeologists, and organizations work arduously to find and preserve the keys to our past.
But how far can we really go?
With the recent launch of the James Webb Telescope, about 13.7 billion years.
You might’ve heard of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) launch everywhere within the past month, but what is its true significance? What is the potential of a telescope the product of over 30 years of work costing over 10 billion dollars, being sent nearly a million miles away from Earth?
This impressive feat is undoubtedly expected to return even more impressive results, results that can take us one step closer to unlocking the depths of our universe’s deepest secrets.
The JWST, pictured above, will be sent far into our vast solar system, to a spot over four times as far as our moon. At around the size of a tennis court, its sunshield (the dark layers below the hexagonal gold mirror) will protect it from the remaining heat and radiation from our sun.
Non-Paradoxical Time Travel
We don’t know much about the beginning stages of the universe.
Our universe is constantly expanding. As a result, our stars, galaxies, and everything in between get further away from us, and each other, at a steadily increasing rate.
On the other hand, light doesn’t travel instantly, but at a fixed speed (186,282 miles per second to be exact). Though the time gap between flicking on a flashlight in the dark and the bright light filling the room is completely unnoticeable to us, this starts to change on a larger scale.
To begin observing this difference, we can start with celestial objects over tens of millions of miles away, like our sun which sits around 93 million miles away from our home planet.
Thanks to this distance, light from the sun actually takes around 8 minutes to reach us. This means that when we look at the sun, we’re actually seeing what it looked like around 8 minutes ago because the light it emitted took 8 minutes to reach us. Quite fascinating.
On an even larger scale when we look at stars and galaxies hundreds of thousands of times further than our sun, we see them as they looked from billions of years ago. Light not only gets fainter, but starts to fade away as our universe stretches out, making it disappear from sight completely as it approaches the viewing limits of our current technology. This disappearing light, which includes some of the first light of our universe, is exactly what the JWST is working to recover.
Seeing the Invisible
As light travels further away from us on a cosmic scale, it begins to dim and experience a phenomenon called redshifting. Light gets stretched to a point where it reaches us as infrared light, which is invisible to the naked eye, and gets redder and redder the farther the object gets.
This is where the telescope comes in.
Our other telescopes like Hubble lack an advanced infrared camera, but due to its vastly expanded range of detectable wavelengths, the JWST can see hundreds of million years farther back than our most advanced telescopes yet.
Not only can we see the earliest light of our universe, but also the galaxies and stars that are blocked by clouds of gas and dust because infrared waves can pass through them. By observing infrared light, we are already unlocking clues to the start of our universe that our best telescopes can’t come close to capturing.
Pictured above are the Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula, a packed collection of gas, dust clouds, and stars seen in visible light (left) and infrared light (right). Credit: NASA
As seen in the image above, the way the JWST detects infrared light allows it to see way more and way clearer than its predecessors. With its cutting-edge technology, the JWST can even detect a bee on Earth from the moon (which is 238,900 miles away!) Aside from spectacular shots, the JWST’s infrared capabilities can provide groundbreaking clues about our beginning, ones that can completely rewrite our pre-existing theories.
Our Quest to Find New Life
The JWST’s abilities lie far beyond seeing billion-year-old light.
Limited by our current technologies, we have little knowledge of exoplanets besides the fact that they exist in our universe, floating around hundreds of light years away from us. However, the telescope’s powerful infrared cameras can also identify the specific compositions of gases in distant exoplanets. By detecting the gasses composing the atmosphere, scientists can determine its habitability and even detect extraterrestrial life.
How does this work? Exoplanets, like Earth, rotate around a host star. As light from their host stars illuminate their atmosphere, different gases absorb and reflect different colors, allowing us to detect their unique atmospheric composition.
An artistic interpretation of an exoplanet in the TRAPPIST-1 system, a star system consisting of star TRAPPIST-1 surrounded by 7 planets located around 39 light years away. These planets are around the size of Earth, and 3 of the 7 are within the star’s habitable zone. These are one of many exoplanets the JWST will observe in its lifetime. Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser
Some gases, like oxygen, are what scientists call biomarkers. A detectable amount of them in an exoplanet’s atmosphere is a strong indication of extraterrestrial life. The ability to detect it, however, from hundreds of light-years away (given that a single light-year is 5,878,625,370,000 miles away) is what makes this ability revolutionary for the future of exoplanet research.
Wrapping Up
From being able to soak up invisible light from our earliest galaxies, to detecting the specific gases composing potentially life-hosting exoplanets quadrillions of miles away, the James Webb Space Telescope is one of the greatest technological feats of humanity thus far.
These are among the many ways the JWST will have profound impacts on what we know about our cosmic origins, along with learning more about mysterious dark matter and the status of our own solar system. Previous telescopes pale in comparison to the JWST, but we are still writing our technological future. Webb, along with the next brilliant creations we send to space in the near future, will undoubtedly shed crucial light on the new dawn of space research.
