Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Astrophysics Professor Explains James Webb Space Telescope Results: What do they mean? What's next? (#239)

Episode Date: July 13, 2022

Watch this on Youtube! Today NASA released the first images and data from the James Webb Space Telescope. Here's my reaction to this treasure trove of light, including: Carina Nebula. The Carina Nebula is one of the largest and brightest nebulae in the sky, located approximately 7,600 light-years away in the southern constellation Carina. Nebulae are stellar nurseries where stars form. The Carina Nebula is home to many massive stars, several times larger than the Sun. WASP-96 b (spectrum). WASP-96 b is a giant planet outside our solar system, composed mainly of gas. The planet, located nearly 1,150 light-years from Earth, orbits its star every 3.4 days. It has about half the mass of Jupiter, and its discovery was announced in 2014. Southern Ring Nebula. The Southern Ring, or “Eight-Burst” nebula, is a planetary nebula – an expanding cloud of gas, surrounding a dying star. It is nearly half a light-year in diameter and is located approximately 2,000 light years away from Earth. Stephan’s Quintet: About 290 million light-years away, Stephan’s Quintet is located in the constellation Pegasus. It is notable for being the first compact galaxy group ever discovered in 1877. Four of the five galaxies within the quintet are locked in a cosmic dance of repeated close encounters. Don't miss my exclusive LIVE Q & A with JWST Project Scientist, and Nobel Prize winner, John Mather! Don't miss John Mather’s past appearance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwqTNa9e_LE Please join my mailing list to get the latest news in the Universe and win cool prizes like meteorites, books and more! briankeating.com/list 📝 Subscribe to The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast for exclusive audio interviews https://briankeating.com/podcast.php Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, everybody, just a quick in-between episode featuring yours truly waxing, rhapsodically about the mysteries of the universe unveiled today by the James Webb Space Telescope. Now you can't see the images on this podcast app, but you can if you go to my YouTube channel, Dr. Brian Keating, and there you'll find the visual delights that will await you. So I hope you'll do that. Subscribe to the channel while you're there. And leave a comment for Dr. John Mather. Pass guests on The End of the Impossible Podcast. the lead project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope. He's coming back for his second appearance on the podcast for just a brief Q&A

this Thursday morning on my YouTube channel. So make sure you subscribe and leave a comment or question for Dr. Mather. And for now, I invite you to sit back, relax, and enjoy this ride into the impossible with yours truly and the James Webb Space Telescope. First results. Let's go. Today's announcement brings unprecedented clarity and visibility into the universe, with targets ranging from nearby stars, relatively nearby exoplanets, and some of the most distant

galaxies and clusters of galaxies known to exist. After careful planning for these images, scientists working on the James Webb Space Telescope didn't quite know what to expect. Why do some of the galaxies in this image, which is a very very very important, a very important, small subset of the Hubble deep field, why do they appear bent in arcs? Well, it's the combined mass of the galaxy, both luminous matter and dark matter, that causes gravitational lensing, just as Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity predicted a hundred years ago. And this magnifying effect of a lens is identical to an optical lens that you might be familiar with,

except it's gravity doing the lensing. It's magnifying a galaxy that we might not be able to see from the farthest galaxy in this image. It's over 13, 1.1 billion years of travel time away from us, traveling at the speed of light. The Karina Nebula, or Ada Karina, it's one of the largest and brightest nebulae in the sky. It's over 7,000 light years away in the constellation Karina, which you can only see from the Southern Hemisphere. And I had the amazing opportunity to glimpse through a six-meter diameter telescope called the Magellan Telescope in 2019, shortly before the Great Eclipse and the Southern Hemisphere. And I looked through the telescope and where was it pointed to the Ada

Kurena Nebula, home to many massive stars, most of which are much, much larger than our sun. It's an amazing nebula of a cloud of gas and dust with rich treasure troves of data for astronomers. And these data aren't the only glimpse that astronomers will take. We plan to study these objects for decades to come. Also, in the south, the Southern Ring Nebula, or the Eighthburst Nebula, is what's called a planetary nebula. An expanding cloud of dust that comes off is puffed away from a dying star. This object is nearly a half a light year in diameter,

and it's over 2,000 light years away from the Earth. The Southern Ring Nebula is fascinating. The dimmer dying star is expelling gas and dust that Webb sees an unprecedented detail. It saw it with two different instruments on the telescope that we'll explore in more detail. On the left in this image is NIRCAM's image, and on the right is Miri's image, and they both provide different types of information. The Southern Ring Nebula, despite being called a planetary nebula, doesn't have anything to do with planets at all.

These are shells of gas and dust shed by dying sun-like stars. This will be the fate of our sun as well. That kind of belch out the outer exo atmosphere of the star, not the planet. New details from Webb will further transform our... understanding of how stars evolve and the mysteries they contain. Going farther out into space, 290 million light years away, JWST imaged Stefan's quintet, located in the constellation Pegasus. This quintet of galaxies is notable for being the first compact group ever discovered by astronomers way back in 1877. Can you imagine what those astronomers would think if they could glimpse these

images today? Four of the five galaxies in the quintet are locked. together, gravitationally bound to one another as they play out the bulk of eternity in gravitational embraces. And lastly, we come to a very interesting object, an exoplanet known as WASP-96B. This is a giant planet located far away from our solar system and it's made mostly of gas a gas giant this object this exoplanet is more than a thousand light years away from earth and it orbits its host star about a hundred times more rapidly than earth rotates around the sun this massive planet has about half the mass of jupiter and it was only discovered about eight years ago and what's interesting is these data aren't of the surface of the planet, but actually of the spectrum, the spectrum that we call a library of light.

Webb captured the light curve of the brightness of WASP 96B's parent star over a fairly long period of time. And as the planet transited, the star's disk, it's kind of like a little eclipse, a total eclipse, though it is not. Only a tiny bit of the light of the star gets blocked. Though many of the aspects of this WASP 96B planet were known, Web has added incredible detail thanks to the spectroscopy results that it provides. You can think of spectra as barcodes in some sense, and these barcodes are telling scientists that there is an unambiguous signature of water present in the haze and the clouds themselves. It's the most detailed exoplanet spectrum to date.

It tells us about the chemical composition of this plant. So what exactly will James Webb be looking forward to in the future? Probably more like these images, pretty pictures, but also spectra. And that is where most of the rich data that I'm looking forward to is going to come from. The universe is full of light. Light that has enabled a treasure trove of discoveries and images that never fail to take our breath away. As exciting as these pictures and images are, the data from the James Webb Space Telescope, contains far more information than just a pretty picture. In fact, hiding in plain sight is a vast library of light.

And today, I'll take you on a tour of the James Webb Space Telescope, how it works, and what spectroscopy tells us about the very underpinnings of our universe. Let's go. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, please, how? If you're new to my channel, welcome. I'm Brian Keating, Chancellor's Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of California, San Diego. I'm also an experimental cosmologist who builds telescopes and takes them all around the world to far-flung places like the South Pole, Chile, and even shoot some telescopes deep into space.

Today's exciting discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, are providing a new Rosetta Stone for astronomy, and cosmology, and I'm going to take you on a deep dive into how it all works. Today's announcement involves exoplanets, fascinating objects, perhaps harboring life. Today's announcement describes new phenomena like the earliest galaxies and stars in the entire universe, helping us understand how our galaxy got here, and perhaps how life on Earth could possibly form. Many telescopes have been launched into space, and even with our most advanced Earth-bound telescopes, we've only seen slivers of the expansive universe, including some faraway galaxies, but not nearly as far away as those discovered by the James Webb Telescope. Telescopes in space, like the Web, are unbound by the Earth's atmosphere.

This allows them to see much better than their Earth-bound telescope cousins. But these telescopes are encumbered by other constraints, such as size, weight, and operational support in distant regions as far as a million miles away from Earth, four times the distance from the Earth to the Moon. And of course in space no one can hear you scream. But there's also no prospect to fix a telescope located so far away. The Webb Telescope is 4,000 times farther away from Earth than the Hubble Telescope. There's no prospect to ever get prepared. There have been over 90 space telescope launched over the past half century.

These have been finely tuned to see aspects of the universe in ever more detail. The most famous space telescope, of course, is the Hubble Space Telescope. Named after Edwin Hubble and designed by Lyman Spitzer at Princeton University way back in the 40s. It was unleashed in 1990, over 32 years ago. Of course, it was named after Edwin Hubble, who in the 1920s discovered not only the existence of other galaxies for the first time, but also that those distant galaxies were expanding, getting ever farther away from us with each passing year.

32 years after Hubble launched, a worthy successor has seen first light and obtained stunning new images and data, the James Webb Space Telescope. Over two decades and $10 billion in the making, the JWST is the fruition of one of the most ambitious international science collaborations ever undertaken. It is arguably one of the most complex precise machines ever built. On a par with the large Hadron Collider, which cost about the same amount, except this telescope was launched a million miles away from Earth, unlike the LHC. Make every get-together chill.

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After being delivered to its parking space by a European Space Agency Arian 5 rocket in late December 2021, By March of this year, 2022, it had reached a million miles distance from the Earth. It unfolded flawlessly and synchronized its orbit with that of the Earth around the Sun, protected by five tennis-court-sized heat shields. These heat shields allow Webb's instrumentation to achieve a frosty 50 Kelvin or minus 370 degree Fahrenheit below zero. However, under careful mission control from engineers on Earth, the web unfolded 18 hexagonal mirrors and aligned them to within a tolerance smaller than a human hair to comprise a giant

6.5 meter diameter primary mirror. With a collecting area over six times greater than that of the Hubble telescope, resulting in the first stunning image. Alignment images, to be sure, calibration images as they're known. But these images revealed the presence of untold galaxies lurking in plain sight that were hidden to the Hubble Space Telescope by virtue of the fact that the Hubble Space Telescope cannot access the long wavelength light that the Webb Telescope is designed uniquely to receive.

Some sources of light originated at the dawn of time when the very first galaxies were born. Over 13 billion years ago, just a few hundred million years, after the origin of our observable universe. Now, the images, as startling as they are, don't contain the entirety of information. To get that, we need to explain what spectroscopy is. James Webb has cameras that can see into a huge swath

of the near and mid-infrared spectrum, ranging from wavelengths as short as 0.6 micrometers, or microns in wavelength, which is visible to the human eye, to 28.5 micron wavelengths, much farther beyond both with the human eye could see and the one or two micron wavelengths that the Hubble Space Telescope could see. As the universe expanded,

objects are pushed to what are called higher and higher redshifts, meaning that the wavelength, originally, which may have been in the visible wavelength of light, has been redshifted far outside, potentially as far as 28 microns, almost the highest red shifts that could possibly be observed. This high wavelength capability allows the web to penetrate clouds of dust, and gas that populate the universe.

And in these highly redshifted parts of the spectrum, the web's near-infrared instrument and near-infrared camera are giving the world's stunning images of galaxies from the dawn of time that may reveal how the very first stars were formed and how those stars gathered into the first galaxies and what is pulling the universe together on small scales, dark matter, and what is causing the universe to expand and accelerate in its Hubble expansion, the so-called dark energy effect.

Now, most telescopes that you're familiar with, including telescopes that I've recommended you purchase on this channel in previous videos, are designed to produce pretty pictures, images. And even the images can provide a lot of data. But far more information comes from spectrographs, images of the spectrum detected by the web telescope that reveal the distances and the composition of objects producing the light. Spectroscopy is the ability to read the

the library of light that fills our universe, teasing out its secrets. If a picture is worth a thousand words, as the saying goes, a spectrum is worth a thousand pictures. I think of it as putting a chemistry set right at the objects you're interested in, right back at the beginning of time, and assaying the composition, the chemical makeup, the chemical fingerprints of the oldest objects ever seen to exist. Webb has three exquisitely sensitive spectroscopic instruments, the near-infrared spectrograph or near-spec, the mid-infrared spectrograph, and the slitless spectrograph. The near-spec is a micromechanical marvel that has the ability to observe a hundred different objects simultaneously,

using an array of over one quarter of a million tiny little mirrors that are only 100 by 200 micron diameter shutters. This combination of spectroscopy instrumentation will not only analyze the composition of distant stars and galaxies, but it has also revealed the composition and atmosphere of exoplanets, over 4,000 of which have been already cataloged by previous instruments like the Kepler Space Telescope. Webb may confirm that some of these exoplanets have conditions in their atmosphere that either indicative or indicative of life or that prove they already harbor life. So what are the implications of what JWST has shown us in its first images? Is there something new?

Or are they just more detailed views of previously discovered phenomena? Astronomers will compete feverishly for time on this incredible new instrument and they'll pour over the images and the spectral data collected for decades to come. I will try to involve you, my audience, with these astronomers in live streams and conversations describing the findings on a near real-time basis. So join me and subscribe to the channel to get access to exclusive conversations with these Titanic astronomers.

The discoveries announced today will reverberate for decades, and new discoveries await us as well, the nature of primordial black holes. What was the earliest black hole that could possibly form in the universe? New discoveries about atmospheres surrounding distant exosures. planets and fascinating glimpses into the very first stars and galaxies ever formed. Webb's findings will continue to stoke your curiosity and I'll be right there to help you interpret them. Leave a comment below. Which discovery by James Webb are you most excited to learn about? Don't forget to subscribe and join my mailing list for twice monthly updates from around the universe of cosmology,

experimental particle physics, and beyond. Visit bryankeating.com for more. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, please, hell. Undoubtedly, for the decades to come, data releases from the James Webb Space Telescope will keep us enthralled and entertained, and I'll be right here guiding you through and explaining the significance of these amazing findings by colleagues all around the world.

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