Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What did the first JWST images reveal?

Episode Date: July 21, 2022

Daniel and Jorge walk through the first images from our fancy new space telescope! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to therapy for black girls on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. You get your podcast. Hey, Jorge, how'd you celebrate the big holiday? Holiday, which one? July 4th? No, much more important than that. July 14, Bastille Day. No, no, even more cake was involved in this holiday.

Let me look it up. Okay, Google says it was recently. recently world yoga day. Is that the one? Oh, that's important, but this recent holiday stretched our knowledge of the universe more than our bodies. Okay, which holiday was it? It was new space telescope first picture day. That's a really long name for a holiday. Isn't there a shorter name you can use? Space Day. This is just go crazy day. It's a little catcher than yoga day. Probably fewer injuries too. Unless you count mindblones. Hi, I'm Jorge, a cartoonist, and the co-author of Frequently Asked Questions about the universe.

Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I have never had my mind blown by yoga. Maybe you haven't been doing the right kind of yoga. Have you tried like that hot yoga or that cold yoga? I don't know the yogas, but I'm sure there are many different kinds. Maybe one of them will blow your mind off. Maybe I should do downward facing dog while reading a science paper. There you go. Although that might blow your back more than your head.

Or my old, old knees. Welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of IHeart Radio. In which we invite you to stretch your mind, to relax your consciousness and to allow us to insert into it, crazy ideas about the nature of the universe. We look deep into the farthest recesses of the galaxy and even beyond into other galaxies

to try to understand where it all came from, what it's doing, and what it means for the future. That's right. We do downward dog. We do all the poses here on the podcast as we try to examine the amazing things that scientists are learning about our universe and all of the amazing discoveries that are being made right now. And sometimes on the podcast, Jorge, you do a version of linguistic gymnastics. when you're responding to having your mind blown. You're like, what, what, what?

I do have to practice those, you know. He's in front of the mirror, just pretending he said something amazing. Well, you have an amazing variety of different reactions where apparently my chuckle is fairly canned. Yes, that's what I should do. I should just pre-record all of my mind-blowing reactions. You have like a keyboard in front of you. You can just press a button for the right one. What? What? What? We have a little song here.

Yeah. Somebody out there should resample a famous song using your what's. Oh, don't say that. If you say that to the internet, it will happen. Make it so, internet. But it is an interesting time to be in science, in astronomy, in astrophysics, learning about the universe because more and amazing new things are coming up every day. We can learn so much about the universe just by looking up at the sky and seeing those twinkling stars and those roving plants. and those smudges that are nebula and distant galaxies. But we want to know even more than can be seen just by our evolved eyeballs. We in the species are deeply engaged in building new kinds of eyeballs.

Eyeballs that can see better, farther, deeper than the ones that we spent billions of years evolving. And those eyeballs show us the ancient history of our cosmos and help us understand where it came from. And just very recently, it was a really big day for space eyeballs because we have a new telescope that is now up and running, and we're getting data from it right now. That's right. After decades and billions of dollars, the James Webb Space Telescope launched in December 2021, and spent the last six months commissioning and tweaking

and aligning all the various bits of the most complicated, the largest, the most expensive, and the most powerful space-based astronomical observatory humanity has ever built. And finally, we recently saw its first pictures. Yeah, it was a big day. You call it a holiday, Daniel. Did you open up presents? Do you hang something on the wall or something?

Everybody here at UC Irvine was very excited. There was definitely champagne. I saw people munching cake. But the biggest present was just the pictures themselves. You know, this is light that is arriving on Earth all of the time. The information in these pictures is information that has already arrived on Earth over and over and over again is just spilled, wasted on the ground or hitting the clouds or the tree or the roof of your buildings because nobody is looking at it.

So finally, we have built a device which is capable of capturing this light, processing it, analyzing it, and revealing to us what it shows about the distant universe. It's a fantastic day for astronomy. Yeah, it was a pretty incredible day. A lot of fanfare. It was all over the news. Even the president announced it. President Biden looked amazed. And, you know, that guy's a little shell shock these days.

And so to see him be so captivated, so impressed, I think just reflected how it's not just astronomers who find these people. pictures beautiful and revealing, but it's something common in humanity to want to explore to see what's over the next hill, what's past that furthest galaxy. Yeah, and President Biden has been around for a while, so you think he had seen it all, but he was pretty impressed. He's pretty far redshifted, yeah. Yeah, everyone was really excited about these pictures, not just because they're beautiful and pretty and amazing to look at, but because of all of the things that those pictures are telling us about the universe. That's right. The universe is gorgeous, and we love to look at these incredible views over billions and billions of miles. But also, as you say,

we have questions about the nature of the universe, about what's out there, about how stars are formed, how galaxies came together, about the atmospheres of exoplanets. And these pictures are more than just beautiful. They start to answer those questions. And most importantly, they show us how powerful this observatory will be in getting us even more answers in the near future. So today on the podcast, we'll be answering the question. What are the pictures from the James Webb Space Telescope? Tell us, you mean besides how awesome the universe looks and how pretty it is? Yeah, you know, this generates gorgeous pictures of people luxuriating over and using as their phone lock screens,

but also this is a science instrument. This is going to answer questions about the universe. We don't spend $10 billion just to generate backgrounds for your laptop, right? We do it because we have questions about the nature of the universe that we want, answers to. We know the answers are out there. We know the answers are arriving here on Earth. We just until recently hadn't been able to capture and decode that information. Although having good laptop backgrounds, this is a pretty good bonus. How much would you spend for a really good laptop background? $10, $20? How good does it have to be to be worth $10 billion? Well, I'm an artist

so I can just make one myself. And you can assign whatever price you want to it, right? You're like, I'm not selling this for less than $10 bill. Maybe NASA should get into NFTs of their pictures. You know, they can sell them for some Bitcoins. Well, maybe NASA will help us understand how to live on an exoplanet after NFTs have ruined the environment down here. But, you know, they might fund extra planetary exploration and find us a new home. No financial advice is given on this podcast. We are not experts.

But it is pretty interesting how I made the news so much. And in fact, my cousin wrote me, he's like, what are these photos? I'm like, what do you mean? What do they mean? He's like, what am I looking at? Why is this interesting? Yeah, and I got a tsunami of email from listeners wanting to know what we thought about these photographs and what we could learn from looking at them. So as usual, we were wondering how many people out there had seen these photographs and what they thought we could learn from them. So, Daniel, this time you went out there into the campus, right? Not just sat from your computer. That's right. When we respond to breaking news events, I like to walk around campus and see what people have heard about this. So you get a different slice sort of of humanity asking random people around UC Irvine than our listeners.

So I walked around the day after these pictures were released and asked people that they had seen these pictures, what they thought of them, and whether it was worth billions of dollars. So think about it for a second. What did you think when you first saw the pictures from the James Webb Space Telescope? Here's what others had to say. Have you guys seen the new pictures from the James Webb Space Telescope? Yes. Yes. You have.

Okay. What did you think of them? I thought it was really cool how it was essentially like a telescope looking at. another natural telescope, like the warping of that cluster of galaxies kind of bending the light so that you could see like much, much farther away, much, much older galaxies. I thought that was really cool. What do you think we've learned from these images? I think I just know generally what we can learn from it, but it's that there's more galaxies out there and we could see more. Did you see the latest images from the James Webb Space Telescope? Yes. You did? What'd

you think of them? They were amazing. It also looks very similar to some of the images we've seen like theoretically before, which was really interesting. So what do you think we've learned from these or built them? No idea. Did you see the new images from the James Webb Space Telescope? Yes. What did you think of them? I thought they were cool.

What do you think we've learned from them? Honestly, I'm not sure. I just glanced upon them. I didn't really do no research on it. But I did think they were cool. Cool. So you think it was worth the $20 billion? Could the $20 billion could have went somewhere else?

Probably, but the pictures were cool. So the question is, did you see the latest images from the James Webb Space Telescope? Yes, I did. And what did you think of them? They were pretty beautiful and amazing. And what do you think we can learn from these kind of images? Our place in the universe.

What do you mean? Maybe both how amazing it is that we are here and at the same time how we're just insignificant in the brother's team of things. So do you think it was worth the billions of dollars? Yes, because I don't think it's a trade-off of, if we spend money on that kind of science or other science, we should do just more of it because we waste lots of money in lots of other places.

All right. Some pretty excited people and also some people who had never heard of these things. A lot of folks just gave me like a blank look. Like, huh? What? And, you know, it's all over the news. But, you know, maybe I'll look at a different slice of the news than most people. But you don't record the get lost responses.

I'm calling the campus police. When people say they don't want to be on a podcast, then I don't put them on the podcast. But yeah, a lot of people, a lot of people seem to have seen these and are, it seemed very excited about it. They were like, wow, this is amazing, so cool. Yeah, everybody was very enthusiastic. Even the folks that didn't really have a grasp of the science involved, they had a sense that we had arrived at a new moment in human technology and maybe even in scientific exploration, that they might all remember the day these images came out. Yeah, to be fair, I guess for the people who hadn't heard, I mean, it is big news in the science world. But, you know, these days you still have to scroll down quite a bit to find.

kinds of announcements on the major news pages. That's true, but it's nice to get some good news these days, you know, to look on the newspaper and to see something exciting, something inspiring. Yeah, so these were pretty awesome pictures. And so let's dig into it, Daniel. It was the basics of the James Webb Space Telescope. I know if we've had a couple of episodes on this telescope talking about what it can do and how it does it, right?

So the James Webb Space Telescope is sort of a successor to Hubble, but not exactly. It's a successor to Hubble in that it's the newest, Chinese, fanciest thing. But it's not exactly a direct descendant of Hubble because it really is a different kind of telescope. What do you mean? What Hubble was just plain old optical? This one is more infrared. Yeah, the range of photons that they can see is different. So Hubble is focused on the optical and can do a little bit of infrared and a little bit of ultraviolet.

But the James Webb Space Telescope is really focused on the longer, redder wavelengths in the infrared, the near and the far infrared. And that's because of its science mission. As things travel across the universe, they get stretched out by the expansion of space. And that includes photons. So photons get stretched out. Their wavelengths get longer.

That means they get redder and redder. So some photons that have been traveling for billions of years are so red that Hubble cannot see them. But James Webb Space Telescope, its optics are designed to see in the infrared so we can see older photons than Hubble can. Interesting. So even if we had like an amazing super high resolution, powerful telescope,

it wouldn't see anything out there if it wasn't able to see in the infrared. Yeah, just like your eyeballs can only see a certain slice of electromagnetic radiation. You can't see the ultraviolet. You can't see x-rays. You can't see radio waves. Our telescopes also have limitations. So Hubble has a spectrum that you can see and James Webb can see lower wavelengths than Hubble. We also talked in the podcast recently about this next wave of space telescopes that we hope

will follow the James Webb. And one of them is a more direct successor to Hubble. It's called Louvoire. It's going to be in the optical, the near-infrared, and also the UV. And there's another one called Origins, which is going to be in the deep infrared, which can look even further into longer wavelengths than James Webb. Well, step us through here. James Webb is good at infrared.

So how do they do that? How do you make a telescope that's good at seeing infrared light? Well, one thing you need to do to see infrared light is to block out other sources of infrared light. Because remember that everything in the universe glows, and it glows depending on its temperature. And the colder you are, the longer the wavelengths you generate. So the Earth, for example, generates infrared light. Basically, everything glows in the infrared. And so in order to reduce that noise, in order to see these very faint old photons,

you need to have your telescope be super duper cold so that it's not itself glowing in the light that is trying to see. You also need to shade it from other sources like the Earth, like the Sun. like the moon. So the James Webb Space Telescope is much further away than Hubble, which is orbiting the Earth. James Webb is at the L2 Lagrange point, which allows it to use the Earth to shade itself from the sun. And it also has a tennis court size sunshade to keep it cool. Can you also play tennis on the James Webb telescope? Strictly prohibited, though I bet the NASA administrator has done that at least once. You got it, right? Those people in buddy suits tossing a tennis ball around

billion dollar equipment but it is really far out there it's like one and a half million kilometers out there right and it's in this weird orbit where it's like always like it always keeps the earth between itself and the sun that's right there are several points near the earth's

orbit that are called Lagrange points because they're stable or semi-stable meaning you can just sort of hang out there and not need a lot of pushes to stay in that orbit and one of them is this point L2 which is along the line between the center of the sun and the center of the earth. And L2 is past the earth, meaning that it's always in the earth's shadow. So at L2, you don't see the sun. The earth is

blocking you from the sun, which is the goal here because you want to be in a cold space. You don't want to be heated up by the sun all the time. Now, it's not 100% stable, and it's not actually at L2 because L2 kind of collects a lot of space junk and you don't want to sit there where everything else is falling into you. So it's gently orbiting L2 a little bit. And that's one of the things it needs fuel for to sort of maintain that orbit. And it's kind of a funny orbit, right? It's kind of like a ring. It's doing a circle, but it's kind of a perpendicular circle to the Earth, right?

Yeah, exactly. And so they want to keep it near L2 because that's a nice spot to be, but not right at L2. So it's a target. One thing they need to worry about for James Webb is to avoid debris, micrometeorites and other things which can damage its very delicate optics. Yeah, maybe that's why you need like a hockey-sized shield for those. maybe hockey rink size shield for those where you can't really put a shield in front of the optics without blocking the optics right so it's sort of tricky but they try to arrange the flight of

this thing to avoid micrometeorites as much as possible don't they have like force fields like in star trek they have the lasers to shoot these things and do they know they don't I wish they did that would be a good idea though right like if you see a little bit of something coming your way you could zap it push it out of the way yeah you have Hans solo and the little pod that sticks out the bottom of it, you know, just zapping these things. Maybe get chewy to do it. I think he's got pretty good aim. Yeah, there you go. No, it's very passive in that sense. And it is susceptible to these impacts. And already they've seen in the first data that there's been an impact from a micrometeorite. Oh. So yeah, it's something we're going to have to watch. And the, so the quality of the images

will slowly degrade as it gets impinged by these micrometeorites over time. But the optics are beautiful. You know, they're covered in gold. And they're just enormous. You know, this thing is six and a half meters wide compared to two and a half meters for Hubble. So Hubble is sort of like, you know, the back of a school bus size, whereas James Webb is as wide as a school bus is long. So this thing really is much, much bigger than Hubble. And that's key because you want to see far into the universe. You need to gather more light. You need to see fainter things by grabbing more of their photons. Yeah, it's pretty impressive. I was kind of surprised when I saw a picture. Like, if you look up a picture of the telescope with like a human next to it for scale, it's huge.

It is, like you said, like the size of a semi-truck. And usually you see just one portion of it, right? Because it went into the rocket folded and then had to unfold into its final configuration in space. This incredible piece of robotics, which I'm sure you admired as an expert in robotics. But the size of it is huge. And, you know, originally they planned it to be a little smaller. And then NASA was like, nah, let's make it eight meters. but then they downgraded it to six and a half meters

because that's the biggest thing they thought they could squeeze into a rocket. Right. And like you said, it's not just that it can see into the infrared more than Hubble. It's like the mirror is actually huge. It's much bigger than Hubble, which for some reason lets you see clearer pictures. So maybe tell us a little bit about that. Why does having a bigger mirror give us more high resolution? Like it wouldn't just give us a wider view. It actually gives us a more clearer view.

Yeah, just because you are seeing more photons, right? You want a crisp picture or something. You can see things better during the day than you can at night. Things are fuzzier if you just don't get as many photons from them. Imagine you're looking at a really distant galaxy. If you're getting dozens and dozens of photons from it, then you can start to see the difference between the left side of that galaxy and the right side of that galaxy.

Whereas if you just get like one photon per year, then you're just seeing a point from that galaxy. So the more photons you can get from a distant object, the more you can resolve different parts of it. You can see structure. You can see different colors. So you just get more information, and that allows you to get a deeper picture. So astronomy really is all about light gathering power.

The size of the end of the telescope is enormously important in how faint and distant an object you can see and resolve. Size matters in astronomy. Is that what you're saying? Size matters. And, you know, James Webb is much sharper than Hubble, even though it's at a bit of a disadvantage because it's in the infrared. And the infrared is longer wavelengths, which are inherently worse resolution. Think of these photons as sort of like bigger or more spread out. They're sort of like fatter blobs.

Now, at the same wavelength, you can compare them apples to apples by examining their resolution at the same wavelength. And James Webb is like almost three times as sharp in these images than Hubble at the same wavelength. Cool. Well, it is an amazing piece of engineering and science that they've put out there. And so let's get into what the first pictures actually show and what we can learn from them. But first, let's take a quick break.

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Right, we're talking about the James Webb Space Tonskub, which has been up there for a few months. but we're in the just now receiving pictures from it and they're pretty amazing. They show us some awesome and incredible views of the universe. Tell us, Daniel, what have we learned from these first pictures? So first, I want to give a shout out to the folks who built this thing

because, you know, for a long time, the James Webb Space Telescope was sort of like a joke among big science projects. Wait, what? What do you mean? A joke to who, to particle physicists? It was just delayed for so long. There was like 10 years went by when we didn't make any progress. towards the actual launch date. Like every year they went by, the launch date was pushed by a year. And the cost of balloon, you know, was supposed to be just a few billion and ended up 10 billion.

So it sort of seemed like a fiasco for a while. But then, you know, the launch went perfectly. The unfolding went perfectly. And now that the thing is actually up there in operational, they are exceeding performance standards and blowing everybody's expectations out the window. You know, this is a project that like 20,000 people from 14 different countries worked on. And we didn't just get images from it. We also got a paper put it on the web yesterday, characterizing its performance. And, you know, this paper says things like the James Webb Space Telescope will go deeper, faster than expected. It was envisioned to enable fundamental breakthroughs, and we now know it certainly will because it is blowing all the specs out the window. Everything they designed it for is doing

better than they designed. So these engineers really did their job. Yeah, pretty awesome. I think what you're saying, Daniel, is that it's good to be late and that it's okay to delay. things to the last minute. I think that's what you're saying, right? Yeah, spend $10 billion in procrastinate. That's definitely the lesson here, I'm sure. Yeah, you seem pretty excited and ready to forgive him for it. So I'll take a note of that.

I'm saying if you're going to be 10 years late and $10 billion over budget, you better really deliver. And they have. Yeah, they delivered some awesome first pictures from the Space Telescope. And these are just the first pictures, right? This is like the first, you know, product coming out of the factory, right? Yeah, they have a lot of data already that they are processing. and analyzing the people are doing signs on.

They just gave us like five pictures to give us a taste, take us an understanding of what this thing is capable of. And very soon we'll have a tsunami of photographs. And the whole astronomical community is going to be doing science at a level we haven't ever done before. All right. So what are some of these first pictures they sent us? So one of them is of the Karina Nebula.

This is really exciting because it's sort of like in our backyard. Relative to the other pictures, this was pretty close to Earth. It's only like 7,600 light years. away. And the nebula is just like a big blob of gas and dust. It's the kind of place where stars can form. And, you know, star formation is something we still don't really understand that well. We had an episode recently about why galaxies stop forming stars. And it's not something that we understand. We see some galaxies out there rapidly making new stars and other galaxies have

just stopped making new stars. So to understand that, we want to look closely at a stellar nursery. So the Karena Nebula is like that. It's a huge cloud. It's about 12 million. million years old. And we can see stars forming within it. We can also look at the structure of this cloud and understand like what is it doing? Is it clumping together? Is it swooshing around? Are there like galactic winds blowing against it? And so it's number one, just beautiful. It looks like cosmic cliffs. But it's also very scientifically interesting. Yeah, it's really interesting because I guess to understand how stars form, it's not like you can just film a video, you know, take a movie out there of a star forming because it takes a long time and it's kind of hard to catch. So what we have

to do, right, is catch lots of these stars being born and then you sort of piece the picture together. And so this is part of what that's doing for us, right? Yeah, it's like going out into nature and seeing babies of a species and then finding other individuals at another age and other individuals at another age. And from that, trying to piece together the idea of stellar evolution and life cycle. And so we would love to see stars being formed and then watch them all the way through their age. But as you say, we don't have billions of years to get our graduate students across the PhD finish line. So we have to look at stars at different stages of their evolution. And one of the great questions about star formation is what is required to make it happen. We think

that what you need is a big blob of gas, but that gas has to be cold. The gas is too hot. Then its molecules are zipping around in gravity, which in the end is quite weak. doesn't have the force to pull them together into a star. So it's not just having the ingredients to make a star. You also need the right conditions. You need those ingredients to be cold. They can't be like room temperature or heated up. You won't get a star.

So by looking at this cosmic nursery and seeing where stars are being formed and where they're not, and also understanding the structures that we're looking at, we can start to understand better what influences the conditions for star formation. Right. And so these pictures are helping us because they're, what, higher resolution? or they're giving us more detail or this is a special kind of star nursery that we couldn't see before. It's much higher resolution. And so, you know, if you compare the picture from Hubble to the picture from James Webb, you can just see a lot more detail.

You can see ripples. You can see over densities. You can see under densities. You can see the shapes of these cliffs. And if you're a scientist working on this, then you're developing models. Models for how these gas clouds are formed and how they evolve and how they make stars. And to understand whether your models are accurate, you need data. You need to compare it to reality.

And so the crisper, the picture you can take, the more you can constrain the models that you are building and make sure that they are describing reality. You can check your models and say, my model predicts we should see these kind of shapes and blobs. Does that happen in reality? Until now, we didn't know because we saw kind of a fuzzy picture. Sort of like if you're trying to predict, you know, whether there are spots on leopards, but you can't really make out the spots on real leopards. so you don't really know if your predictions are accurate or not. And then all of a sudden, you'll get very crisp pictures close up to the leopard and see you can understand what's really going on out there.

Yeah, you don't want spotty pictures for that. But the telescope is not just giving us such sort of high resolution pictures where you can make out the details. It actually also has to do with the fact that it's infrared, right? Because infrared lets us look deeper into these nurseries. Yeah, we want to look at the universe in lots of different wavelengths because the universe looks different in these different ways. wavelengths. You know, light is light is light, but it interacts with different stuff as it flies through the universe.

And one of the biggest bains of astronomy is dust. Dust is out there helping form new solar systems, but also blocks a lot of light between us and the things we want to look at. One reason why, for example, we can't see across the center of the Milky Way very much because there's a lot of dust. But infrared light is good at passing through dust because it's very long wavelengths. or sort of like skips over smaller things. So infrared light helps us penetrate these dust clouds. The way, for example, x-rays can see through some kinds of bodily tissue and help you get a picture for what's inside.

Infrared light can see into these dust clouds and help us understand the three-dimensional structure. Where are there clumps, where are their stars being born? Or some of the cool things you can see that we couldn't really see before are little bubbles. When a star is formed, all of a sudden it's emitting huge amounts of radiation. and that pushes away the gas and the dust that was near it. So it like opens up a little cavity within the dust cloud. It cleans up its own environment. And we can start to see some of those because of these pictures.

And that lets us, I guess, understand more of what's going on when stars are born. And so we can spy on star babies more. Yeah. And there's a lot of stuff in these pictures that scientists don't understand that they didn't anticipate. You know, lots of weird bubbles and other structures that they're like, hmm, what's making that happen? And that's the process of discovery. Every time you see something you didn't expect or you see something you don't quite understand, you need to change your ideas for what you thought was happening to accommodate that, to describe what you are seeing.

So already there are threads to pull on here to help us improve our understanding of the basic process of star formation. Cool. Well, star formation is one thing we're seeing. What's another cool picture they sent us? Another cool picture is of galaxy formation and galaxy merging. So one of the favorite things for galactic astronomers to look at is, this object called Stefan's Quintet. And this is something which we've known about for more than 150 years.

It's a cluster of five galaxies that almost look like they're touching each other. They're very nearby each other in the sky. There was actually the first of these sort of compact groupings that was ever found in 1877. And you know, that's before we even really understood galaxies. Before Hubble understood that these things were much further away than the stars, that they were actually other galaxies, floating out in space, not just nebula within our galaxies, we didn't even really know that other galaxies existed. So this is something that predates our understanding of galaxies.

I guess what can we learn from these galaxies clustered? So these galaxies are cool, not just because they're close to each other, but because two of them are slamming into each other. So there's five of them there. Four of them are actually close to each other in space. They're like 300 million light years from Earth, and they're all near each other. The fifth one is much closer. It's 40 million in light years from Earth. It's just sort of in the line of sight. But it's those four that are really interesting and two in particular are very, very close to each other. They're actually in the process of merging. Remember we talked in the podcast about galaxy formation and one theory was that big galaxies were made like all at once. You have a huge cloud of gas and dust gathered together by

dark matter which just like collapses into a bunch of stars and you get a big galaxy born early in the universe. Now we think probably a different process is dominant that you get a bunch of little galaxies and then those little galaxies come together to make bigger galaxies. And here we can see that happening sort of in real time because two of the galaxies are really close to each other and we can see the details of what happens when two galaxies come together. It's like super high precision, high accuracy rubbernecking. Exactly. You're trying to see what happens when these two things crashing to each other and you know, star numbers are right up there eating popcorn seeing what happens. Yeah, we all want to see what happens in the biggest.

collisions in the universe. This one's particularly fun because the last best infrared image that we took, which was from the Spitzer Space Telescope, we did a whole fun podcast episode about what we learned from Spitzer. This showed a smiley face in that picture. So if you look at a picture of Stefan's Quintet from the Spitzer Space Telescope, you see the cores of these two galaxies, each form like an eyeball. And then there's like a big swirl of stars under it that forms like a huge smile out in space. And so people were really curious to see if the James Webb image would also have that smiley face in it.

It's like the universe has an emoji keyboard or something. And so now we can see much more detail from James Webb, but exactly what is happening. We can see the collision of these two galaxies. We can see gas and dust that's being heated up from this collision. We can also see bright spots inside these galaxies that we think might represent super massive black holes, exciting the gas around them to emit very brightly. One of the galaxies also looks like it might have astrophysical jets that the central black hole might be gathering together particles and mass and shooting it up and down out of the plane

of the galaxy. And this is not something we've gotten to study in a gory detail many times. So a high-resolution picture of those jets can really help us understand the process there. So it's giving us more higher-resolution images. I guess, you know, we've seen these galaxy clusters and galaxy collisions before, but I guess maybe the idea is that this telescope is letting us see more of them, right? And further out, too. Yeah, that's right.

We're seeing them, CRISPR, but we're also seeing more of them because we can see deeper into the history of the universe. And so just like when we were studying star formation, we want examples of young galaxies, and we want examples of older galaxies. So we can understand the whole spectrum, the whole life cycle of a galaxy. We want fender bender accidents. We want full on, head-on, head-on. collisions. Exactly. And if you're an insurance agent for galaxies, most of these collisions do happen when they're in their teenage years for galaxies. Is that true though? That's a funny joke,

but is that actually true? Like, I wonder if things were more crazy back then, right? Things were more crazy back then because there were many more smaller galaxies. So there are fewer galaxies now and they're bigger, but when the collisions happen, they're more dramatic. So being able to look deeper and further back into the history of the universe is going to maybe let us see more of these collisions. Yes. And we'll talk later about the deep field image, which is a sort of triumphant example of that, seeing some of the very first galaxies as they form and then also seeing them later on in their life cycle. All right. So spying on babies, rubber-necking galaxy crashes. What else have they shown us this week? Another thing I was really excited about was that they looked at an exoplanet.

It's only been like 20-something years since we were even sure that there were a lot of exoplanets. For most of the existence of the human race, we didn't know whether our solar system was unusual, whether we were the only ones with planets, whether planets themselves were rare in the universe. Now because of tests and lots of other observatories, we have catalogs of thousands of exoplanets. And we've moved now to the next phase. It's not about discovering exoplanets and how many are there. It's about looking for signs of life on those exoplanets, looking for biosignatures. Can we, without even going to those exoplanets, figure out what is happening on the surface, understand what is in the atmosphere, maybe even tell what the weather is like on those planets? That's pretty cool. So we can use the same telescope that's sort of looking out into the wide view of the universe.

We can also use it to like, can we focus it on particular planets or just catching images of these planets along the way? We can focus it on these planets, absolutely. This thing is really good at tracking. And so we can point to wherever we want to, and we can look specifically at planets we think are good targets. And so they released an image from one particular planet called Wasp 96B. This is a gas giant planet orbiting a star about 1,100 light years from Earth and the constellation Phoenix. We've known about this planet for maybe 10 years. Mass is like half the mass of Jupiter, but we haven't known is what's in the atmosphere. And James Webb, though it's very powerful, isn't powerful enough to give us like a picture of the planet from space as you might see if you

are orbiting it, right? That's just not something we're capable of yet. It's not. It's too small. The planet is too small and too far away, right? This thing is a thousand light years away. And the planet itself is very, very small. And it's next to a very, very bright star. So that's extraordinarily difficult to see the planet itself directly. But it can play some really clever tricks. You can look at the light from the star as it passes. through the atmosphere of the planet. Remember the way we know this planet exists is that it does sort of like a mini eclipse of the star. It passes in front of the star and there's a dip in the light from the star. So when that happens, we know the planet is in front of the star. And if we

look at just the right moment, we can see light that passes through the atmosphere of the planet before it comes to Earth. And so it's changed a little bit by having passed through the atmosphere. And that tells us what's in that atmosphere because it absorbs some frequencies of light and emits in other frequencies. So I guess you're still looking at the star, but you're seeing how this light from the star changes because of that planet. So it's sort of an indirect way of taking a picture of the planet. Yeah, it's not so much a picture of the planet as much as like a spectrograph of the atmosphere of the planet.

Like what light does the atmosphere emit? But because everything emits at different frequencies and has its own unique fingerprint, by looking at the different colors of light that arrive here on Earth when the planet is in front of the star and when it's not, we can tell what's in that atmosphere. And so already they have evidence of water vapor in the atmosphere of that planet. So they think what they're seeing are clouds on that planet, which is pretty amazing, you know? We're looking at a cloudy day on Wasp 96B. That's amazing. Weather forecasting for space. But I guess the idea is that light changes when it goes through water vapor, right? And you can see those changes here. Yeah, but it's not exactly

forecasting because we're talking about the weather a thousand years ago, right? This light has been traveling from that planet for more than a thousand years. So it's not very useful for planning your beach vacation. Yeah, that wouldn't help at all to know what the weather was like a thousand years ago. But it is amazing. You can sort of tell what the weather was like or is like on this planet, right? Yeah. And as we keep doing this, we might see exciting things because every different molecule

and chemical emits different fingerprints. This is how, for example, we saw evidence of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus. And now because of James Webb, we can start to play these kinds of games for all sorts of exoplanets, ones that are even closer. You know, we think that the star that's nearest us, Proxima Centauri, it has Earth-like planets around it. So we can point this thing at all sorts of exoplanets and start to get a sense for what's in the atmosphere and understand maybe there are things in those atmospheres that we imagine can only be made by life.

That would be very exciting. Pretty cool. That would be a bummer if you look at the planet from the telescope and say, hey, the weather is great. Let's go over there. And then a thousand years later, the weather has changed. Probably the weather is going to change a thousand years later. Unless it's Southern California where it's just all the same weather all the time.

Yeah. You don't even check. There you go. Maybe WASM 96B is the Southern California of the universe. Let's hope so. All right. Then what's another picture that they've released? And what is it telling us about the universe?

Another one which is sort of beautiful is the Southern Ring Nebula. This is something people have been taking pictures of for a long time just because it's kind of gorgeous. And it's the leftover shell from a dying star. Remember that stars burn for a very, very long time, billions of years depending on their mass. But they are this delicate dance between gravity that's squeezing them down and fusion, which is puffing them up. But near the end of the life cycle, as the temperature climbs, fusion starts to win that battle. And it puffs up the outer layers of the star and eventually blows them out really, really far.

And this is probably what's going to happen to our star. And so at the heart, it leaves this core of very hot metals that were produced by fusion inside the star as a white dwarf, this glowing dot at the center, this enormous explosion, this planetary nebula created from the outer shells of the star. So these are smaller types of nebulas, right? I mean, nebula it just means like a cloud of stuff in space. but this one came from just one star yeah this is just from one star and the size of it depends on

when it blew up if you watched over thousands of years you would see these things grow as the stuff is moving away from the center of the dead star of course because we can't watch over thousands of years we just get sort of one snapshot but just like with other examples we can look around and see stars at various stages doing this ones that have just blown up ones are in a process of ones that might soon blow up. And what does that tell us, I guess, about these stars? Is it helping us kind of figure out when it blows up or how it blows up? Yeah, you know, we don't really understand the innards of stars very well.

Even our own sun is a bit of a mystery to us, how that works, the conduits of plasma that are inside those tubes, how they generate magnetic fields. We have some models, but we'd like to understand better. And so seeing the stars sort of like erupt and vomit its innerence all over its neighborhood helps us understand sort of what was going on because we couldn't see inside stars before but now those insides are sort of everywhere and in the same way that we can understand what is in the atmosphere of that exoplanet we can also understand what compounds what chemicals are in this planetary nebula because different chemicals glow at different frequencies and so if you

look at this picture for example we can see this like a blue portion in the inner part and it's orange on the outside. That's colorized, right? James Webb C is in the IR. So these aren't literal colors you could see with your eyeball if you were near this nebula yourself. The colors do mean something. The different colors tell us that there are different frequencies of light that are coming from this nebula. So the orange and the outside is mostly due to like molecular hydrogen and the inner part comes from hotter ionized gas. We can also see that there are like holes in this nebula. The things from the inner part of the star have like shot through it, creating these holes where they're like beaming out to the rest of the universe.

So it's quite dramatic and scientists can compare this new detailed image again to their models for what they think happens at the end of the life cycle of a star. It sort of sounds like a lot of these early pictures they're sending out where just kind of like upgrade pictures of things we had seen before but now we can to illustrate how much better this telescope is, it shows just kind of the same pictures we took before but much much higher resolution and with more detail. Yeah, absolutely. all of these pictures that we're seeing in this first tranche from James Webb are things we

have seen before with Hubble, but just faster, better, deeper. And I think maybe the idea was to sort of see how much better the telescope is, but also what's interesting about the telescope is that it lets us see things that we couldn't see before, right? Things way out there in the universe. Yes, because James Webb is so much more sensitive, it can see things which were so faint, so red that we couldn't see them before. All right. So let's get into what those things are and what they can tell us about the early

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All right, we're talking about the new images from the James Webb Space Telescope. And Daniel, so far, we have spying on baseball. babies. We have rubber-necking galactic accidents. We have predicting or not predicting the weather in other planets and also looking at the death of stars. That's right. But maybe the most exciting one is the new deep field. Deep field is just when you point the telescope at a part of the sky where you think there's like nothing where you don't really see anything. It sort of looks like a blank spot. This is made famous by Hubble when they pointed it for like a few weeks at a spot on the sky where they couldn't see anything and they just collected data for like 23 days.

When they looked at it, they saw so many galaxies, galaxies that were too faint, too distant for them to see before. Now, James Webb can do the same kind of thing, but because it's so much more sensitive and because it sees in the IR, you can see even deeper, even fainter galaxies more easily. Right. I guess it's kind of like when you look out into the night sky, like if you step outside on a clear night and you see a bunch of stars, you see a bunch of places where there are aren't any stars. The only reason you're seeing black there is because your eyeballs are not good enough to see what's there, right?

Exactly. There's basically a galaxy in every direction. If you go far enough, it just might be that those galaxies are so far away that you're not getting very many of their photons. Even if they're really bright where they are, they're sending those photons in every direction. So the further your eyeball is from that galaxy, the smaller, the fraction of all the photons it's shooting out are going to land on your eyeball. And so the longer you have to look before you get one of those photons. So the bigger your eyeball is, or in this case your telescope, the fainter the galaxy that you can see. So remember that James Webb is much bigger, has this huge mirror for collecting light. And you can see in the infrared. Some of these galaxies are so far away that their light is red shifted out of Hubble's vision. So they pointed this thing at a spot in the sky and just for 12 hours gathered light.

And they came up with this incredible picture. And this is something, again, that Hubble has looked at in the past, and James Webb is now looking at, and you can compare these two pictures, it's really incredible because every galaxy that's there in Hubble, you can also see in the James Webb picture, but now it's crisp, it's clear. You can see definition, you can see edges, you can see features, you can see stuff happening you didn't know about. Plus, you can see all sorts of new galaxies in the background,

these red galaxies, which we didn't even know were there until now. Yeah, because I guess, you know, space is mostly empty, If you go out far enough in any direction, you're going to probably hit something, right? At least in the observable universe, which is pretty big. Absolutely. And this is just taking the tiniest slice of the universe. The fraction of the sky that it's seeing is one 25 millionth of the sky. Right.

So defy the whole sky to 25 million pixels. This is just looking at one of them. Yeah, like if you zoom into one pixel of the night sky that you see outside, you're going to see a bazillion galaxy, just in that little pixel. Just in that little pixel. And the size of that pixel, 125 millionth of the night sky, is the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length.

So we're really talking about a tiny little bit of the sky and it's filled with galaxies, all sorts of exciting things happening. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. I think when you first see that picture, you're like, okay, it's another picture of space with, you know, glowy things in it. But if you sort of look closer and you think about it,

like each one of those little tiny, glowing things is an entire galaxy, right? with hundreds of millions of stars in it, like a whole Milky Way in that little blob. Yeah, exactly. These are galaxies from a long, long time ago, far, far away. So they could have, you know,

their own politics and their own Star Wars and all sorts of stuff could be going on. Each one is hundreds of billions of stars. So it really gives you a sense for the incredible vastness of space. When people say space is vast, they're suggesting it's empty. But, you know, it's vast,

but it's also chock full of galaxies. It's just incredible how many of these things there are. It really is like no blank sky out there. There were some regions in space that we used to call voids because there was less stuff there than in other spots. But now that we look at them, we see, oh, they're just less dense than other spots. And James Webb can see into those voids and show us what is there. Yeah, like imagine if you had like super duper better eyeballs in your head, you know, once they could collect a lot of light. You know, if you step outside the night, you probably see the whole sky lit up, right, with bazillion galaxies and tiny dots everywhere.

It would almost be like almost daylight, I wonder. Yeah, and the reason the nice sky is not like catastrophically bright, it's not like blindingly bright is because the universe is expanding, so we're only seeing a fraction of it. And of course, it's also redshifted. But you're right, there's galaxies in every direction, and we can do more than just like be a gog at the beauty of this. We can do some science with this. We were talking earlier about understanding the structure of galaxies and how,

they form. This is the best way to see the oldest galaxies, galaxies that we haven't seen before, galaxies that were so red that were the edge of Hubble's ability to understand them. How far back in time can we see now with the new James Webb telescope? We can see just past 13 billion years. You know the universe is like almost 14 billion years old. So we're seeing really far back in time. We're seeing some of the first galaxies, And we still don't really understand exactly what happened. We talked about the dark ages of the universe on the podcast, this time between when hydrogen became neutral and stars started to form, and then how galaxies came together from that.

And that's a process we'd really like to understand. But we haven't been able to because we haven't been able to see those galaxies. There were too faint for us to spot. How far back could Hubble look? Well, we didn't really know because we saw some really red, some very faint galaxies. that we thought maybe we're super duper old. There were a couple candidates that were around 13 billion light years. Just a few, though.

But the problem was there was a lot of uncertainty in aging them because you age these things by measuring their red shift by saying, here's the spectrum, and we see how much it shifted. But if it redshifted a lot, you're missing parts of the spectrum. So there's a lot of uncertainty in those redshift measurements. But James Webb can look at those same galaxies, and because it can see deeper in the IR, are, it sees more of the spectrum and we'll get a more accurate estimate of those ages.

So Hubble has seen a few galaxies which seem around 13 billion years old, but they're very uncertain. James Webb will see more of them and will be able to better measure their ages more to more precisely. Wow. 13 million out of the 14 million of the universe, that is almost the whole thing. I wonder, is there a limit to how much, how old or how far back in time we can see with a telescope? But the limit, of course, is the cosmic microwave background radiation. That is the oldest light in the universe. Beyond that, everything was just sort of opaque.

So light that was created before that has been reabsorbed. So the oldest light flying around the universe is about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. We can see that now because that was everywhere in the universe. So it's always arriving here on Earth. In the same way, these oldest light from the oldest galaxies has always been arriving here on Earth. We just haven't been able to see it until recently. But is there a limit to how far back the James Webb Telescope can see, like, you know, 13 and a half billion years ago or something? Or can it see all the way back to the, you know, when the universe first became transparent?

There's not a fixed limit. It's determined by, like, the depth of the infrared light that he can see. And so the origin space telescope will see even further. But there's not like a crisp edge. It depends on, like, where an object is, how fast it's moving away from us, and how bright it is inherent. So it's not a crisp number, but it's around 13 billion years old. Wow. Still, it's pretty impressive.

I mean, you're seeing kind of the universe when it was only a billion years old. Was it very different back then? Can you tell that it was really different? Well, that's what they're going to be able to begin studying because we didn't know, for example, like were there big galaxies already? We think that there might already have been super massive black holes when the universe was only a billion years old. We don't understand how those form.

So seeing those galaxies like inactivity. we might get a sense for what happened. How do you get such a big black hole? Were there primordial black holes that seeded these super galaxies? Was there some process where galaxies gathered together faster than we can currently understand? It's not something we know now. You know, each of these like really distant galaxies, we see them brighter, we see more of them, but we also see their structure. You know, a really far galaxy, for example, that was like just three by three pixels in Hubble is now like eight by 8 pixels in James Webb.

So you can get much more idea for like the shape of these things, where they already spirals, where they all sort of like really irregular and then they came together later into spirals, these are the kind of questions that we can start to ask and to answer now that we have pictures of what happened back then. Cool. And we might be even be able to see galaxies forming, right? Like could we maybe see so far back that there aren't even any galaxies? We might.

We know that the first stars formed after those dark ages. We think it was a few hundred million years after the beginning of the universe. And so we might be lucky enough to see some of those to resolve some of those stars in these very distant galaxies. But it's at the real edge of even James Webb's capability. So the origins telescope will be even better suited for specifically that kind of question. The cool thing about this deep field is not only you're seeing really, really old stuff, you're also seeing the stuff between us and that old stuff.

And something you can see in this deep field is something we talk about in the podcast all the time, which is gravitational lensing. A lot of the galaxies in this image look smeared and stretched and kind of weird, and that's because there's a lot of mass between us and those galaxies, and that mass bends space. And so as the light from those galaxies is coming towards Earth, it gets distorted. But it's not just visible mass that we're talking about. We're looking at dark matter gravitational lensing. This is lensing from a huge gravitational cluster between us and the background galaxies and that gravitational cluster is mostly dark matter. When you look at this image, you are looking very directly at the effects of dark matter. Sort of like you're seeing a lens in

space. It's as close as we can get to seeing dark matter. Yeah, you can see it. I think in that first picture that President Biden released, you can see there's a bit of distortion or like a fish eye effect in the middle. But I thought they said that was because of some galaxies that were in the middle, not because of dark matter. Yeah, well, galaxies have dark matter in them. Most galaxies are mostly dark matter. And so it's because of this huge cluster of galaxies that are about like 5 billion light years away. And that's mostly dark matter. So most of the lensing comes from dark matter. So is this going to let us study dark matter better? We want to know where the dark matter is. And the best way to do that is to see its effect on light. To use strong lensing and weak

lensing to get a map of where the dark matter is in the universe. And that'll help us understand how it was made and where it is and where it's going and what its temperature is. It won't help us understand things like, is it made out of particles and how many different kinds of particles? Not very directly, but it'll give us a better map for where the dark matter is in the universe, which is helpful. Yeah, which might tell you a bit of how it was formed, right? And where it came from. Yeah, absolutely. I wonder if it could also be like a nuisance. Like if you're trying to look at a cool, I don't know, nebula or galaxy crash somewhere, but it's all distorted because some dark matter that's in the middle, you're like, oh, if I could just wipe that dark matter

off my lens. Yeah, that's true because if you don't know exactly how much dark matter there is, you don't exactly know how the lensing is happening. So it's hard to reverse it. Yeah, that does add some uncertainty. Like the universe has a little bit of myopia due to dark matter. Yeah. And speaking of myopia, the next day after the first release, they also showed us a picture of Jupiter from the James Webb Space Telescope because James Webb can not only look at really, really distant things. It can also look at things in our solar system. What? It has that like focal range from like right next door to us to the edge of the universe? And actually the biggest challenge for seeing things in our solar system is being

able to track them. Really distant things are easy to track because they're very slow. But close by things tend to move pretty fast. So they've designed James Webb to be able to track Mars to keep an eye on Mars so that it could image it. And Mars moves at like 30 mila arc seconds per second. And James Webb can actually do twice as fast. They get a sense for like what that means. That's like trying to photograph a turtle that's crawling when it's a mile away from you. It's not moving super duper fast, right? James Webb is not like panning, zooming around, but it's capable of tracking those objects. And so it can do things like take pictures of the rings of Jupiter, which are invisible to the naked eye and even to fairly powerful telescopes from Earth. But Hubble can see them.

And it can also do things like look at the geysers on the moons of Saturn. to see what is spraying out into the universe. Wow, what kind of detail can you get? I wonder if you can see, for example, the Mars rovers on the surface, or is that way too small? I'm more excited about seeing what's going on on those moons of Saturn and Jupiter that might have, like, underground oceans. You know, maybe there's some aliens spraying out messages in terms of geysers,

and James will help us capture those pictures. Right, right, interesting. Although, if you take a picture of the Mars rovers, it's like the world's most expensive selfie. which is a record in itself. But so gorgeous, it's worth it. The world's longest selfie stick. All right.

Well, these are some amazing new pictures that we've gotten from the James Webb Space Telescope. And this is just the beginning. This is just like the first pictures they took with the camera, right? These are just the first five. There's so many more to come. And we think there'll be about 20 years

of science operation for this telescope. So it's really the beginning of a new era of astronomy. me, we're going to discover things we can't even imagine. Wow. Why don't we make more of them and put them out there in space? Wouldn't that be better, twice as good? I totally agree.

And so we have a program for four new space telescopes we hope to launch in the 2030s, which will give us all sorts of new amazing eyeballs to look even deeper into the universe, to study exoplanets, to study the first galaxies to understand everything that's out there. Yeah, very cool. And so a shout out to the James Webb Space Space. Space Telescope team, including Alexander Lockwood, who we interviewed here on the podcast about the telescope, and who is also the star of the Ph.D. movies.

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