Read a new interview with the astrophysicist Jane Rigby, on the Webb Telescope, the possibility of life on other planets, and the mysteries of our universe:
from French Guiana, on Christmas Day, 2021, the telescope has hovered in space about a million miles from Earth. During its voyage, the J.W.S.T. unfolded like a piece of origami, releasing an array of solar panels, a powerful antenna, a honeycomb of golden mirrors, and a sunshield that looks like a set of silver sails. Scientists then spent more than three months aligning its mirrors with nanometre precision.
The real problem with J.W.S.T. was that we needed a telescope bigger than rockets are. The rocket we launched on is a little more than five metres across. But just the telescope part of J.W.S.T. is 6.6 metres across . One way to overcome the size limit, which is a fundamental challenge for space telescopes, is to have them fold up. Six of the primary mirror segments were tucked back behind the rest of the mirrors for launch. Then they unfolded on hinges.
J.W.S.T. was also built to study the atmospheres of planets orbiting other stars. That’s the other really high-profile science case. And we’re doing that, but we haven’t gotten far enough yet during our first year of science observations.J.W.S.T. works in the infrared. It was designed to see the light from the universe that is totally invisible to Hubble, which sees primarily in the optical and ultraviolet. About the “bluest” light that J.W.S.T.
Perhaps this is a limitation of my childhood education, but knowing now that light is stretched, I am curious how else light travelling for thirteen billion years across the entire universe will be altered before it gets here. Is what we are seeing what it actually looked like?In general, no, but, in some ways, yes. That’s actually a really lovely question. The light gets stretched, but light can also get absorbed.
The beautiful Milky Way up there isn’t the only one like that. There are thousands. So how did it come to be? We’ve only known what stars are made of since the fantastic 1925 thesis of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin—probably the best astronomy thesis ever written. That was her thesis! Can you imagine that? Like, we all sit down and say, I’ll have to do something useful for my thesis. And hers was, O.K., here’s what stars are made of.
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