Webb Telescope: NASA to Reveal the Deepest Picture Ever Taken of the Universe
NASA administrator Bill Nelson stated Wednesday that the agency will reveal the “inmost picture of our universe that has ever been taken” on July 12, thanks to the newly operational James Webb Space Telescope.
“If you think of that, this is farther than humanity has ever looked in the past,” Nelson stated during a press instruction at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, the operations center for the $10 billion observatories that was introduced in December last year and is currently orbiting the Sun a million miles (1.5 million kilometers) far from Earth.
A wonder of engineering, Webb can gaze further into the universes than any telescope before it, thanks to its vast main mirror and its instruments that concentrate on infrared, enabling it to peer via dirt and gas.
“It is going to explore things in the solar system and atmospheres of exoplanets orbiting other stars, giving us ideas as to whether potentially their atmospheres are similar to our own,” included Nelson, speaking over the phone while isolating with COVID-19.
“It may respond to some concerns that we have: Where do we come from? What more is available? Who are we? And of course, it is going to respond to some concerns that we do not even know what the concerns are.”
Webb’s infrared capabilities permit it to see deeper back in time to the Big Bang, which occurred 13.8 billion years ago.
Due to the fact that the universe is growing, light from the earliest stars changes from visible wavelengths, and the ultraviolet was emitted in, to longer infrared wavelengths– which Webb is equipped to detect at an unprecedented resolution.
Currently, the earliest cosmological observations date to within 330 million years of the Big Bang. However, with Webb’s capacities, astronomers think they will easily break the record.
20 years life
In more good news, NASA Pam Melroy, deputy administrator, revealed that thanks to an efficient launch by NASA’s partner Arianespace, the telescope could stay operational for twenty years, double the lifespan that was originally envisaged.
“Not only will those 20 years permit us to go deeper into background and time. However, we will go deeper into science because we have the chance to learn and expand and make new observations,” she stated.
NASA likewise intends to share Webb’s initial spectroscopy of a faraway planet, referred to as an exoplanet, on July 12, stated NASA’s top scientist Thomas Zurbuchen.
Spectroscopy is a tool to examine the chemical and molecular composition of distant things and a planetary spectrum can assist in characterizing its atmosphere and other properties such as whether it has water and what its ground resembles.
“Right from the beginning, we will take a look at these worlds available that maintain us awake at night as we consider the starry sky and wonder as we are looking out there, exists life elsewhere?” said Zurbuchen.
Nestor Espinoza, an STSI astronomer, told AFP that previous exoplanet spectroscopies performed utilizing existing tools were very restricted compared to what Webb could do.
“It is like being in a room that is very dark, and you just have a little pinhole you can check out,” he said, of present technology. Now, with Webb, “You have opened up a huge window, you can see all the little details.”
Read the original article on PHYS.
