NASA's Curious Universe - Exploring the Early Universe with Webb

Episode Date: December 12, 2023

The James Webb Space Telescope promised to show us “baby pictures” of the universe. Now in its second year of science, Webb is fulfilling that promise—and more. NASA scientists Jane Rigby, Taylor Hutchison, and Gerónimo Villanueva explain how they use Webb to peer back to the earliest stages of the universe and examine stunning plumes of water in our own solar system. NASA's Curious Universe is an official NASA podcast. Discover more adventures with NASA astronauts, engineers, scientists, and other experts at nasa.gov/curiousuniverse

Thank you for listening to NASA's curious universe. If you're new to the show and excited to learn more about the universe around us, welcome. You're in the right place. We're hard at work making new episodes, but we just wanted to stop for a minute and say, thank you. We're very happy to have you here. And we have some good news for you. We have over 50 episodes exploring all sorts of fun topics from human spaceflight to astrophysics and more. Whether you're a total space nerd or a first-time space explorer, I'm telling you, there is a curious.

Universe episode for you. So find your favorite episode at nasset.gov slash curious universe or wherever you listen to podcasts. So glad you found us. Thanks. And enjoy the show. My favorite image, hmm, I've got a couple. So it looks like this sort of ghostly white pearl essence that fills much of the image.

And then there are hundreds of these white to yellow galaxies. And what you're seeing is a city. In a galaxy cluster, there are hundreds or thousands of galaxies crammed into that same space. It's the most urban part of the universe, a very busy place. Jane Rigby is the senior project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope. Since its launch, almost two years ago, Webb has gathered a lot of images. This one caught Jane's eye right away. And not just because it's beautiful.

It shows a galaxy cluster called Abell 2744. But more importantly, it shows what's going on behind that galaxy cluster. There are these red things that look stretched like taffy. You know, you take a laffy taffy and you pull on it and you get a sort of funky stretched shape. You've got these stretched, funky red things. The galaxy cluster is billions of light years away, more than halfway across the universe. And those funky red things are galaxies that are even further away behind the cluster. The cluster acts like a pair of eyeglasses, distorting the light from the more distant galaxies

and helping us see them better. When this one dropped, I will say that my peeps and I, like we all got on Zoom, and we spent like an hour or two just like geeking out about this. We're like, oh my God, look over here. I'm like zoom in and let me stretch it for you. Like, oh, that's so pretty. This image was a long time coming. The Webb Telescope has been in the works since the 1990s,

and construction started in 2004. By the summer of 2022, after decades of hard work from scientists and engineers around the world, it was time to share Webb's first images. Jane and the rest of the team were ready to show the world what it could do. The Webb Telescope was built to do some really audacious things, And it's been such a relief that even like the first images and the first science results to emerge were, yep, we did it. This is NASA's curious universe. Our universe is a wild and wonderful place.

I'm your host for today, Jacob Pinner. And in this podcast, NASA is your tour guide. The James Webb Space Telescope is pushing astronomy to new frontiers. We're seeing baby pictures from the early life of the universe, new details about our own solar system, and planets orbiting other stars that could show signs of life. In this episode, we're diving into the new science that Webb makes possible. We'll meet a couple of astronomers discovering unexpected black holes in the early universe and examining a gigantic plume of water on an icy moon of Saturn. And we'll hear how Webb is also helping to launch the next generation.

of scientists at NASA and around the world. Jane Rigby has been on the web team since 2010. Back then, the telescope didn't look much like a telescope. It was being built in separate pieces, and it would be a few more years before those pieces started to be assembled. There was a position, and I applied and said, I don't really understand what this is, but it sounds kind of cool. And I realized more and more that if Web didn't work,

like we were going to be stuck. Like, astronomy was going to be stuck for a decade. And science, too, we really had to get this thing to work. Webb was designed to build on the legacy of the Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories. Webb would primarily capture infrared light, which human eyes can't see. And Webb's primary mirror would be 60 times bigger than a previous infrared telescope called Spitzer, which made a lot of discoveries that Webb will study in more detail. The elevator pitch for Webb was we were going to visit a time when galaxies were young.

We were going to find galaxies that they're so far away that their light has been traveling for more than 13 billion years to get to us. After decades of planning, construction, and testing, Webb made it to the launch pad on December 25, 2021, Christmas Day. Three, two, Unite, stop. Ready to blast off on a rocket provided by the European Space Agency. And liftoff. And liftoff. Decolage lift off from a tropical rainforest to the edge of time itself. James Webb begins a voyage back to the birth of the universe.

Once Webb was in space, it was time for commissioning. A delicate dance of unfolding and activating a lot of fragile parts. In order to have the mirrors all act as one, they need to be lined up to just within a few nanometers of one another. That ends up being it's a few hundred atomic dynamics. few hundred atomic diameters, the level of precision that we need here. So to do that, we step through a long process. Webb's engineers had to make sure everything worked the way it was supposed to. We have the best engineers on the planet. I trust them. It worked. It was exhilarating and scary,

but it worked. The last couple months of commissioning was just this unwrapping a present, and the president was way better than I could have possibly expected. The more the team tested Webb, the more they realized, it was even better than advertised. By July 2022, it was time to share Webb's first images with the world. By then, the web team had realized the telescope can take images twice as sharp as NASA had promised. And there were a couple moments where it's like, oh, my, this thing's really good. Like the back away slowly from the computer, right? Like, oh, my goodness, that's better.

than it's supposed to be by kind of, okay, by quite a bit. Webb's images are breathtaking. And if you want to hear more about them, we have another episode of Curious Universe dedicated to those very first images released from Webb. But for scientists, the telescope provides something even more beautiful, data. I work with galaxies that some of the ones that are the first we've ever found.

You know, they're the earliest in the very, very distant universe, some of these first galaxies that ever formed. I try and find them, and anything else I can pick apart to try and understand the very, very early universe. Taylor Hutchison is a postdoctoral fellow at NASA. She spends a lot of time looking at web data.

Like literally anything you find out about these galaxies and this time in early universe is a substantial advancement of that science. Like anyone who contributes to it is making a big contribution because we just knew nothing about it. And it's so exciting to see, very rapidly over the span of just one year,

we have a completely different understanding of what's going on in the early universe that we did before. Before Webb, or JWST, as the insiders call it, Taylor had used a ground-based telescope for a research technique called spectroscopy. That's where light is separated into its components so scientists can see what chemical ingredients are out there.

When she saw the first images from Webb, she knew it was going to change everything. And I remember I was taking my cat to the vet and having the live stream play on my phone as I was driving. And they showed this light fingerprint spectrum of a really, really distant galaxy, more distant than we'd ever been able to get a spectrum of before. And I remember having to pull over one to look at it and then also because I started crying because it was just so beautiful. I mean, I spent my entire PhD dissertation trying to study these same kinds of galaxies using a 30-foot-wide telescope in Hawaii. and I could get maybe hints of the light of these galaxies. And then in two hours, GWST got so much more.

Taylor says that looking back at those early galaxies feels like cosmic archaeology. By looking far across the universe, she's also looking far back in time. The universe is so massive. Space is so vast that light is not instantaneous. It has to travel. I mean, if you're in a room, you turn on a switch,

your room is immediately lit up. But the sun even is far enough away from the earth that it takes eight minutes for light to get to us from the sun. So if you had an evil wizard go and disappear the sun, it'd take eight minutes for us to stop seeing sunlight. And so you can imagine how much longer and longer it takes the further out in space you go from us. That means that when Webb shows us images that are billions of light years away, we're also looking billions of years back in time. So, to understand what Webb is showing us so far, let's take a trip to the very early universe. We're sending our time machines as far back as they can possibly go, 13.8 billion years ago, to the Big Bang. You have the Big Bang, and then you have this really rapid expansion of the universe.

You may be wondering, just how big was the Big Bang? Well, for a fraction of a second, the universe, The universe itself expanded faster than the speed of light. How that happened is a whole nother mystery. But over the next hundreds of thousands and even millions of years? Millions of years to an astronomer is like, I think, what other people might think of as like, a minute or something, a very small amount of time. The universe started to take shape.

First, protons and electrons found each other and formed the first atoms. For the next couple of hundred million years, the universe was a dark cloud of gases with no no stars at all. You just have this universe that's just awash with this hydrogen atoms and maybe trace amounts of other elementary particles. And then slowly but surely, these things start to connect and they start to form these little clumps. The temperature is changing this early universe. And suddenly you have these little knots forming and that's the first stars that are forming.

And as the more and more stars are formed and they grow and they age and they explode, you're having a more complicated universe beginning to form. With these first stars, you then start to have the first galaxies. Just days after starting its official science operations, Webb captured the most distant galaxies ever seen by human eyes, including one that existed just 350 million years after the Big Bang. As light travels over those huge cosmic distances, it starts to behave strangely.

Those distant galaxies are also moving away from us. By the time light reaches Earth, after billions of years traveling through space, the light itself has been stretched to a different wavelength. And so if you were to imagine you're standing on a sidewalk and there's this very piercing loud siren from a fire truck and the fire truck is zooming past you. What you'll hear as it approaches you is this higher pitch noise. And then as it passes you, you'll hear it drop to a lower pitch. So they'll go like, mea-oh.

And that's literally the sound waves being compressed as the fire truck approaches you, and then the sound waves being stretched out as the fire truck passes you. And so light behaves just like that. Astronomers call that effect redshift. It means that if a star far across the universe is shining visible light, which we can see, by the time that light reaches Earth, it's in the infrared spectrum that we can't see. That's one of the main reasons Webb is designed to gather infrared light.

Web's science journey is just in its second year, but it's already showing us that in the baby universe, galaxies are behaving differently than we expected. So there's this understanding in astronomy that almost every galaxy and definitely every mass of galaxy has some kind of supermassive black hole in its center. This is something we see from our own Milky Way to galaxies far across the universe. At the center, you can expect to find a black hole with a mass that's millions or, are even billions of times greater than our sun. These galaxies that have these supermass black holner center, I mean, a very obvious question that would be, okay, which formed first?

Was it the black hole or was it the galaxy? And so when you're looking in the very early universe, what you're really expecting to see are, you know, a ton of baby galaxies that are just beginning to, you know, kind of grow, they're like in their toddler phase, they're growing and evolving. So you might think that in those baby galaxies, the black holes would be smaller too.

It's still early days for the science. But Taylor says that's not what we're seeing. Some of these black holes that we're finding in these galaxies, the information that we have suggests that they're very large already in this very early universe. And that is a really fun problem because how did they get so big so fast? And so it's a really interesting, confusing question. We're actively still trying to figure out why. That's just one head scratcher.

Here's Jane again with another. We also see galaxies that are done, or at least taking a break. Astronomers thought baby galaxies would have huge appetites, constantly churning out lots of stars. But for some galaxies... They've just formed a whole bunch of stars, and now it's like after Thanksgiving dinner, where you just kind of lean back and touch your belly and say, oh, that was great. They're done eating. They're done.

So we've got this, at some level, we've answered the question we wanted. We have taken the baby pictures in the universe. We know how galaxies got their start. But now we have a whole bunch of new questions. In Webb's first year of operation, Jane and other astronomers didn't know what they'd find. Now they have a growing list of follow-up questions on top of all of our other big questions about the universe. I think of this telescope as like a Formula One race car in a horse and buggy world. and there's a lot of gears on a Formula One race car, right?

And I don't think we've gotten up to the top gears yet. We just need to stare longer. We need to look at more places on the sky. We have to be patient and build up the science. Webb is also showing us new details in our own backyard. We'll hear how the telescope is changing the game for research in our own solar system. That's after a short break. Hey, Curious Universe listeners.

Do you want even more great storytelling, live launch coverage, and behind the scenes access into the world's premier space agency? Well, let me tell you about NASA Plus. NASA Plus is NASA's new on-demand streaming service. Out now on all major platforms.

Get ready to travel through space from the comfort of your own home. The best part? It's family-friendly. There's no subscription required, and it costs nothing. Check out other worlds, a documentary series that follows scientists

as they explore planets in our solar system and beyond with the James Webb Space Telescope, or the new season of NASA Explorers, which takes you behind the scenes of the Osiris Rex mission to collect an asteroid sample and bring it back to Earth. You can download the NASA app on your phone, stream on Roku and Apple TV, or visit us online at plus.nessa.gov.

See you there. Besides studying the early universe, Webb has a handful of other science goals. It's going to look for new planets orbiting other stars and even evaluate whether they're good candidates to support life. And closer to home, Webb is showing us new details about our own solar system. I mean, James Webb has been revolutionary for planetary astronomy. It has definitely changed the game completely.

Geronimo Villanueva is a planetary scientist at NASA. I mean, typically, you know, we've been exploring the solar system with almost anything you can think of. We have even spacecraft going to many of these objects. So we should know a lot about them, but nevertheless, every time we punch James Webb, something new we discover. For a telescope designed to study the farthest edges of the universe, there are actually some challenges to make it work for observing closer objects, too.

Think about being in a car, traveling down the highway at 60 miles an hour. When you look out toward the horizon, you can track objects pretty easily. They appear to be moving, but not that fast. But then, shift your focus to the side of the road right next to the car. Everything next to you, the plants and the road signs, they seem to be whipping by. To keep just one object in focus, your eyes have to move really fast. Webb has the same challenge with studying planets close to Earth. So we had a speed limit of how fast we could track things.

And from the get-go, our scientists were asking, can we go a little faster? Or is that actually our speed limit? Like, are we, you know, can we push it? And they worked with the engineers to figure out what the actual technical limits of the system were. That opened up the possibilities for using Webb on our neighbors, too. Mars, Pluto, comets, Webb is giving us a fresh look at all of them. One particular place that keeps surprising scientists is a moon called Enceladus. Saturn has a lot of moons, and one of them is Enceladus.

Enceladus is a small moon, just over 300 miles across, or small enough that it could fit inside the Gulf of Mexico. On most of its surface, temperatures are below minus 300 degrees Fahrenheit, about the same as liquid nitrogen. So it's not a very appealing place for humans. But here's the good news. Its surface is covered with a layer of ice about 20 miles thick, and underneath, there appears to be an ocean of living. liquid water. And the interesting thing about Enceladus is that we had been there. We had a mission called Cassini.

This was a probe that visited Saturn and several of its moons, starting in the mid-2000s. Cassini made several close flybys of Enceladus. And one of the things that was revealed when we were there is that it has this massive jet of water coming from the South Pole. This jet spits out water vapor at about 800 miles an hour. It's so strong that the vapor shoots off into space for hundreds of miles. Inside that water cloud, Cassini's instruments detected a mix of carbon and organic materials. So if we're going to find life in our solar system, Enceladus is one of the best places to look.

But it's been years since our probe observed Enceladus. With Webb, Geronimo wanted to know, was that water plume still coming off the surface? We were expecting to see the glitigrible around there. So when we point the telescope, we took the data. First of all, we didn't see anything obvious in the data, but then when we look at the specific fingerprints of water vapor, not anything else, we saw this massive amount of water coming out. And it was not only localized, it was everywhere.

We actually saw water standing much beyond the little location of the moon. The plume was releasing so much water that it produced a cloud of water around it. We don't know exactly what this would look like from the surface. But picture a geyser made of ice. with water vapor pouring out of it, like the steam that comes off a block of dry ice. And there's so much of it that the vapor flies into space and creates a cloud surrounding the moon. Scientists have zeroed in on Enceladus as a high-priority place to explore. Eventually, we may send another orbiter there, or even a probe to land on the surface.

To reach the liquid water on Enceladus, that probe would have to pierce through miles of ice. But this discovery from Webb could show us a shortcut. The moment you discover that there is a jet or a massive release of constant gases into the atmosphere onto a jet, you are effectively producing a connection point to that ocean. So that naturally there is like a connection path between that ocean and the surface. So now the exploration of that moon becomes much more accessible. If you ever go there, well, I'm going to go close to that jet, because this is where I can connect to the ocean underneath.

There aren't any probes headed to Enceladus. Not yet. But starting in 2024, there will be a NASA probe headed to Europa, another icy moon. So Webb is also looking for plumes on Europa. And on Mars, Webb can work with rovers and orbiting probes to analyze gases in the atmosphere. So across the solar system, Webb is helping NASA home in on its targets. Research papers with web data are basically flying off the printing presses. They're coming so fast that Jane can barely keep up. Now, the web team is deciding what to study next. Even though Jane is the top scientist, it's not totally up to her. I think if you ask people would say it's like a secret cabal, or like there's like 20 NASA scientists and we all get together. No.

There's an open competition that's open to the whole world for the best ideas. That doesn't mean it's an easy competition. For the last round of applications, only one out of every seven got selected. But it gives scientists from all kinds of backgrounds a path to using a revolutionary telescope. We want this telescope to be as powerful as possible, as effective as possible, as efficient as we can make it. We want the users, the hundreds of people around the world, actually thousands of people around the world who are using the telescope to understand the data to get all the information that

they want out of it. As senior project scientist, Jane has to balance her own research with set up up other scientists for success. There's a mental image of a great scientist that many of us have. A man locked in his office, scribbling furiously on a chalkboard, looking for a breakthrough all on his own. But that's not how it works.

For one, scientists don't look a certain way. And most discoveries come from teams of people working together. For Web, thousands of people have been involved, from planning to construction, to construction, to using it for their own research. And as the leader of its science team, Jane has been making space for everybody. In 2022, the group Out to Innovate named her the LGBTQ Plus Scientist of the Year. Jane says she grew up without any queer role models.

And now, she's someone who other queer scientists can look up to. Like Taylor, the postdoc we heard from earlier. Dr. Rigby is an exceptional scientist. She will fight for every student and early career scientist that she comes across, and she will take the time out of her incredibly busy schedule to make time for them. And it's so clear how valuable mentorship is for her and how valuable it is for her to make sure that the next generation of scientists have those much support and opportunities and resources as they can. And on top of all of that. She's also doing fantastic science. I think there is no one better suited to be the lead of the JWST and represent it than someone like her. Oh my gosh, that's so nice. You know, the thing about astronomy is that we are all harvesting olives from olive groves that we didn't plant. We're all benefiting from the people that came before us. For those of us who are minorities. There's a lot of like the people who open the doors and the people that were willing to

look at the current system and be like, wait a minute, you're right. That's not fair at all. Like, maybe we should change. We all benefit from that. Jane says when she was a kid, she wrote a fan letter to Sally Ride, the first American woman to go to space. Sally responded with a signed photo, which still hangs in Jane's office today. A while ago, the Curious Universe team, got a note from an eighth grader named Una. Una said she wanted to study astrophysics and maybe even work at NASA someday. Here's Jane's advice for Una, or for anybody else.

Find something you really love doing. If you know what that is, just go for it. Just seriously go for it. And if you don't know what that is, that's okay. That's most people. Keep trying stuff until you find something that lights you up. If that's advice for becoming an astrophysicist, It also sounds like how to launch a space telescope.

No matter how much you want it, how much you dream, or how much you prepare, there's only one way to break new ground and make huge discoveries about ourselves and the universe we live in. You just have to go for it. This is NASA's Curious Universe. This episode was written and produced by me, Jacob Pinner. Our executive producer is Katie Conan's. The Curious Universe team includes Christian,

Elliot, Maddie Olson, Michaela Sosby, and of course, Patty Boyd. Our theme song was composed by Matt Russo and Andrew Santaguita of System Sounds. Christopher Kim is our show artist. Special thanks to Laura Betts and the James Webb Space Telescope team. If you enjoyed this episode about Webb, good news. In 2021, we released a themed mini-series all about the science, engineering, people, and launch of this incredible cosmic telescope. Find it in our episode archives wherever you listen. If you like NASA's Curious Universe, please let us know by leaving us a review and sharing

this episode with a friend. And remember, you can follow NASA's Curious Universe in your favorite podcast app to get a notification each time we post a new episode. I can say that I'm probably one of the few people that I know of at least who have ever hugged a telescope because, you know, a weird flex, but sure.