Foggy planets and ultra-diffuse galaxies: the 'James Webb' telescope begins to answer fantastic questions

In 1659, Christiaan Huygens published his ring theory about the origin of the appearance that Saturn presented through his telescopes, the largest of which reached a lens size of about 20 centimeters in diameter.

The largest telescope ever built to date, our Spanish jewel Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), has a segmented mirror with a diameter of 10.4 meters.

Just counting the difference in size, the GTC is about 3,000 times more sensitive than the first telescopes built almost 400 years ago.

This week, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has started providing data to all astronomers in the world;

in fact, anyone can download their data from today.

JWST is about 3,000 times more sensitive (spectroscopically speaking) than any telescope ever built and/or still operating in the mid-infrared region.

We have made a leap that took us hundreds of years in twenty.

We are witnessing a scientific revolution that began to take shape in 1996 with a very ambitious statement by the then director of NASA, who, after a presentation by a highly renowned astronomer on the possible construction of a 4-meter space telescope that would work in the infrared, commented : "Why do you ask for such a modest thing? Why not six or seven meters?"

telescope

wants to answer a few questions, simple, basic, perhaps fantastic, I would say full of transcendence.

How did the universe we know, full of stars, planets and galaxies, come about?

What do the planets of the Milky Way look like, how are they created, and how do they evolve to perhaps have atmospheres and possibly ingredients to support life?

What role do black holes, especially supermassive ones, play in the origin and evolution of our universe?

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What lies behind the images of 'James Webb'

Photo: NASA, ESA, CSA, AND STSCI (AP) |

Video: EPV

We will begin to find some of the answers to these questions in the first JWST data released on July 11 and 12, which have been presented in style.

First, it was US President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris who advanced (with some delay, more earthly issues crossed the agenda) the deepest picture of the universe ever taken, and embellished it with reflections on collaboration between nations, the benefit of humanity through knowledge and technology, and the limitless possibilities of human entrepreneurship and exploration.

It was a great show of government support for science in the United States, we should learn.

Later, at a NASA press conference, ESA and CSA (acronym for the American, European and Canadian space agencies, respectively) presented much more data on everything that the JWST can do in the impossible task of answering those questions, which, however, will allow us to get closer to understanding the cosmos and our place in it.

I would like to dwell on each of these images briefly;

each one will provide for months of analysis and dozens of scientific articles.

But it's almost a crime to put just two or three sentences out of every data set presented these days, so I'm going to focus on two topics, covering the beginning and the end of the evolution of where we live, the universe.

a cloudy planet

Never before has a spectrum of this quality been taken of an exoplanet from space, and the honor goes to what is known as WASP-96 b (“b” because it is the first planet discovered around the star WASP-96).

It is not a very different star from the Sun, just a little cooler, 5,200 °C compared to 5,500 °C for the Sun. This distant world is a planet about half the mass of Jupiter, but larger, that orbits to its star every 3 days, compared to 12 years for Jupiter.

In 2021, water was discovered in its atmosphere, understood as the outermost part of its structure, because in principle it should not have a solid surface, but be a large gas giant.

And sodium was later discovered emitting in a manner similar to the orange lights of street lamps, observations that told us that it probably has no clouds.

However, here is the first surprise provided by JWST: the planet has clouds, mists, and not unlike those on Earth, they are made of water!

The characterization of the atmospheres of planets beyond our Solar System will be a breeze for JWST, it is demonstrated, and that will bring us closer to knowing how they must evolve to give rise to the ingredients of life, which many of us think could not have arisen alone here.

birth and death of stars

Planets with atmospheres and perhaps life is the final destiny, until today, of the universe.

Along the way there have been birth and death of stars (perhaps also with their planets), 2 other topics that JWST has already shown us what it can do.

But I want to close the article with the other end of the life of the universe, the formation of the first stars in the first galaxies, which touches me more closely in my daily work.

JWST has taught us, presented by Biden, a manual of how the universe works, of the physics that governs the cosmos.

In a unique but spectacular image of an area of ​​the sky where there is a cluster of galaxies called SMACS 0723, we see other galaxies so distant that the universe was only 4% of its current age when they emitted the light that the JWST has collected these weeks.

Distant red galaxies with lots of dust and forming stars 1,000 times faster than any nearby galaxy today.

Also red galaxies, but already exhausted from forming stars at an early time and that will spend 50% or more of the life of the universe, irremediably aging, without seeing new stars forming again in them.

Galaxies whose image is terribly distorted by the gravitational lensing effect caused by the SMACS 0723 cluster. Or ultra-diffuse galaxies, much less dense than the Milky Way, which may have a very different origin associated with them, and of which we only knew a handful nearby from us and yet they look perfect in this image from JWST.

Learn what the universe was like

In JWST's first deep field image you can even learn about what the universe was like before galaxies existed, because what fills that image that JWST doesn't directly see, but will detect thanks to unique spectroscopic capabilities, is dark matter. , which is several times more abundant in the universe than the matter around us, in our bodies, on planets or in stars.

The work that was routinely done detecting distant galaxy candidates with Hubble and then observed, with great difficulty, low success rates and months if not years of efforts, with giant ground-based telescopes like the GTC, as of today JWST will do in a matter of weeks, never before has there been such a powerful spectrograph in space.

I'm done.

To some of us the images of these days seem tremendously beautiful, for a reason we dedicate ourselves to it (and they also make us nervous, we have a lot to learn about how to analyze that data).

To others they seem spectacular, the vertigo of knowing that we are looking at the immensity of the cosmos, which we will never visit, undoubtedly excites our brains in some way and launches our curiosity and imagination to try to understand.

Others ask what is the use of studying the universe, a lawful question, like all.

Perhaps, most likely, our lives and the cosmos do not have a meaning, but the fact is that they happen, each one has its history and we humans love to tell and listen to stories, which last beyond our existence.

Or maybe there is a sense, the fact then would be that the universe has ended (until today) giving rise to life on Earth, or perhaps somewhere else and at some other time?

Again, the history of the cosmos would help us relativize, understand and transcend our limited time and our ephemeral existence, at least that is my dream.

Cosmic Void

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