NASA's Curious Universe - Webb’s First Images

Episode Date: July 12, 2022

On July 12, 2022, a fundamentally new era of exploring our universe begins. This special season finale episode features an overview of the James Webb Space Telescope’s first detailed cosmic images. Learn what this historic moment means from astronomer Michelle Thaller.

Hi, curious universe listeners. Are you ready for a special season finale episode? I'm Nicole Colon, an exoplanet scientist at NASA who works on the Web Space Telescope team. Patty's not able to join us this episode, but I'm honored to step in as your temporary tour guide. In the fall of 2021, we released a miniseries all about the James Webb Space Telescope, one of the most ambitious missions ever sent to space. This observatory is now situated a million miles away, and it's on a mission to reveal the secrets of our universe.

We are thrilled to report that Webb has just sent its first detailed cosmic images and other information back to Earth. So settle in as we share a bit about Webb's journey since its launch date, And here where this exciting image release marks the beginning of a new scientific era that might just change the way we see our place in the universe. As you listen to the episode, we recommend looking up these magnificent images. You can find them at nassah.gov slash webfirst images. Thanks and enjoy the show.

It's been said over and over again that the James Webb Space Telescope is the most complex observatory we've ever launched into space. And so that meant that there were a lot of moments where all of us had our fingers, toes and legs and arms, everything crossed we possibly could. Of course at NASA, we test things, we design things. We have the best engineers and scientists in the world. But there always is this little bit of luck

that things really do have to work. I mean, you can have a bad day or you can have a good day. My name is Michelle Fowler, and I am an astronomer and science communicator at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. After more than 25 years of development, and through the hard work of thousands of people worldwide, the James Webb Space Telescope launched from French Guyana on December 25, 2021. The world took a collective sigh of relief when this engineering marvel left the launch pad, but the most stressful part of the mission's journey was only just beginning for the scientists and engineers who work on web.

As web soared through space towards its final destination, there were exactly 295 things that needed to go perfectly right during its deployment. If any one of these failed, the web mission would be over before it even really began. Imagine building a telescope so big, the mirror won't fit in the rocket unless you fold it up. I mean, it was risky. The engineering had never been tried before. So there was this huge adventure we were on. There was this large heat shield.

It was five layers of very thin material, almost like mylar, sort of reflective thin material. For this thing to unfold correctly, there were little wires that had to pull these sheets taught. The sheets had to separate. There were all of these little actuators that had to undo themselves for the sheets to unfold correctly. And so the first couple of days after the launch, I mean, to me, looking back on it, it was almost like a fairy tale. We knew everything that could go wrong. If one of these didn't work, then this heat shield would not unfold properly.

And then one after another, every single one worked. Since that intense process of unfolding its various mirrors and tennis court-sized sunshield, Webb has been capturing information from its special lookout, point over our universe. And now, for the first time ever, we get to experience the universe through web's infrared eyes. The first five released images from the telescope give us insight into some perplexing cosmic wonders, a stellar nursery where stars are formed, a giant exoplanet light-ears away, a grouping of galaxies, the aftermath of a star's burnout, and the deepest image of our universe ever captured.

Wow. I had no idea that's what it looks like. Michelle was part of a small group of scientists who got the chance to see those first images from Webb before they were released to the public. Let's hear from her about what we are seeing in these incredible images. Everybody's heard the cliche, you know, an image is worth a thousand words. And it really is true in astronomy.

astronomy. And even as a trained astrophysicist, the images blow me away. I mean, literally, I get goosebumps. All of a sudden, I feel part of this vast and large and beautiful system that is our universe. So the Webb Telescope took a picture of a star-forming region called NGC 3324. Now, this is part of a vast, call of starbirth, a place where hundreds, if not thousands of new stars are forming. It's a gigantic cloud. And I have to say, this was the first image that I actually saw. It almost shocked me, because, of course, we were waiting for images from the Webb Telescope.

We knew this was the telecon. We'd be talking about them. But there it was. And it really got me. This journey of 25 years, hundreds of people that I know, with tens of thousands of people around the world who made this possible. And the image was beautiful, crystal clear, gorgeously focused. And there in front of me was this edge of a glowing gigantic cloud. We'd seen this cloud before, but deep down inside the sort of colorful glow,

the heat coming from this cloud, all of a sudden there was this structure we've never seen. There were these swirls and these bubbles being blown by winds around the young stars. And it now was like we had a ring side seat. We'd seen this from a distance, but here we are actually looking at every little detail inside the nebula. And there's so much mystery still in how stars form. There are so many questions about how this process really plays out, and it's in there. So again, this was a glance. It just leaves you wanting more.

I want to go in with a fine-tooth comb and look at every little bump and wiggle and wrinkle and find out what it's telling us about how stars form. To counterbalance the image of a star birth, Webb also took an amazing picture of a star death. The other side of a star's lifetime. It's a star unraveling itself into space after its main nuclear reactions go off inside.

And we see many of these around the sky. The Hubble Space Telescope has taken so many gorgeous pictures of them. They're very popular poster subjects and all of that. And the Webb Telescope had this image. I've seen the nebula before, but the reveal underneath as to what was going on was breathtaking. So in previous images, for example, there was a kind of a bright center that we knew was the dying star. we knew from other observations it was a binary star, two stars going around each other. But with the unprecedented resolution of Webb, we could actually see that binary star as two distinct stars.

And the thing about infrared is it can actually look through layers of obscuring dust, dark material that gets in the way of seeing inside these clouds. So here is this dramatic moment where these stars are basically dying, shepherding, getting their material back out into space, this is where the chemistry of life begins. Pretty much all of the heavy elements in the universe, things that are heavier than hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, iron, phosphorus, sulfur, all these things that biology needs, you know, the calcium in my teeth. All of that stuff, stars form that naturally when they die, but if you look at how much of that stuff

was around in the universe. Most of that came from this first generation of stars. There was just this party of element formation. All of this stuff came pouring out of these exploding young stars. We haven't been able to see that. We simply know that the universe all of a sudden had this chemistry, that they could start to build molecules and life and planets and everything else. So we're looking back to the beginning of us.

The place where a lot of the atoms inside your body were formed. There it is, right in front of you, with the dying star. So there's the image of a grouping of galaxies called Stefan's Quintet. Stefan's Quintet is a group of galaxies that are interacting with each other. They're tugging on each other gravitationally. Galaxies are such monsters. These are these families of hundreds of billions of stars. and they don't really exist in space alone.

They tend to cluster. They tend to interact. I mean, our own Milky Way galaxy turns out to be swallowing up. Smaller galaxies left, right, and center. So with Stephen's Quintet, this is something that as an astronomer I've known about for quite a while. They're doing this beautiful dance. They're slowly colliding and ripping each other apart over billions of years. When I saw the James Webb Space Telescope image, what I'd never seen before is the depth into

the galaxies that were looking. So in a visible light image like Hubble, you can see the beautiful glow of all the stars. But with the James Webb Space Telescope, all of a sudden there was this detail underneath, this almost this skeleton of where the gas and the dust were going, how the collision was really unfolding. And this is exactly what we wanted James Webb to do.

The story is there. Just a glance told me that. And now we're going to go back over weeks and months and years and find out every single little detail about what's really going on there. Webb also sent data back from an exoplanet called WASP 96B. One of the big things we were waiting for with the James Webb Space Telescope was the measurement of an exoplanet's atmosphere, the actual chemistry. So we've been detecting exoplanets left, right, and center,

but all we can see is just them blocking out the light from their stars. What is the atmosphere really like? WASP 96B is a planet around another star a bit more than a thousand light years away from us. And it's a big planet. It's about the mass of Saturn, we think. It's actually bigger than Saturn because it's very close to its star,

and therefore it's very hot. And so basically it's kind of puffed up. It's so warm, the gases are kind of expanding in the atmosphere. And so it's this big puffball of a planet. The amazing thing to me is, And I think this is something people don't appreciate. Webb was able to measure the chemical content of this planet quickly and just exploding in front of our eyes were multiple signatures of water.

Now, in this case, the planet's very warm, so we're looking at water vapor, probably reasonably hot water vapor, and so we're not looking at liquid water, the way we have here on the surface of Earth. But just as a demonstration, Look at one planet for a fairly short amount of time, and there you have it. There's the chemistry. We know it has all these different signals, you know, not just water, but many other chemicals that we can see in that spectrum. It's a squiggly line, but there's so much wonderful information in there. So this was an amazing start for Webb, just to show that we can make one of these beautiful observations detect the chemistry quickly. And I have to say, for this, what I'm really looking forward to what goes on from here. Because soon enough, I really think we're going to find a planet that's about the same temperature and the same size as Earth. And when we start finding things like water vapor there, that's truly exciting. There were some things with

the Webb Telescope that everybody was looking forward to. We all knew that we were going to see. The James Webb Space Telescope took a picture of a distant group of galaxies called SMAC's 0723. Now this was one of the images that everyone was waiting for. I mean, you could just tell. When we were on the telecon and they were showing us images, we were gasping and we were all texting each other

little applause symbols for the different images that came up. But we knew that the last one they were going to show us was going to be a deep image of the universe. So this was the big deal about the James Webb Space Telescope, How deep can we go? How far away, and therefore, how deep back in time, because the light took so long to get to us. So this is a beautiful cluster of galaxies,

and it's very dramatic because you'll see all of these kind of arcs and things that look sort of smudged all around it. And what that really is, it's just kind of mind-blowing, is you're looking at the gravity of some galaxies actually creating natural lenses out of space, space itself, the gravity of galaxies that are a bit closer to us, they're still very far away, but they're actually bending space into a natural telescope. And that actually leaves the images from distant galaxies even farther away than the cluster.

As they pass through this lens, they get distorted and warped into these wonderful, smeared out images. To me, when you see this image, it's almost hard to believe that this is really what you see on the sky. This has not been altered or created by computer animators. If you had eyes as sensitive as James Webb, you would see these smears and these arcs that are really the consequence of bent space, lensed space. That's amazing. But it's safe to say that you're looking at the universe the way it was probably only about 500 million years after the Big Bang. And that's amazing. That's the dawn of the first galaxies.

I think as we get better with our observations, we might even tease out some of the signals from the first stars. Let me just say, the thing about this particular deep image of the universe was when I first saw it, I was just impressed by the beauty. I know what we're looking for. I know the scientific questions that we're trying to ask with this image. But just for now, just sit back and look at this. This grandeur, this beauty on a scale our minds don't.

process. This is the treasure we get to begin picking through. And let's just see what we're going to find. The first images from Webb signal a new era of discovery for NASA and for the world. In this new era, we'll gain a new perspective on the universe's cosmic history. We'll open the door to new ways of probing the atmospheres of terrestrial planets and even look for signs of potentially habitable worlds. These new images still only scratched the surface of what discoveries will be made possible with

Webb. Scientists like Michelle can't wait for how Webb's research will change our understanding of the universe. It's so easy to think of scientists and science as sort of this, you know, this sort of monolithic population that is different than us.

You know, somehow scientists don't have the same feelings. These are real people and people who dedicated their lives. It is a privilege to work for NASA and to be involved in this pure exploration and to be surrounded by people that share those goals, that want to spend their lives doing that thing. I want you to realize when you think about Web and when you think about these images, the wonderful, real, warm people that made this possible and how much joy they feel in presenting these images to you. These belong to all of us now. And the universe

is about to change. Wow. I know when I first saw these images, I was blown away. And remember, you can see these incredible images by visiting nassah.gov slash webfirst images. This is NASA's curious universe. This episode was written and produced by Katie Atkinson and Erica. Kriner with additional support from Liz Landau. The Curious Universe team includes Patty Boyd, Christina Dana, Michaela Sosby, and Maddie Arnold. Our theme song was composed by Matt Rousseau and Andrew Santaguita of System Sounds. Special thanks to Mike McClare, Mike Menzel, and the James Webb Space Telescope team. Thank you for tuning in to the fourth season of NASA's Curious Universe.

We've enjoyed taking you along with us as we've enjoyed taking you along with us as we've explored even more of our wild and wonderful universe, from the lunar surface to supersonic flight and more. We're taking a break now, but we'll be back this fall with more adventures. Until then, you can continue exploring with NASA by visiting nassad.gov. And find more NASA podcasts, like Houston We Have a Podcast and On a Mission, in your favorite podcast app, or by visiting nassah.gov slash podcasts. It's, Patty, we love you.

Get well soon.