Instant Genius - How the James Webb Space Telescope is peering deeper into the cosmos than ever before

Episode Date: October 24, 2024

Since its launch on Christmas Day 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope has delivered some of the most stunning images of space we’ve ever seen, peering deeper into the cosmos than ever before. But as awe-inspiring as these images are, data about the history of the Universe being collected by the telescope are perhaps even more mind-blowing. In this episode, we catch up with Sky at Night Presenter Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock to talk about her new book Webb’s Universe: The Space Telescope Images that Reveal our Cosmic History. She tells us how the telescope is shedding new light on what we know about the birth of stars and galaxies, how it’s teaching us more about the structure and atmospheres of distant exoplanets and what she’s most excited about it discovering in the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, bite-size masterclass in podcast form. Every Monday and Friday, you'll hear world-leading experts and scientists talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus. Since its launch on Christmas Day 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope has delivered some of the most stunning images of space we've ever seen, peering deeper into the cosmos than ever before. But as awe-inspiring as these images are, data about the history of the universe being collected by the telescope are perhaps even more mind-blowing. In this episode, we catch up with Sky at Night presenter Dr Maggie Adirin Pocock to talk about her new book, Webb's Universe, the

space telescope images that reveal our cosmic history. She tells us how the telescope is shedding new light on what we know about the birth of stars and galaxies, how it's teaching us more about the structure and atmospheres of distant exoplanets and what she's most excited about it discovering in the future. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks very much for joining us. Oh, lovely to be here. Thank you. You're welcome. So today we're talking about your new book, Web's Universe, the space telescope images that reveal our history. So I think let's start with the obvious question then. What is the James Webb Space Telescope? So the James Webb Space Telescope is the largest space telescope that we've ever built to date. And for a little while, it was called sort of the next

generation space telescope, because it was meant to take over from Hubble, but then it became the James Webb Space Telescope, and we might discuss that later. But fundamentally, Hubble was a telescope mainly looking at visible light, the sort of things we see with our eyes, whereas the James Webb Space Telescape is an infrared telescope. And that is incredibly handy, because when we're looking at into the universe, there were clouds of dust and gas that lie within the universe, where a visible light can't penetrate, but infrared light can pass through some of these clouds of dust and gas, and so it means that we get a new understanding of the universe. Also, the James Webb Space Telescope is primary mirror is six and a half metres in diameter. Now, we have to scale it up because it's

infrared and infrared has larger wavelengths than visible light, but it does mean that we get very crisp images, high resolution images, so we see the universe in detail like we never have before. Great. So it's called a space telescope. So from that, we can guess, that it's in space. So whereabouts is it in space and why? Yes. I like to compare it with a Hubble Space Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope sits in low Earth orbit. So about 350 kilometres about sea level and it orbits the Earth every 45 minutes. The James Webb Space Telescope sits in a very, very different location. It sits at a location called Lagrange Point 2. Now, there are various Lagrange points sort of out there within our solar system and they're sort of like gravitational wells.

So it's like a null point in the gravity. So if we launch a telescope into that position, it can sit there without actually having to actively be propelled and things like that. So it's a nice place to sit. And the Grange Point 2 is the perfect place for an infrared telescope. Because what it does is it orbits the sun with planet Earth, but it doesn't orbit planet Earth. But we have this relationship and we travel together through space.

But the Grange Point 2 is looking, the way we've faced the telescope, it's looking into deep, dark space. And for an infrared telescope, that's really important. Because Earth gives out lots of infrared radiation and the sun gives out massive amounts of infrared radiation. And if the telescope were to look towards those two, it would be dazzled. So at this Lagrange Point 2,

which is one and a half million kilometres away from Earth, it looks into deep, dark space and it isn't dazzled by the Earth and the Sun. So you mentioned there it's a huge thing. How did we get it up there in the first place? So that was a real real, challenge. And I've met some of the people. They actually got someone who did origami to help actually fold this huge telescope up into a tiny package for launch. So with our launch vehicles,

they have a limited volume capacity. And with a sort of a six and a half meter mirror and then all the sort of a heat shields and things like that to stop the infrared radiation dazzling the telescope, it was, if anyone's seen images, it's quite a package. And so everything had to be concertina'd up, the mirror actually folded, two wings of the mirror, so folded together. And it was all sort of like a flower bud. And that was what was put on the launch vehicle. And then when it got to Lagrange Point two, I think there were 300 different actuations that had to happen. So the telescope could be fully deployed. So the heat shield had to be deployed. Antenna had to be deployed. The mirror had to fold out to its full six and a half meters. So all these different things had to happen

before the telescope was operational. But yes, when it was on Earth, it was folded up like a flower bud before it was launched. So a pretty fantastic engineering job all round, really, then. Yes, also, because it was launched on the 25th of December, Christmas Day, 2021. And there were scientists across the world. Because about 10,000 scientists and engineers worked on this telescope. So I think we were all there biting our nails, hoping that it will go up safely. Yeah, great.

So you mentioned there that it's an infrared telescope. So let's have a look at some of the instruments on it, though, because there are several, aren't there? Just as Hubble was looking at visible light, James Webb is looking at infrared light, but it looks at infrared light in different wave bands. And so infrared light, just like visible light comes in different colors, infrared light, depending on the wavelength, will give us different information about the universe. And so we'll start with the near infrared camera. And as the name says, it's a camera taking fantastic images of what's out there.

Then there's the near-infrared imager and slitless spectrograph. Now, one of the things that I've done throughout my career is worked on spectrographs. And these are pieces of equipment that take light, so it could be infrared, it could be visible. But what it does is it takes that light and it stretches it into its component colours. And when we do this, we get a lot more information than just an image. It tells us about the chemical composition of what we're looking at due to something called redshift or blue shift. It can tell us if the object we're looking at is moving towards us or away from us. So a spectrograph is one of the bastions of ground-based and space telescopes.

And then there's a near infrared spectrograph. Again, a spectrograph, but this one, it uses something called a micro-shutter array. And that means that it's a panel which contains thousands and thousands of tiny, tiny little windows, which can be opened or closed. The micro-shutter array is a unit that contains thousands and thousands of little windows, And it means what we can do is we can open, if you have a field of view and it has lots of objects in it, but some of the objects are really bright, they can dazzle the camera. And so it's harder to see the dimmer images, the dimmer points of light.

But with the microchutter relay, you can actually close some windows and open other windows and let the light in from the dim objects and also do some spectroscopy on those as well. And there's also the mid-infrared camera, which is again a camera, but now it's not in the near-infrared. it's sort of further out. So longer wavelength infrared light. And near spec, which is, yes, the instrument I worked on. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals

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a day, which is quite a bit, but it's not humongous. So one thing that I'm quite interested about these things is, so presumably, like, since the telescope was put in position, every astronomer or cosmologist around the world wanted to have a bit of time on it. How do you book a spot? Oh, it's done by competition. So what people do is they will actually sort of put an application in. And this happens for sort of ground-based telescopes, for space telescopes as well. They put an application in and that application is peer reviewed.

And it is, as you say, very, very competitive. Because yes, especially as the James Webb is the new kid on the block. But yes, they have to show how the data is going to be. to enhance our knowledge of the universe. It must be something that hasn't been done before and something that can't be done with another instrument. Because the James Webb Space Telescope has these specific capabilities like the micro-shuthorray and sort of a number of different spectrographs and also working in a number of bands of infrared light, it means that you have to justify actually using the James Webb Space Telescape. So in the book, there's loads of lovely

pictures, and I'm sure sort of anyone listening will have seen some of the pictures that have been produced by the telescope. But you mentioned there it's not visible light. So how do we go from the data to these striking images? Yes. It is good to note that this is an interpretation. And so my crazy dream is one day I want to get out there in space. And if I went out into space and looked at these things that the James Webb Space Telescope is looking at, our eyes can't detect infrared light. We can see visible light, but we can't see infrared light. And so what we have done, or what scientists have done, have taken those images in infrared light, looked at the wavelength distribution, and then shifted that wavelength distribution from the infrared into the visible.

And that's why we get these sort of glorious images. One of the things I like to say that in my career is I have tripped the light fantastic because over the years I've worked in sort of different wavebands. I've worked on sort of mainly in optical, but in infrared and also in UV. And these are all part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Now, the electromagnetic spectrum is one of the few things that can travel through the vacuum of space, which is why we use these wavelengths for astronomy. But one of the glorious things is by looking at these different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum,

so we're talking about radio waves, microwaves, visible, UV, and then at the other end, we have x-rays and gamma rays. Sometimes we can take an image from the infrared and then compare them, and it gives us a lot more information than we would get otherwise. I always like to compare it to a picture by Van Gogh, Starry Night. If you break down the picture into its component colours like the greens, the reds, the blues, seeing each one, you don't get a full understanding of what's going on. It's not until you combine them all together that you get the complete understanding. And so the James Webb is sort of filling in some of the gaps in the infrared. So let's have a look at that then.

What are some of its scientific goals? So I understand that the kind of USP, the sort of big selling point is, its ability to peer deeper into space than ever before. Yes. And that is sort of one of its key goals. And you can understand, because one of the things is that the universe is expanding. And as the universe expands, one of the things that happens is it actually stretches the wavelengths of light. So as the universe expands, if you're looking at sort of light from the early universe, visible light from the early universe, by the time it reaches us, it would have been stretched into infrared light. And so by looking at this infarid light, and so by looking at this

for red light, it means we can go further back in time to look at some of the first stars and sort of galaxies that were formed in the universe. And that is one of the key goals of the James Webb Space Telescape to look at this early universe. With Hubble, we were able to peer back to objects, which were, I think, a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang. But with the James Webb Space Telescope, we want to peer back even further in time to see and get sort of closer to the formation of the universe. So sort of coming off the back of that then, in the book, there's a section on nebula. I personally think they're some of my favourite pictures. So what exactly is a nebula? What can we learn from studying it? Yes. So nebula are beautiful clouds of dust and gas.

And this is often where star formation happens. And so, for instance, if you look at the birth of our star, the sun, our sun started in a cloud of dust and dust. So it started off in a nebula. And it probably got disturbed and things started clumping together. And slowly but surely those clumps got bigger and bigger, and then towards the centre, enough matter came together to form a proto star, so a baby star. And then when enough matter, and you got the critical mass together, that star starts the fusion process, and that's how a star is born. And then around the star is what we call an accretion disc, which is a swirling gas, batter and debris, and those clumped together to form the planets. So yes, they're fascinating places to look at. And with all this activity

going on inside them, one of the James Webb's key goals is to actually sort of understand how stars form, how galaxies form, and sort of getting an understanding of that process. And with James Webb Space Telescope, we look out into deep, dark space beyond our solar system to see many, many examples of this and how it's happening. But the spectroscopy element is quite critical because it shows us the chemical composition of these galaxies, some of these stars and potential solar systems. So all that comes through the data. So another thing that I think a lot of people get excited about is exoplanets. So what are they and how do we go looking for them? So exoplanets, I always like to say that when I was at university, we speculated that exoplanets could be there,

but we didn't actually have confirmation. So when we look up in the night sky, on a very clear night, we might see 2,000 stars if we've got a good location. And what many people don't realize is each one of those stars is a sun like our sun. So our sun looks big and bright. Of course, we should never look at the sun because it can damage your own. eye. But the sun looks big and bright, but that's because it's close to us. All the other stars we see in the sky are suns like our sun, but because they're much further away, they do look like these tiny paintpricks of light. Now, on any given night, if you go outside, you might be able to see one or two of the planets of our solar system. At the own tap the other night,

and I could see Jupiter, and it looked glorious. The problem is, planets don't give out light. So, stars give out light because of the fusion process that's happening in their center. they make these electromagnetic waves, but planets don't give out light. And so when we see the planets of our solar system, what we're seeing is like coming from our local star the sun, traveling out to the planet, reflecting off the planet's atmosphere or surface, and then falling into our eyes, which I think is quite breathtaking anyway. But if you're talking about an exoplanet, which is going around a star, which is, let's say, 40 trillion kilometers away, and that's the distance to our next-door neighbor star, Proxima Centauri,

Because this star system is so far away, any exoplanets, for one thing, they're going around a very bright object, so it would be dazzled by that. And to be able to pick up the reflected light from that star is really very challenging. And so we detect exoplanets in a number of different ways. The main way is via the transit method. And that is if an exoplanet is going around a star, as the exoplanet orbits, if it's in the right orientation, as it goes in front of the star, the starlight will dim by a small. amount. And we can detect this dimming in the star's light and work out that there's an exoplanet there. And so using this technique, we've found many thousands of exoplanets. But hopefully, the James Webb Space Telescope will add to that and we'll find many more in the future.

And in a few cases, we can actually do some spectroscopy again. So I keep on about spectroscopy, but it's a very powerful tool. And in some cases, as the exoplanet goes in front of the star, a tiny, tiny fraction of the starlight will pass through the atmosphere of the exoplanet if the exoplanet has one. And we can analyze that and see where the absorptions are and work out the chemical composition of the atmosphere of an exoplanet, which is many trillions of kilometres away from us. So it's powerful stuff, really. So is this sort of one of the ways in which we could speculate, let's say, that there might be life on one of these? Yes. I often ask this question to people who actually do the detailed research here. And I think the challenge is we can do

sort of this chemical analysis and try and get an understanding of what's out there. But I don't think we can get a sort of full confirmation. So one of the things we've found is we've found quite a few exoplanets with water vapor in their atmosphere. And sort of water vapor is one of the chemicals we have in our atmospheres here. And also from looking at the position of the exoplanet, using that transit method, we can work at how far away it is from its local star? Is it in what we call the habitable or Goldilocks zone where it's not too close to the stars or the water evaporates? not too far away from the star than all the water freezes, but in that sort of happy medium, which we call the habitable or Goldilocks A.

So by doing this, we can sort of find these Earth-like planets. But to get confirmation of life, we need a lot more detail. And unfortunately, I don't think we are at a stage where we could say, yes, we think there's life on that planet yet. So let's move a bit close to home then, sort of sticking with the same theme. Some of the moons in our own solar system, potential candidates for this sort of. thing. What can you tell us about that? This is one of the topics. I go out and speak to school kids a lot, and this is one of the topics I really like to discuss with them. Because I mentioned that Goldilocks

zone, and that's where we thought we were most likely to find life on other planets. Because life, as we know it, I should add, because sometimes it's hard to define exactly what life is. But we know that we live in the Goldilocks zone in our solar system, and that's why we've got liquid water and water vapor in our atmosphere. So we're looking for life as we know it, because that's the only example we have of life at the moment. But maybe 20, 25 years ago, people were doing research here on Earth, and they went down to some of the deepest points of the ocean, a place called the Mariana Trench, which is 11 kilometres below sea level. And down here, they weren't expecting to find life, because generally we believed that life was based on sort of energy from, you know,

our local star, the sun. Plants photosynthesize, they make sugars, that's usually the baseline for all ecosystems on our planet. But down in the Mariana Trench, 11 kilometres below sea level, life was detected. And life was detected, and it was living off thermal vents. So the residual heat of the formation of the earth bubbling up through fissures and thermal vents down on the deep ocean floor, and creatures were living off this. And so if creatures and life can thrive in these areas, now we can look at some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn and think perhaps a similar process is happening there. And so if you look at there's a moon called Anceladus that goes around Saturn, and Saturn is one of the gas giants, so a huge, far, far bigger than Earth, a much more

massive than Earth. And as this moon sort of goes around Saturn, we think that there could be some heating, some contracting that could cause thermal vents. Also, we know that Anceladus has an icy crust, but we know it has liquid water beneath the icy crust because it vents out into space every so often. So there are places we're now within our solar system, which aren't planets but moons where life could occur. Now, that's within our solar system. But when we start talking about exoplanets

and looking out there other solar systems, we haven't got confirmation of an exo moon yet. So we found six and a half thousand exoplanets, but we haven't had confirmation of an exo moon. And so, yeah, not only are we looking for exoplanets now, we're looking for exo moons because they could potentially harbour life too. So we've covered an awful lot there and just sort of coming off the back of that by way of summary, what are you most excited about seeing next from the telescope?

Well, the thing is, because the telescope, it discovers such a wide range of things. So we said, you know, sort of looking back in time and it doesn't look towards the sun or the earth. And so we don't look at any of the planets of the inner solar system. But it does give us some glorious images of planets of the outer solar system. Now, if you look at sort of Mars or Jupiter and Saturn, we've sent probes to these planets. But if you talk talking about the outer planets like Uranus and Neptune, it tend to get some fantastic images of those. So that's quite exciting. And that's in our own sort of local ball field. But at the same time, it's looking to some of the earliest universes and the earliest, you know,

star formation. So it's covering the full gambit. But I must admit exoplanets do have a special place in my heart. Trying to get an answer to the question, you know, are we alone in the universe? I don't think we'll get a definitive answer with the James Webb, but it's giving us more understanding of what's out there. And also the range of exoplanets. When we started, our solar system was probably quite standard. But now we're finding hot Jupiters and all sorts of exotic planetary systems out there. So yes, I think the James Webb is really going to help with all of that and change our understanding of how our solar system formed. And how common solar systems like ours are. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius.

Brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Sky at Night presenter Dr Maggie Adirin Pocog. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out her latest book, Web's Universe, the space telescope images that reveal our cosmic history. If you liked what you just heard, then please do consider subscribing to Instant Genius on your preferred podcast platform.

The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or download us on your app store of choice. also find us online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analogue warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist vocal,

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