Speaker 1: Hey, or hey, how do you celebrate the big holiday holiday?
Speaker 1: Which one? Life? Four? No? Much more important than that?
Speaker 1: Do you li? Four teams? The steel Day? No? No,
Speaker 1: even more? Cake was involved in this holiday? Let me
Speaker 1: look at up. Okay, Google says it was recently World
Speaker 1: Yoga Day? Is that the one? Oh? That's important? But
Speaker 1: this recent holiday stretched our knowledge of the universe more
Speaker 1: than our bodies. Okay, which holiday was it? It was
Speaker 1: New Space Telescope First Picture Day. That's a really long
Speaker 1: name for a holiday. It's in there a shorter name
Speaker 1: you can use, Space Day. Does this go crazy Day?
Speaker 1: It's a little catcher than yoga Day. Probably fewer injuries
Speaker 1: to unless you count mind blowns. Yeah. I am Jorg
Speaker 1: had my cartoonists and the co author of frequently asked
Speaker 1: questions about the universe. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a physicist
Speaker 1: and a professor at you see Irvine, and I have
Speaker 1: never had my mind blown by yoga. Maybe you haven't
Speaker 1: been doing the right kind of yoga. Have you tried,
Speaker 1: like the hot yoga or the cold yoga? And I
Speaker 1: don't know the yogas, but I'm sure there are many
Speaker 1: different kinds. Maybe one of them will blow your mind off.
Speaker 1: Maybe I should do downward facing dog while reading a
Speaker 1: science paper, although that might blow your back more than
Speaker 1: your head or my old old knees. Welcome to our
Speaker 1: podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of
Speaker 1: My Heart Radio, in which we invite you to stretch
Speaker 1: your mind, to relax your consciousness, and to allow us
Speaker 1: to insert into it crazy ideas about the nature of
Speaker 1: the universe. We look deep into the farthest recesses of
Speaker 1: the galaxy and even beyond into other galaxies to try
Speaker 1: to understand where it all came from, what it's doing,
Speaker 1: and what it means for their future. That's right, we
Speaker 1: do downward dog. We do all the poses here on
Speaker 1: the podcast as we try to examine the amazing things
Speaker 1: that scientists are learning about our universe and all of
Speaker 1: the amazing discoveries that are being made right now. And
Speaker 1: sometimes on the podcast or hey, you do a version
Speaker 1: of linguistic gymnastics. When you're responding to having your mind
Speaker 1: blown You're like, what, what what I do have to
Speaker 1: practice those? You know, he's in front of the marriage
Speaker 1: just pretending he said something amazing. Well, you have an
Speaker 1: amazing variety of different reactions where apparently my chuckle is
Speaker 1: fairly canned. Yes, that's what I should do. I should
Speaker 1: just prerecord all my mind blowing reactions. You have like
Speaker 1: a keyboard in front of you, You can just press
Speaker 1: a button for the right one. What what what? You
Speaker 1: can have a little song here? Yeah, somebody out there
Speaker 1: should re sample a famous song using you or what's Oh,
Speaker 1: don't say that. You say that to the internet, it
Speaker 1: will happen. Make it so, Internet. But it is an
Speaker 1: interesting time to be in science, in astronomy, in astrophysics,
Speaker 1: learning about the universe because more and amazing new things
Speaker 1: are coming up every day. We can learn so much
Speaker 1: about the universe just by looking up at the sky
Speaker 1: and seeing those twinkling stars and those roving planets, and
Speaker 1: those smudges that are nebula and distant galaxies. But we
Speaker 1: want to know even more than can be seen just
Speaker 1: by our evolved eyeballs. We and the species are deeply
Speaker 1: engaged in building new kinds of eyeballs, eyeballs that can
Speaker 1: see better, farther, deeper than the ones that we spent
Speaker 1: billions of years evolving. And those eyeballs show us the
Speaker 1: ancient history of our cosmos, and help us understand where
Speaker 1: it came from. And just very recently it was a
Speaker 1: really big day for space eyeballs because we have a
Speaker 1: new telescope that is now up and running and we're
Speaker 1: getting data from it right now. That's right after decades
Speaker 1: and billions of dollars that James web Space Telescope launched
Speaker 1: in December one. Has spent the last six months commissioning
Speaker 1: and tweaking and aligning all the various bits of the
Speaker 1: most complicated, the largest, the most expensive, and the most
Speaker 1: powerful space based astronomical observatory humanity has ever built. And
Speaker 1: finally we recently saw its first pictures. Yeah, it was
Speaker 1: a big day. Do you call it a holiday, Daniel?
Speaker 1: Did you open up presents? You having something on the
Speaker 1: wall or something? Everybody here, you see, Irvine was very excited.
Speaker 1: There was definitely champagne. I saw people munching cake. But
Speaker 1: the biggest present was just the pictures themselves. You know,
Speaker 1: this is light that is arriving on Earth all of
Speaker 1: the time. The information in these pictures is information that
Speaker 1: has already arrived on Earth over and over and over again,
Speaker 1: is just spilled wasted on the ground or hitting the
Speaker 1: clouds or the tree or the roof of your buildings
Speaker 1: because nobody is looking at So finally we have built
Speaker 1: a device which is capable of capturing this light, processing it,
Speaker 1: analyzing it, and revealing to us what it shows about
Speaker 1: the distant universe. It's a fantas plastic day for astronomy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was a pretty incredible day, a lot of fanfare.
Speaker 1: It was all over the news. Even the President announced it.
Speaker 1: President Biden looked amazed. And you know that guy's a
Speaker 1: little shell shock these days, and so to see him
Speaker 1: be so captivated, so impressed, I think just reflected how
Speaker 1: it's not just astronomers who find these pictures beautiful and revealing,
Speaker 1: but it's something common in humanity. Do you want to explore,
Speaker 1: to see what's over the next hill, what's past that
Speaker 1: for this galaxy? And President Biden has been around for
Speaker 1: a while, so you think he had seen at all.
Speaker 1: But he was pretty he's pretty far red shifted you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: everyone was really excited about these pictures, not just because
Speaker 1: they're beautiful and pretty and amazing to look at, but
Speaker 1: because of all of the things that those pictures are
Speaker 1: telling us about the universe. That's right, the universe is gorgeous,
Speaker 1: and we love to look at these incredible views over
Speaker 1: billions and billions of miles. But also, as you say,
Speaker 1: we have questions about the nature of the universe, about
Speaker 1: what's out there, about how stars are formed, how galaxies
Speaker 1: came together, about the atmospheres of exoplanets, and these pictures
Speaker 1: are more than just beautiful. They start to answer those
Speaker 1: questions and most importantly, they show us how powerful this
Speaker 1: observatory will be in getting us even more answers in
Speaker 1: the near future. So today on the podcast will be
Speaker 1: answering the question what are the pictures from the James
Speaker 1: web Space Telescope. Tell us you mean, besides how awesome
Speaker 1: the universe looks and how pretty it is. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: this generates gorgeous pictures of people luxuriating over and using
Speaker 1: as their phone lock screens. But also this is a
Speaker 1: science instrument. This is going to answer questions about the universe.
Speaker 1: We don't spend ten billion dollars just to generate backgrounds
Speaker 1: for your laptop, right. We do it because we have
Speaker 1: questions about the nature of the universe that we want
Speaker 1: answers to. We know the answers are out there, and
Speaker 1: we know the answers are arriving here on Earth. We
Speaker 1: just until recently hadn't been able to capture and decode
Speaker 1: that information. Although having good laptop backgrounds isn't a pretty
Speaker 1: good bonus. How much would you spend for a really
Speaker 1: good laptop background and twenty dollars? How good does it
Speaker 1: have to be to be worth ten billion dollars? Well, well,
Speaker 1: I'm an artist, so I can just make one myself
Speaker 1: and you can sign whatever price you want to it.
Speaker 1: Write like, I'm not selling this for less than ten
Speaker 1: bill Maybe NAS that you get into n f T
Speaker 1: s of their pictures, you know, they can sell them
Speaker 1: for some bitcoins. Well, maybe NASA will help us understand
Speaker 1: how to live on an exo planet after n f
Speaker 1: t s have ruined the environment down here. But you
Speaker 1: know they would might fund extra planetary exploration and find
Speaker 1: us a new home. No financial advice is given on
Speaker 1: this podcast. We are not experts, but it is pretty
Speaker 1: interesting how it made the news so much. And in fact,
Speaker 1: my cousin wrote me, he's like, what do these photos mean?
Speaker 1: I'm like, what do you mean? What do they mean?
Speaker 1: He's like, what am I looking at? Why is this interesting? Yeah?
Speaker 1: And I got assume amive email from listeners wanting to
Speaker 1: know what we thought about these photographs and what we
Speaker 1: could learn from looking at them. So, as usual, we
Speaker 1: were wondering how many people out there had seen these
Speaker 1: photographs and what they thought we could learn from them. So, Daniel,
Speaker 1: this time you went out there into the campus, right,
Speaker 1: not just sat from your computer. That's right. When we
Speaker 1: respond to breaking news events, I'd like to walk around
Speaker 1: campus and see what people have heard about this. We
Speaker 1: get a different slice sort of humanity asking random people
Speaker 1: around you see Irvine than our listeners. So I walked
Speaker 1: around the day after these pictures were released and asked
Speaker 1: people that they had seen these pictures, what they thought
Speaker 1: of them, and whether it was worth billions of dollars
Speaker 1: to think about it for a second. What did you
Speaker 1: think when you first saw the pictures from the James
Speaker 1: Webb space Telescope. Here's what others had to say. Have
Speaker 1: you guys seen the new pictures from the James Webb
Speaker 1: space telescope? Yes, yes you have, Okay, what did you think?
Speaker 1: I thought it was really cool how it was essentially
Speaker 1: like a telescope looking at another natural telescope, like the
Speaker 1: warping of that cluster of galaxies kind of bending the
Speaker 1: light so that you could see like much much farther away,
Speaker 1: much much older galaxies. I thought that was really cool.
Speaker 1: What do you think we've learned from these images? I
Speaker 1: think I just know generally what we could learned from it,
Speaker 1: but it's not There's more galaxies out there and we
Speaker 1: could see more. Did you see the latest images from
Speaker 1: the James web Space Telescope? Yes, you did. What do
Speaker 1: you think of them? They were amazing. It also looks
Speaker 1: very similar to some of the images we've seen like
Speaker 1: theoretically before, which was really interesting. So what do you
Speaker 1: think we've learned from these? Were buildings? No idea. Did
Speaker 1: you see the new images from the James Webb Space Telescope? Yes?
Speaker 1: What do you think of them? Um? I thought they
Speaker 1: were cool. Yeah. Do you think we've learned from them? Honestly,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure. I just glanced upon them. I didn't
Speaker 1: really do no research on it, but I do think
Speaker 1: they were cool. Cool, So you think it was worthy
Speaker 1: a billion dollars? Could the billion could have went somewhere else? Probably,
Speaker 1: but the pictures were cool. So the question is, did
Speaker 1: you see the latest images from the James Webb space telescope. Yes,
Speaker 1: I did. And what do you think of them? They
Speaker 1: were pretty beautiful and amazing And what do you think
Speaker 1: we can learn from these kind of images our placed
Speaker 1: in the universe? What do you mean? Maybe both are amazing.
Speaker 1: It is that we are here and at the same time,
Speaker 1: how we're just significant in the Brother Stephen things. So
Speaker 1: do you think it's worth the billions of dollars? Yes,
Speaker 1: because I don't think it's a trade off of we
Speaker 1: spend money on that kind of science or other science.
Speaker 1: We should do more of it because we rated lots
Speaker 1: of money and lots of other places. All right, some
Speaker 1: pretty excited people and also some people who had never
Speaker 1: heard of these things. A lot of folks just gave
Speaker 1: me like a blank look, like huh what? And you know,
Speaker 1: there's all the news, but you know, maybe I look
Speaker 1: at the different slides of the news than most people.
Speaker 1: But you don't record the get lost responses. I'm calling
Speaker 1: the campus belief when people say they don't want to
Speaker 1: be on a podcast, and I don't put them on
Speaker 1: the podcast. But yeah, a lot of people, a lot
Speaker 1: of people seem to have seen these and are It
Speaker 1: seemed very excited about it. They're like, well, it's amazing,
Speaker 1: so cool. Yeah, everybody was very enthusiastic, even the folks
Speaker 1: that didn't really have a grasp of the science involved.
Speaker 1: They had a sense that we had arrived at a
Speaker 1: new moment in human technology and maybe even in scientific
Speaker 1: exploration that they might all remember burn the day these
Speaker 1: images came out. Yeah, although, to be fair, I guess
Speaker 1: for the people who hadn't heard, I mean, it is
Speaker 1: big news in the science world. But you know, these
Speaker 1: days still have this girl down quite a bit to
Speaker 1: find these kinds of announcements on the major newspages, that's true.
Speaker 1: But it's nice to get some good news these days,
Speaker 1: you know, to look in the newspaper and to see
Speaker 1: something exciting, something inspiring. Yeah. So these were pretty awesome pictures,
Speaker 1: and so let's dig into it, Daniel. It was the
Speaker 1: basics of the James Webb Space Telescope, and if we've
Speaker 1: had a couple of episodes on this telescope talking about
Speaker 1: what it can do and how it does it. Right, So,
Speaker 1: the James web Space Telescope is sort of a successor
Speaker 1: to Hubble, but not exactly. It's a successor to Hubble
Speaker 1: in that it's the newest, chinest, fanciest thing, but it's
Speaker 1: not exactly a direct descendant of Hubble because it really
Speaker 1: is a different kind of telescope. What do you mean
Speaker 1: what what Hubble was just planet optical, This one is
Speaker 1: more infra red. Yeah, the range of photons that they
Speaker 1: can see is different. So Hubble is focused on the
Speaker 1: optical and can do a little bit of infrared and
Speaker 1: a little bit of ultra violet. But the James web
Speaker 1: Space Telloscope is really focused on the longer, redder wavelengths
Speaker 1: in the infrared, the nearer and the far infrared, and
Speaker 1: that's because of its science mission. As things travel across
Speaker 1: the universe, they get stretched out by the expansion of space,
Speaker 1: and that includes photons. So photons get stretched out, their
Speaker 1: wavelengths get longer, and that means they get redder and redder.
Speaker 1: So some photons that have been traveling for billions of
Speaker 1: years are so red that Hubble cannot see them. But
Speaker 1: James web Space Telescope, it's optics are designed to see
Speaker 1: in the infrared, so we can see older photons than
Speaker 1: Hubble can. Interesting, so even if we had like an
Speaker 1: amazing super high resolution powerful telescope, it wouldn't see anything
Speaker 1: out there if it wasn't able to see in the infrared. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just like your eyeballs can only see a certain slice
Speaker 1: of electromagnetic radiation. You can't see the ultraviolet, you can't
Speaker 1: see X rays, you can't see radio waves. Are telescopes
Speaker 1: also have limitations. So Hubble has a spectrum that it
Speaker 1: can see, and James Webb can see lower wavelengths than Hubble.
Speaker 1: We also talked to the podcast recently about this next
Speaker 1: wave of space telescopes that we hope will follow the
Speaker 1: James Webb and one of them is a more direct
Speaker 1: successor to Hubble. It's called louver WIR. It's gonna be
Speaker 1: in the optical, the near infrared, and also the UV.
Speaker 1: And there's another one called Origins was just going to
Speaker 1: be in the deep infrared, which can look even further
Speaker 1: into longer wavelengths than James Webb. We'll step us through here.
Speaker 1: James Webb is good at infrared. So how did they
Speaker 1: do that? How do you make a telescope that's good
Speaker 1: at seeing infrared light? Well, one thing you need to
Speaker 1: do to see infrared light is to block out other
Speaker 1: sources of infrared light. Because remember that everything in the
Speaker 1: universe glows, and it glows depending on its temperature, and
Speaker 1: the colder you are, the longer the wavelengths you generate.
Speaker 1: So the Earth, for example, generates infrared light. Basically everything
Speaker 1: glows in the infrared, and so in order to reduce
Speaker 1: that noise, in order to see these very faint old photons,
Speaker 1: you need to have your telescope be super duper cold
Speaker 1: so that it's not itself glowing in the light that
Speaker 1: is trying to see. And you also need to shape
Speaker 1: eat it from other sources like the Earth, like the Sun,
Speaker 1: like the moon. So the James web Space telescope is
Speaker 1: much further away than Hubble, which is orbiting the Earth.
Speaker 1: James Webb is at the L two lagrange point, which
Speaker 1: allows it to use the Earth to shade itself from
Speaker 1: the Sun, and it also has a tennis court size
Speaker 1: sunshade to keep it cool. Can you also play tennis
Speaker 1: on the James Webb telescope? Strictly prohibited though, but the
Speaker 1: NASCID administrator has done that at least once you got
Speaker 1: it right. Those people in buddy suits tossing a tennis
Speaker 1: ball around billion dollar equipment. But it is really far
Speaker 1: out there. It's like one and a half million kilometers
Speaker 1: out there, right, and it's in this weird orbit where
Speaker 1: it's like always like it always keeps the Earth between
Speaker 1: itself and the Sun. That's right. There are several points
Speaker 1: near the Earth's orbit that are called lagrange points because
Speaker 1: they're stable or semi stable I, meaning you can just
Speaker 1: sort of hang out there and not need a lot
Speaker 1: of pushes to stay in that orbit. And one of
Speaker 1: them is this point L two, which is along the
Speaker 1: line between the center of the Sun and the center
Speaker 1: of the Earth. And L two is past the Earth,
Speaker 1: meaning that it's always in the Earth's shadow. So at
Speaker 1: L two you don't see the Sun. The Earth is
Speaker 1: blocking you from the Sun, which is the goal here
Speaker 1: because you want to be in a cold space. You
Speaker 1: don't want to be heated up by the Sun all
Speaker 1: the time. Now, it's not a hundred percent stable, and
Speaker 1: it's not actually at L two because L two kind
Speaker 1: of collects a lot of space junk and you don't
Speaker 1: want to sit there where everything else is falling into you.
Speaker 1: So it's gently orbiting L two a little bit, and
Speaker 1: that's one of the things that needs fuel for to
Speaker 1: sort of maintain that orbit, and it's kind of a
Speaker 1: funny orbit, right, it's kind of like a ring. It's
Speaker 1: doing a circle, but it's this it's kind of a
Speaker 1: perpendicular circle to the Earth, right, Yeah, exactly, And so
Speaker 1: they want to keep it near L two because that's
Speaker 1: a nice spot to be, but not right at L two,
Speaker 1: So it's a target. One thing they need to worry
Speaker 1: about for James Web is to avoid debris, micro meteorites
Speaker 1: and other things which can damage it's very delicate optics. Yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe that's why you need like a hockey sized shield
Speaker 1: for those maybe sucky rank size shield for those where
Speaker 1: you can't really put a shield in front of the
Speaker 1: optics without blocking the optics. Right, So it's sort of
Speaker 1: tricky when they try to arrange the flight of this
Speaker 1: thing to avoid micro meteorites as much as possible. Don't
Speaker 1: they have like force fields? I can start right, they
Speaker 1: have the lasers to shoot these things, and do they know?
Speaker 1: They don't? I wish they did. That would be a
Speaker 1: good idea though, right, Like if you see a little
Speaker 1: bit of something coming your way, you could zap it,
Speaker 1: push it out of the way. Yeah, you have Hans
Speaker 1: Solo and the little pod that sticks out the bottom
Speaker 1: of it, you know, just zapping these things. Maybe get
Speaker 1: chewy to do it. I think he's got pretty good aim. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there you go. No, it's very passive in that sense,
Speaker 1: and it is susceptible to these impacts. And already they've
Speaker 1: seen in the first data that there's been an impact
Speaker 1: from a micro meteorite. So yeah, it's something we're gonna
Speaker 1: have to watch in the So the quality the images
Speaker 1: will slowly degrade as it gets impinged by these micro
Speaker 1: meteorites over time. But the optics are beautiful. You know,
Speaker 1: they're covered in gold and they're just enormous. You know,
Speaker 1: this thing is six and a half meters wide compared
Speaker 1: to two and a half meters for Hubble. So Hubble
Speaker 1: is sort of like, you know, the back of a
Speaker 1: school bus size, whereas James Webb is as wide as
Speaker 1: a school bus is long. So this thing really is
Speaker 1: much much bigger than Hubble. And that's key because you
Speaker 1: want to see far into the universe, you need to
Speaker 1: gather more light, you need to see fainter things by
Speaker 1: grabbing more of their photons. Yeah, it's pretty impressive. I
Speaker 1: was kind of surprised when I saw a picture like
Speaker 1: if you look at a picture of the telescope with
Speaker 1: like human next to it for scale, it's huge. It is,
Speaker 1: like you said, like the size of a semitruck, And
Speaker 1: usually you see just one portion of it, right, because
Speaker 1: they went into the rocket folded and then had to
Speaker 1: unfold into its final configuration in space. This incredible piece
Speaker 1: of robotics, which I'm sure you admired as an expert
Speaker 1: in robotics. But the size of it is huge. And
Speaker 1: you know, originally they planned it to be a little
Speaker 1: smaller and then Nassa's like, now, let's make it eight meters,
Speaker 1: but then they downgraded it to six and a half
Speaker 1: meters because that's the biggest thing they thought they could
Speaker 1: squeeze into a rocket. Right, And like you said, it's
Speaker 1: not just that it can see into the infrared more
Speaker 1: than Hubble is, Like, the mirror is actually huge. It's
Speaker 1: much bigger than hubble, which for some reason, let's you
Speaker 1: see clearer pictures. So maybe tell us a little bit
Speaker 1: about that. Why do just having a bigger mirror give
Speaker 1: us more high resolution? Like it wouldn't just give us
Speaker 1: a wider view, it actually gives them more clearer of view. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just because you are seeing more photons, right, you want
Speaker 1: to crisp picture something. You can see things better during
Speaker 1: the day then you can at night. Things are fuzzier
Speaker 1: if you just don't get as many photons from them.
Speaker 1: Imagine you're looking at a really distant galaxy. If you're
Speaker 1: getting dozens and dozens of photons from it, then you
Speaker 1: can start to see the difference between the left side
Speaker 1: of that galaxy and the right side of that galaxy.
Speaker 1: Whereas you just get like one photon per year, then
Speaker 1: you're just seeing a point from that galaxy. So the
Speaker 1: more photons you can get from a distant object, the
Speaker 1: more you can resolve different parts of it. You can
Speaker 1: see structure, you can see different colors, so you just
Speaker 1: get more information and that allows you to get a
Speaker 1: deeper picture. So astronomy really is all about light gathering power.
Speaker 1: The size of the end of the telescope is enormously
Speaker 1: important in how faint and distant an object you can
Speaker 1: see and resolve. Size matters in astronomy. Size matters, And
Speaker 1: you know, James Webb is much sharper than Hubble, even
Speaker 1: though it's at a bit of a disadvantage because it's
Speaker 1: in the infrared and the infrared is longer wavelengths, which
Speaker 1: are inherently worse. Resolution. Think of these photons is sort
Speaker 1: of like bigger and more spread out. They're sort of
Speaker 1: like fatter blobs. Now at the same wavelength. You can
Speaker 1: compare them apples to apples by examining their resolution at
Speaker 1: the same wavelength. And James Webb is like almost three
Speaker 1: times as sharp in these images than Hubble at the
Speaker 1: same wavelength. Cool. Well, it is an amazing piece of
Speaker 1: engineering and science that they've put out there. And so
Speaker 1: let's get into what the first pictures actually show and
Speaker 1: what we can learn from them. But first let's take
Speaker 1: a quick break. Alright, we're talking about the James Webb
Speaker 1: Space task Coobe, which has been up there for a
Speaker 1: few months, but we're in the just now receiving pictures
Speaker 1: from it, and they're pretty amazing. They show some awesome
Speaker 1: and incredible views of the universe. Tells, Daniel, what have
Speaker 1: we learned for these first pictures? So first, I want
Speaker 1: to give a shout out to the folks who built
Speaker 1: this thing, because you know, for a long time the
Speaker 1: James Web Space Telescope was sort of like a joke
Speaker 1: among big science projects. Wait, what what do you mean
Speaker 1: a joke to hoo too, particle physicists. It was just
Speaker 1: delayed for so long. There was like ten years went
Speaker 1: by when we didn't make any progress towards the actual
Speaker 1: launch date. Like every year they went by, the launch
Speaker 1: date was pushed by a year, and the cause of balloon,
Speaker 1: you know, was supposed to be just a few billion,
Speaker 1: and ended up ten billion. Sort of sort of seemed
Speaker 1: like a fiasco for a while, but then you know,
Speaker 1: the launch went perfectly, the unfolding went perfectly, and now
Speaker 1: that the thing is actually up there and operational, they
Speaker 1: are exceeding performance, staying yards and blowing everybody's expectations out
Speaker 1: the window. You know, this is a project that like
Speaker 1: twenty thousand people from fourteen different countries worked on, and
Speaker 1: we didn't just get images from it. We also got
Speaker 1: a paper put on the web yesterday characterizing its performance.
Speaker 1: And you know this paper says things like the James
Speaker 1: Web Space Telescope will go deeper faster than expected. It
Speaker 1: was a visioned to enable fundamental breakthroughs, and we now
Speaker 1: know it's certainly will because it is blowing all the
Speaker 1: specs out the window. Everything they designed it for is
Speaker 1: doing better than they designed. So these engineers really did
Speaker 1: their job. Yeah, pretty awesome. I think what you're saying, Daniel,
Speaker 1: is that it's good to be late and that it's
Speaker 1: okay to delay things to the last minute. I think
Speaker 1: that's what you're saying, right, Yeah, spend ten billion dollars
Speaker 1: in procrastinate. That's definitely the lesson here. Sure you seem
Speaker 1: pretty excited and ready to forgive them for it, So
Speaker 1: I'll take a note of that. I'm saying, if you're
Speaker 1: gonna be ten years late and ten billion dollars over budget,
Speaker 1: you better really deliver. And they have. Yeah, they delivered
Speaker 1: some awesome first picks from the Space Telescope. And these
Speaker 1: are just the first pictures, right. This is like the
Speaker 1: first you know, product coming out of the factory, right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they have a lot of data already that they are
Speaker 1: processing and analyzing and people are doing signs on it.
Speaker 1: Just gave us like five pictures to give us a taste,
Speaker 1: take us an understanding of what this thing is capable of,
Speaker 1: and very soon we'll have a tsunami of photographs and
Speaker 1: the whole astronomical community is going to be doing signs
Speaker 1: at a level we haven't ever done before. All right,
Speaker 1: so what are some of these first pictures they sent us.
Speaker 1: So one of them is of the Karna Nebula. This
Speaker 1: is really exciting because it's sort of like in our backyard.
Speaker 1: Relative to the other pictures, this was pretty close to Earth.
Speaker 1: It's only like seventy light years away, and the nebula
Speaker 1: is just like a big blob of gas and dust.
Speaker 1: It's the kind of place where stars can form, and
Speaker 1: you know, star formation is something we still don't really
Speaker 1: understand that well. We had an episode recently about why
Speaker 1: galaxies stop forming stars, and it's not something that we understand.
Speaker 1: We see some galaxies out there rapidly making new stars,
Speaker 1: and other galaxies have just stopped making new stars. So
Speaker 1: to understand that, we want to look closely at a
Speaker 1: stellar nursery. So the Karina Nebula is like that. It's
Speaker 1: this huge cloud. It's about twelve million years old, and
Speaker 1: we can see stars forming within it. We can also
Speaker 1: look at the structure of this cloud and understand like
Speaker 1: what is it doing. Is it clumping together, is it
Speaker 1: swooshing around? Are there like galactic winds blowing against it?
Speaker 1: And so it's number one. Just beautiful looks like cosmic cliffs.
Speaker 1: But it's also very scientifically interesting. Yeah, it's really interesting
Speaker 1: because I guess to understand how stars form, it's not
Speaker 1: like you can just film a video, you know, take
Speaker 1: a movie out there of a star forming, because it
Speaker 1: takes a long time and it's kind of hard to catch.
Speaker 1: So what we have to do, right, is catch lots
Speaker 1: of these stars being born, and then you sort of
Speaker 1: piece the picture together. And so this is part of
Speaker 1: what that's doing for us, right. Yeah, it's like going
Speaker 1: out into nature and seeing babies of a species and
Speaker 1: then finding other individuals at another age, and other individuals
Speaker 1: at another age, and from that trying to piece to
Speaker 1: you other the idea of stellar evolution and life cycle.
Speaker 1: And so we would love to see stars being formed
Speaker 1: and then watch them all the way through their age.
Speaker 1: But as you say, we don't have billions of years
Speaker 1: to get our graduate students across the pH d finished line.
Speaker 1: So we have to look at stars at different stages
Speaker 1: of their evolution. And one of the great questions about
Speaker 1: star formation is what is required to make it happen.
Speaker 1: We think that what you need is a big blob
Speaker 1: of gas, but that gas has to be cold. The
Speaker 1: gas is too hot, then its molecules are zipping around
Speaker 1: and gravity, which in the end is quite weak, doesn't
Speaker 1: have the force to pull them together into a star.
Speaker 1: So it's not just having the ingredients to make a star.
Speaker 1: You also need the right conditions. You need those ingredients
Speaker 1: to be cold. They can't be like room temperature or
Speaker 1: heated up. You won't get a star. So by looking
Speaker 1: at this cosmic nursery and seeing where stars are being
Speaker 1: formed and where they're not, and also understanding the structures
Speaker 1: that we're looking at, we can start to understand better
Speaker 1: what influences the conditions for star formation. Right, And so
Speaker 1: these pictures are helping is because they're what higher resolution,
Speaker 1: or they're giving us more detail, or this is a
Speaker 1: special kind of star nursery that we couldn't see before.
Speaker 1: It's much higher resolution. And so you know, if you
Speaker 1: compare the picture from Hubble to the picture from James Webb,
Speaker 1: you can just see a lot more detail. You can
Speaker 1: see ripples, you can see over densities, you can see
Speaker 1: under densities, you can see the shapes of these cliffs.
Speaker 1: And if you're a scientist working on this, then you're
Speaker 1: developing models, models for how these gas clouds are formed,
Speaker 1: and how they evolve and how they make stars. And
Speaker 1: to understand whether your models are accurate, you need data.
Speaker 1: You need to compare it to reality. And so the
Speaker 1: crisper the picture you can take, the more you can
Speaker 1: constrain the models that you are building and make sure
Speaker 1: that they are describing reality. You can check your models
Speaker 1: and say, my model predicts we should see these kind
Speaker 1: of shapes and blobs. Does that happen in reality? Until now,
Speaker 1: we didn't know because we saw kind of a fuzzy picture,
Speaker 1: sort of like if you're trying to predict, you know
Speaker 1: whether there are spots on leopards, but you can't really
Speaker 1: make out the spots on real leopards, so you don't
Speaker 1: really know if your predictions are accurate or not. And
Speaker 1: then all of a sudden you get very crisp pictures
Speaker 1: close up to the leopard, and so you can understand
Speaker 1: what's really going on out there. Yeah, you don't want
Speaker 1: spoty pictures for that. But the telescope is not just
Speaker 1: giving us such sort of high resolution pictures, but where
Speaker 1: you can make out the details. It's It actually also
Speaker 1: has to do with the fact that it's infrared, right
Speaker 1: because infra red lets us look deeper into these nurseries. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we want to look at the universe and lots of
Speaker 1: different wavelengths because the universe looks different in these different wavelengths.
Speaker 1: You know, light is light is light, but it interacts
Speaker 1: with different stuff as it flies through the universe. And
Speaker 1: one of the biggest banes of astronomy is dust. Dust
Speaker 1: is out there helping form new solar systems, but also
Speaker 1: blocks a lot of light between us and the things
Speaker 1: we want to look at. One reason why, for example,
Speaker 1: we can't see across the center of the milky wave
Speaker 1: very much because there's a lot of dust. But infrared
Speaker 1: light is good at passing through dust because it's very
Speaker 1: long wavelengths. It's sort of like skips over smaller things.
Speaker 1: So infra red light helps us penetrate these dust clouds
Speaker 1: the way, for example, X rays can see through some
Speaker 1: kinds of bodily tissue and help you get a picture
Speaker 1: for what's inside. Infrared light and see into these dust
Speaker 1: clouds and help us understand the three dimensional structure and
Speaker 1: where are there clumps, where are their stars being born,
Speaker 1: or some of the cool things you can see that
Speaker 1: we couldn't really see before our little bubbles. When a
Speaker 1: star has formed, all of a sudden, it's emitting huge
Speaker 1: amounts of radiation and that pushes away the gas and
Speaker 1: the dust that was near it, so like opens up
Speaker 1: a little cavity within the dust cloud. It cleans up
Speaker 1: its own environment. And we can start to see some
Speaker 1: of those because of these pictures, and that, let's just
Speaker 1: I guess, understand more of what's going on when stars
Speaker 1: are born, and so we can spy on star babies more. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and there's a lot of stuff in these pictures that
Speaker 1: scientists don't understand that they didn't anticipate, you know, lots
Speaker 1: of weird bubbles and other structures that they're like, what's
Speaker 1: making that happen? And that's the process of discovery. You know,
Speaker 1: every time you see something you didn't expect, or you
Speaker 1: see something you don't quite understand, you need to change
Speaker 1: your ideas for what you thought was happening to accommodate that,
Speaker 1: to describe what you are seeing. So already there are
Speaker 1: threads to pull on here to help us improve our
Speaker 1: understanding of the basic process of star formation. Well, well,
Speaker 1: star formation is one thing we're seeing. What's another cool
Speaker 1: pictures they sent us. Another cool picture is of galaxy
Speaker 1: formation and galaxy merging. So one of the favorite things
Speaker 1: for galactic astronomers to look at is this object called
Speaker 1: Stephen's quintet. And this is something which we've known about
Speaker 1: for more than a hundred and fifty years. It's a
Speaker 1: cluster of five galaxies that almost look like they're touching
Speaker 1: each other, very near by each other in the sky.
Speaker 1: It was actually the first of these sort of compact
Speaker 1: groupings that was ever found in eighteen seventy seven. You know,
Speaker 1: that's before we even really understood galaxies, Before Hubble understood
Speaker 1: that these things were much further away than the stars,
Speaker 1: that they were actually other galaxies floating out in space,
Speaker 1: not just nebula within our galaxies. We didn't even really
Speaker 1: know that other galaxy seas existed. So this is something
Speaker 1: that pre dates are understanding of galaxies. I guess what
Speaker 1: what can we earn from these galaxies clustered. So these
Speaker 1: galaxies are cool not just because they're close to each other,
Speaker 1: but because two of them are slamming into each other.
Speaker 1: So there's five of them there. Four of them are
Speaker 1: actually close to each other in space. They're like three
Speaker 1: hundred million light years from Earth, and they're all near
Speaker 1: each other. The fifth one is much closer. It's forty
Speaker 1: million light years from Earth. It's just sort of in
Speaker 1: the line of sight. But it's those four that are
Speaker 1: really interesting, and two in particular are very very close
Speaker 1: to each other. They're actually in the process of merging.
Speaker 1: Remember we talking the podcast about galaxy formation, and one
Speaker 1: theory was that big galaxies were made like all at once.
Speaker 1: You have a huge cloud of gas and dust gathered
Speaker 1: together by dark matter, which just like collapses into a
Speaker 1: bunch of stars, and you get a big galaxy born
Speaker 1: early in the universe. Now we think probably a different
Speaker 1: processes dominant that you get a bunch of little galaxies
Speaker 1: and then those little galaxies come together to make bigger galaxies.
Speaker 1: And here we can see that how pending sort of
Speaker 1: in real time, because two of the galaxies are really
Speaker 1: close to each other, and we can see the details
Speaker 1: of what happens when two galaxies come together. It's like
Speaker 1: super high precision, high accuracy rubber nicking exactly. You're trying
Speaker 1: to see what happens when these two things crashing to
Speaker 1: each other, and you know, stunners are right up there
Speaker 1: eating popcorn seeing what happens. Yeah, we all want to
Speaker 1: see what happens in the biggest collisions in the universe.
Speaker 1: This one's particularly fun because the last best infrared image
Speaker 1: that we took, which was from the Spitzer Space Telescope,
Speaker 1: we did a whole fun podcast episode about what we
Speaker 1: learned from Spitzer. This showed a smiley face in that picture.
Speaker 1: So if you look at a picture of Stefan's Quintet
Speaker 1: from the Spitzer Space telescope, you see the cores of
Speaker 1: these two galaxies each formed like an eyeball, and then
Speaker 1: there's like a big swirl of stars under it that
Speaker 1: forms like a huge smile out in space. And so
Speaker 1: people were really curious to see if the James Web
Speaker 1: image would also have that smiley face in it. It's
Speaker 1: like the universe has an Emogi keyboard or something. And
Speaker 1: so now we can see much more detail from James Webb,
Speaker 1: but exactly what is happening. We can see the collision
Speaker 1: of these two galaxies. We can see gas and dust
Speaker 1: that's being heated up from this collision. We can also
Speaker 1: see like bright spots inside these galaxies that we think
Speaker 1: might represent supermassive black holes, exciting the gas around them
Speaker 1: to admit very brightly. One of the galaxies also looks
Speaker 1: like it might have astrophysical jets, that the central black
Speaker 1: hole might be gathering together particles and mass and shooting
Speaker 1: it up and down out of the plane of the galaxy.
Speaker 1: And this is not something we've gotten to study in
Speaker 1: going detail many times, so high resolution picture of those
Speaker 1: jets can really help us understand the process there. So
Speaker 1: it's given us more higher resolution images. I guess you
Speaker 1: know we've seen these galaxy clusters and galaxy collisions before,
Speaker 1: but I guess maybe the ideas that this telescope is
Speaker 1: letting us see more of them, right, I'm further out
Speaker 1: to Yeah, that's right, we're seeing them, cris people. We're
Speaker 1: also seeing more of them because we can see deeper
Speaker 1: into the history of the universe. And so just like
Speaker 1: when we were studying star formation, we want examples of
Speaker 1: young galaxies, when we want examples of older galaxies so
Speaker 1: we can understand the whole spectrum lifecycle of a galaxy.
Speaker 1: We want fender bender accidents. We want full on head
Speaker 1: on collisions exactly. And if you're an insurance agent for galaxies,
Speaker 1: most of these collisions do happen when they're in their
Speaker 1: teenage years for galaxies. Is that true though? That's a
Speaker 1: funny joke, But is that actually true? Like I wonder
Speaker 1: if things were more crazy back then? Right, things were
Speaker 1: more crazy back then because there were many more smaller galaxies.
Speaker 1: So there are fewer galaxies now, and they're bitter, But
Speaker 1: when the collisions happen, they're more dramatic. So being able
Speaker 1: to look deeper and further back into the history of
Speaker 1: the universe is gonna maybe let us see more of
Speaker 1: these collisions. Yes, and we'll talk later about the deep
Speaker 1: field image, which is a sort of triumphant example of that,
Speaker 1: seeing some of the very first galaxies as they form,
Speaker 1: and then also seeing them later on in their life cycle.
Speaker 1: All right, so, spine on babies, rubber nicking, galaxy crashes.
Speaker 1: What else have they shown us this week? Another thing
Speaker 1: I was really excited about was that they looked at
Speaker 1: an exo planet. It's only been like twenty something years
Speaker 1: since we were even sure that there were a lot
Speaker 1: of exo planets. For most of the existence of the
Speaker 1: human race, we didn't know whether our solar system was unusual,
Speaker 1: whether we were the only ones with planets whether planets
Speaker 1: themselves were rare in the universe. Now, because of tests
Speaker 1: and lots of other observatories, we have catalogs of thousands
Speaker 1: of exoplanets, and we moved now to the next phase.
Speaker 1: It's not about discovering exoplanets and how many are there.
Speaker 1: It's about looking for signs of life on those exo planets,
Speaker 1: looking for biosignatures. Can we without even going to those
Speaker 1: exo planets, figure out what is happening on the surface,
Speaker 1: understand what is in the atmosphere, maybe even tell what
Speaker 1: the weather is like on those planets. That's pretty cool.
Speaker 1: So we can use the same telescope that's sort of
Speaker 1: looking out into the wide view of the universe. We
Speaker 1: can also use it to the like, can we focus
Speaker 1: it on particular planets. We're just catching images of these
Speaker 1: planets along the way. We can focus it on these planets. Absolutely.
Speaker 1: This thing is really good at tracking, and so we
Speaker 1: can point to wherever we want to and we can
Speaker 1: look specifically at planets we think are good targets. And
Speaker 1: so they released an image from one particular planet called
Speaker 1: WASP nine six B. This is a gas giant planet
Speaker 1: orbiting a star about light years from Earth and the
Speaker 1: constellation Phoenix. We've known about this planet for maybe ten years.
Speaker 1: Mass is like half the mass of Jupiter. But we
Speaker 1: haven't known is what's in the atmosphere. And James Web,
Speaker 1: though it's very powerful, isn't powerful enough to give us
Speaker 1: like a picture of the planet from space, as you
Speaker 1: might see if you were orbiting it. Right, that's just
Speaker 1: not something we're capable of yet. It's up. It's too small.
Speaker 1: The planet is too small and too far away. Right,
Speaker 1: this thing is a thousand light years away, and planet
Speaker 1: itself is very very small, and it's next to a
Speaker 1: very very bright star. So that's extraordinarily difficult to see
Speaker 1: the planet itself directly. But it can play some really
Speaker 1: clever tricks. It can look at the light from the
Speaker 1: star as it passes through the atmosphere of the planet. Remember,
Speaker 1: the way we know this planet exists is that it
Speaker 1: does sort of like a mini eclipse of the star.
Speaker 1: It passes in front of the star and is a
Speaker 1: dip in the light from the star. So when that happens,
Speaker 1: we know the planet is in front of the star,
Speaker 1: and if we look at just the right moment, we
Speaker 1: can see light that passes through the atmosphere of the
Speaker 1: planet before it comes to Earth, and so it's changed
Speaker 1: a little bit by having passed through the atmosphere, and
Speaker 1: that tells us what's in that atmosphere because it absorbs
Speaker 1: some frequencies of light and emits in other frequencies. So
Speaker 1: I guess you're still looking at the star, but you're
Speaker 1: seeing how this light from the star changes because of
Speaker 1: that planet. So it's sort of an indirect way of
Speaker 1: taking a picture of the planet. Yeah, it's not so
Speaker 1: much a picture of the planet as much as like
Speaker 1: a spectrograph of the atmosphere of the planet, like what
Speaker 1: light does the atmosphere emit? But because everything emits at
Speaker 1: different frequencies and has its own unique fingerprint, by looking
Speaker 1: at the different colors of light that arrive here on
Speaker 1: Earth when the planet is in front of the star
Speaker 1: and when it's not, we can tell what's in that atmosphere.
Speaker 1: And so already they have evidence of water vapor in
Speaker 1: the atmosphere of that planet. So they think what they're
Speaker 1: seeing our clouds on that planet, which is pretty amazing.
Speaker 1: You know, we're looking at a cloudy day on WASP.
Speaker 1: That's amazing weather forecasting for space. But I guess. The
Speaker 1: idea is that light changes when it goes through water vapor, right,
Speaker 1: and you can see those changes here. Yeah, but it's
Speaker 1: not exactly forecasting because we're talking about the weather a
Speaker 1: thousand years ago, right. This light has been traveling from
Speaker 1: that planet for more than a thousand years, so it's
Speaker 1: not very useful for planning your beach vacation. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: wouldn't help at all to know what the weather was
Speaker 1: like a thousand years ago. But it is amazing you
Speaker 1: cantor to tell what the weather is was like where
Speaker 1: is like this planet, right. Yeah, And as we keep
Speaker 1: doing this, we might see exciting things because every different
Speaker 1: molecule and chemical emits different fingerprints. This is how, for example,
Speaker 1: we saw evidence of phosphene in the atmosphere of Venus.
Speaker 1: And now because of James Webb, we can start to
Speaker 1: play these kinds of games for all sorts of exoplanets,
Speaker 1: ones that are even closer. You know, we think that
Speaker 1: the star that's nearest Us proximates Centauri. It has Earth
Speaker 1: like planets around it, So we can point this thing
Speaker 1: at all sorts of exoplanets and start to get a
Speaker 1: sense for what's in the atmosphere and understand maybe there
Speaker 1: are things in those atmospheres that we imagine can only
Speaker 1: be made by life. That would be very exciting, pretty cool.
Speaker 1: There would be a bummer if you look at the
Speaker 1: planet from the telescope and say, hey, the weather is great,
Speaker 1: let's go over there, and then a thousand year little
Speaker 1: later the weather has changed. Probably the weather is going
Speaker 1: to change a thousand years later, unless it's southern California
Speaker 1: where it's just all the same weather time. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: don't even check. There, you go, Maybe what's mighty six
Speaker 1: is the southern California of the universe. Well, let's hope. So,
Speaker 1: all right, then what's another picture that they've released and
Speaker 1: what is it telling us about the universe? Another one,
Speaker 1: which is sort of beautiful is the southern Ring Nebula.
Speaker 1: This is something people have been taking pictures of for
Speaker 1: a long time just because it's kind of gorgeous and
Speaker 1: it's the leftover shelf from a dying star. Remember that
Speaker 1: stars burned for a very very long time billions of
Speaker 1: years depending on their mass. But they are this delicate
Speaker 1: dance between gravity that's squeezing them down and fusion which
Speaker 1: is puffing them up. But near the end of the
Speaker 1: life cycle is the temperature climbs. Fusion starts to win
Speaker 1: that battle, and it puffs up the outer layers of
Speaker 1: the star and eventually blows them out really really far.
Speaker 1: And this is probably what's going to happen to our star.
Speaker 1: And so at the heart it leaves this core of
Speaker 1: very hot metals that were produced by fusion inside the
Speaker 1: star as a white dwarf. This glowing dot at the center,
Speaker 1: this enormous explosion, this planetary nebula created from the outer
Speaker 1: shell of the star. So these are smaller types of nebulas, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, nebula just means like a cloud of stuff
Speaker 1: in space. But this one came from just one star. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is just from one storm, and the size of
Speaker 1: it depends on when it blew up. If you watched
Speaker 1: over thousands of years, you would see these things grow
Speaker 1: as the stuff is moving away from the center of
Speaker 1: the dead star. Of course, because we can't watch over
Speaker 1: thousands of years, we just get sort of one snapshot.
Speaker 1: But just like with other examples, we can look around
Speaker 1: and see stars at various stages doing this. Ones that
Speaker 1: have just blown up, one sort in the process, of
Speaker 1: ones that might soon blow up, and what does that
Speaker 1: tell us, I guess about these stars? Is it helping
Speaker 1: us and I figure out when it blows up or
Speaker 1: how it blows up? Yeah, you know, we don't really
Speaker 1: understand the in nerds of stars very well. Even our
Speaker 1: own son is a bit of a mystery to us.
Speaker 1: How that works, the conduits of plasma that are inside
Speaker 1: those tubes, how they generated magnetic fields. We have some models,
Speaker 1: but we'd like to understand better. And so seeing the
Speaker 1: stars sort of like erupt and vomit its innerance all
Speaker 1: over its neighborhood helps us understand of sort of what
Speaker 1: was going on because we couldn't see inside stars before,
Speaker 1: but now those insides are sort of everywhere. And in
Speaker 1: the same way that we can understand what is in
Speaker 1: the atmosphere of that exoplanet, we could also understand what
Speaker 1: compounds what chemicals are in this planetary nebula, because different
Speaker 1: chemicals glow at different frequencies. And so if you look
Speaker 1: at this picture, for example, we can see this like
Speaker 1: a blue portion in the inner part and it's orange
Speaker 1: on the outside. That's colorized, right, James Webb seas and
Speaker 1: the I R. So these aren't literal colors. You could
Speaker 1: see with your eyeball if you were nearer this nebula yourself.
Speaker 1: The colors do mean something that different colors tell us
Speaker 1: that there are different frequencies of light that are coming
Speaker 1: from this nebula. So the orange and the outside is
Speaker 1: mostly due to like molecular hydrogen, and the inner part
Speaker 1: comes from hotter ionized gas. We can also see that
Speaker 1: they're like holes in this nebula. The things from the
Speaker 1: inner part of the star have like shot through it,
Speaker 1: creating these holes where they're like beaming out to the
Speaker 1: rest of the universe. So it's quite dramatic, and scientists
Speaker 1: can compare this new detailed image again to their models
Speaker 1: for what they think happens at the end of the
Speaker 1: life cycle of a star. It sort of sounds like
Speaker 1: a lot of these early pictures they're standing out. We're
Speaker 1: just kind of like upgrade pictures of things we had
Speaker 1: seen before, but now we can to illustrate how much
Speaker 1: better this telescope is. It shows this kind of the
Speaker 1: same pictures we took before, but much more higher resolution
Speaker 1: and with more detail. Yeah, absolutely all of these pictures
Speaker 1: that we're seeing in this first trons from James Webb
Speaker 1: are things we have seen before with Hubble, but just faster, better, deeper,
Speaker 1: And I think maybe the idea was to sort of
Speaker 1: see how much better the telescope is. But also what's
Speaker 1: interesting about the telescope is that it let's just see
Speaker 1: things that we couldn't see before, right, things way out
Speaker 1: there in the universe. Yes, because James Webb is so
Speaker 1: much more sensitive, you can see things which were so faint,
Speaker 1: so read that we couldn't see them before. All right,
Speaker 1: so let's get into what those things are and what
Speaker 1: they can tell us about the early universe. But first
Speaker 1: let's take another quick break. All right, we're talking about
Speaker 1: the new images from the James Webb Space Telescope and Daniel.
Speaker 1: So far we have spine on babies, we have rubber
Speaker 1: necking galactic accidents, we have predicting or not predicting the
Speaker 1: weather in other planets, and also looking at the death
Speaker 1: of stars. That's right. But maybe the most exciting one
Speaker 1: is the new deep field. Deep field is just when
Speaker 1: you point the telescope at a part of the sky
Speaker 1: where you think there's like nothing, we don't really see anything.
Speaker 1: It sort of looks like a blank spot. This is
Speaker 1: made famous by Hubble when they pointed it for like
Speaker 1: a few weeks at a spot in the sky where
Speaker 1: they couldn't see anything, and they just collected data for
Speaker 1: like twenty three days. When they looked at it, they
Speaker 1: saw so many galaxies, galaxies that were too faint, too
Speaker 1: distant for them to see before. And now James Webb
Speaker 1: can do the same kind of thing. But because it's
Speaker 1: so much more sensitive and because it sees in the
Speaker 1: i R, you can see even deeper, even fainter galaxies
Speaker 1: more easily. Right, I guess it's kind of like when
Speaker 1: you look out into the night sky, Like if you
Speaker 1: step outside on a clear night and you see a
Speaker 1: bunch of stars. You see a bunch of places where
Speaker 1: there aren't any stars. The only reason you're seeing black
Speaker 1: there is because your eyeballs are not good enough to
Speaker 1: see that what's there. Right exactly, there's basically a galaxy
Speaker 1: in every direction if you go far enough. It just
Speaker 1: might be that those galaxies are so far away that
Speaker 1: you're not getting very many of their photons, even if
Speaker 1: they're really bright where they are, they're sending those photons
Speaker 1: in every direction. So the further your eyeball is from
Speaker 1: that galaxy, the smaller the fraction of all the photons
Speaker 1: that's shooting out are going to land on your eyeball,
Speaker 1: and so the longer you have to look before you
Speaker 1: get one of those photons. So the bigger your eyeball is,
Speaker 1: or in this case your telescope, the fainter the galaxy
Speaker 1: that you can see. Remember that James Webb is much bigger,
Speaker 1: has this huge or for collecting light, and you can
Speaker 1: see in the infrared some of these galaxies are so
Speaker 1: far away that their light is red shifted out of
Speaker 1: Hubble's vision. So they pointed this thing at a spot
Speaker 1: in the sky and just for twelve hours gathered light
Speaker 1: and they came up with this incredible picture. And this
Speaker 1: is something again that Hubble has looked at in the
Speaker 1: past and James Webb is now looking at. And you
Speaker 1: can compare these two pictures. It's really incredible because every
Speaker 1: galaxy that's there in Hubble you can also see in
Speaker 1: the James Webb picture. But now it's crisp, it's clear,
Speaker 1: you can see definition, you can see edges, you can
Speaker 1: see features, you can see stuff happening you didn't know about.
Speaker 1: Plus you can see all sorts of new galaxies in
Speaker 1: the background. These red galaxies, which we didn't even know
Speaker 1: we're there until now. Yeah, because I guess you know,
Speaker 1: space is mostly empty, but if you go out far
Speaker 1: enough in any direction, you're gonna probably hit something right
Speaker 1: at least in the observable universe, which is pretty big. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: And this is just taking the tiniest lights of the universe.
Speaker 1: The fraction of the sky that it's seeing is one
Speaker 1: twenty five millions of the sky, right, So to find
Speaker 1: the whole sky in a twenty five million pixels, this
Speaker 1: is just looking at one of them. Yeah, Like, if
Speaker 1: you zoom into one pixel of the night sky that
Speaker 1: you see outside, you're gonna see a bazillion galaxies just
Speaker 1: in that little pixel, just in that little pixel, and
Speaker 1: the size of that pixel millions of the night sky
Speaker 1: is the size of a grain of sand held at
Speaker 1: arms length. So we're really talking about a tiny little
Speaker 1: bit of the sky and it's filled with galaxies, all
Speaker 1: sorts of exciting things happening. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. I
Speaker 1: think when you first see that picture, you're like, Okay,
Speaker 1: it's another picture of space when you know glowy things
Speaker 1: in it. But if you sort of look closer and
Speaker 1: you think about it like each one of those little
Speaker 1: tiny gloy things is an entire galaxy, right with hundreds
Speaker 1: of millions of stars in it, like the like a
Speaker 1: whole milky way in that little block. Yeah, exactly. These
Speaker 1: are galaxies from a long long time ago, far far away,
Speaker 1: so they could have, you know, their own politics and
Speaker 1: their own star wars and all sorts of stuff could
Speaker 1: be going on. Each one is hundreds of billions of stars.
Speaker 1: So it really gives you a sense for the incredible
Speaker 1: vastness of space. When people say space is vast, they're
Speaker 1: suggesting it's empty, but you know, it's fast, but it's
Speaker 1: also chalk full of galaxies. It's just incredible how many
Speaker 1: of these things there are. There really is like no
Speaker 1: blank sky out there. There were some regions in space
Speaker 1: that we used to call Lloyd's because there was less
Speaker 1: stuff there than in other spots. But now that we
Speaker 1: look at them, we see, oh, they're just less dense
Speaker 1: than other spots. And James Webb can see into those
Speaker 1: voids and show us what is there. Yeah, I can
Speaker 1: imagine if you had like super duper better eyeballs in
Speaker 1: your head, you know, once I could collect a lot
Speaker 1: of light, you know, if you step outside at night,
Speaker 1: you probably see the whole sky lit up right with
Speaker 1: Brazilian galaxies and tiny thoughts everywhere. It would almost be
Speaker 1: like almost daylight. I wonder. Yeah, And the reason the
Speaker 1: nice sky is not like catastrophically bright, it's not like
Speaker 1: blindingly bright, is because the universe is expanding, so we're
Speaker 1: only seeing a fraction of it. And of course it's
Speaker 1: also red shifted. But you're right, there's galaxies in every direction,
Speaker 1: and we can do more than just like be a
Speaker 1: gog at the beauty of this. We can do some
Speaker 1: science with this. We're talking earlier about understanding the structure
Speaker 1: of galaxies and how they form. This is the best
Speaker 1: way to see the oldest galaxies, Galaxies that we haven't
Speaker 1: seen before, galaxies that were so red that were the
Speaker 1: edge of the Hubble's ability to understand them. How far
Speaker 1: back in time can we see now with the new
Speaker 1: James Webb telescope, we can see just past thirteen billion
Speaker 1: years right, you know, the universe is like almost fourteen
Speaker 1: billion years old, so we're seeing really far back in time.
Speaker 1: We're seeing some of the first galaxies formed, and we
Speaker 1: still don't really understand exactly what happened. We talked about
Speaker 1: the dark ages of the universe on the podcast, this
Speaker 1: time between when hydrogen became neutral and stars started to
Speaker 1: form and then how galaxies came together from that, and
Speaker 1: that's a process we'd really like to understand, but we
Speaker 1: haven't been able to because we haven't been able to
Speaker 1: see those galaxies There were too faint for us to spot.
Speaker 1: How far back could Huble look But we didn't really
Speaker 1: know because we saw some really read some very faint
Speaker 1: galaxies that we thought maybe we're super duper old. There
Speaker 1: were a couple of candidates that were around thirteen billion
Speaker 1: light years, just a few though, But the problem was
Speaker 1: there was a lot of uncertainty in aging them. Because
Speaker 1: you age these things by measuring their red shift, by saying,
Speaker 1: here's the spectrum, and we see how much it's shifted.
Speaker 1: Its dread shifted a lot. You're missing parts of the spectrum.
Speaker 1: So there's a lot of uncertainty in those red shift measurements.
Speaker 1: But James Webb can look at those same galaxies and
Speaker 1: because it can see deeper in the i R, it
Speaker 1: sees more of the spectrum and we'll get a more
Speaker 1: accurate estimate of those ages. So Hubble has seen a
Speaker 1: few galaxies which seem around thirteen billion years old, but
Speaker 1: they're very uncertain. James Webb will see more of them
Speaker 1: and will be able to better measure their ages more
Speaker 1: to more precisely. While thirteen million out of the fourteen
Speaker 1: million of the universe, that is almost the whole thing.
Speaker 1: I wonder is there a limit to how much, how old,
Speaker 1: or how far back in time we can see with
Speaker 1: a telescope. But the limit, of course is the cosmic
Speaker 1: microwave background radiation. That is the oldest light in the universe.
Speaker 1: Beyond that, everything was just sort of opaque, so light
Speaker 1: that was created before that has been reabsorbed. So the
Speaker 1: oldest light flying around the universe is about three eighty
Speaker 1: thousand years after the Big Bang. We can see that
Speaker 1: now because that was everywhere in the universe, so it's
Speaker 1: always arriving here on Earth in the same way these
Speaker 1: oldest life from the oldest galaxies has always been arriving
Speaker 1: here on Earth. We just haven't been able to see
Speaker 1: it until recently. But is there a limit to how
Speaker 1: far back that James Webb telescope can see, like, you know,
Speaker 1: thirteen and a half billion years ago or something, or
Speaker 1: can it see all the way back to the you know,
Speaker 1: the when universe first became transparent. It's not a fixed
Speaker 1: limits determined by like the depth of the infrared light
Speaker 1: that he can see, and so the Origin Space telescope
Speaker 1: will see even further. But there's not like a crisp edge.
Speaker 1: It depends on where an object is, how fast it's
Speaker 1: moving away from us, and how bright it is inherently,
Speaker 1: so it's not a crisp number. But it's around thirteen
Speaker 1: billion years old. Wow, Still, it's pretty impressive. I mean,
Speaker 1: you're seeing kind of the universe when it was only
Speaker 1: a billion years old? Was it very different back then?
Speaker 1: Can you can you tell that it was really different? Well,
Speaker 1: that's what they're going to be able to begin studying
Speaker 1: because we didn't know, for example, like we're there big
Speaker 1: galaxies already. We think that there might already have been
Speaker 1: supermassive black holes when the universe was only a billion
Speaker 1: years old. We don't understand how those form. So seeing
Speaker 1: those galaxies like in action, we might get a sense
Speaker 1: for what happened. How did you get such a big
Speaker 1: black hole where their primordial black holes that seeded these
Speaker 1: super galaxies? Was there some process where galaxies gathered together
Speaker 1: faster than we can currently understand. It's not something we
Speaker 1: know now. You know, each of these like really distant galaxies,
Speaker 1: we see them brighter, we see more of them, but
Speaker 1: we also see their structure. You know, I'm really far
Speaker 1: galaxy for example, that was like just three by three
Speaker 1: pixels in Hubble is now like eight by eight pixels
Speaker 1: in James Webb. So you can get much more idea
Speaker 1: for like the shape of these things, where they already spirals,
Speaker 1: where they all sort of like really irregular, and then
Speaker 1: they came together later into spirals. These the kind of
Speaker 1: questions that we can start to ask and to answer
Speaker 1: now that we have pictures of what happened back then. Cool,
Speaker 1: and we might be even be able to see galaxies
Speaker 1: forming right like we could we maybe see so far
Speaker 1: back that there aren't even any galaxies. We might we
Speaker 1: know that the first stars formed after those dark ages.
Speaker 1: We think it was a few hundred million years after
Speaker 1: the beginning of the universe, and so we might be
Speaker 1: lucky enough to see some of those to resolve some
Speaker 1: of those stars in these very distant galaxies. But it's
Speaker 1: at the real edge of even James Webb's capability, so
Speaker 1: the Origins telescope will be even better suited for specifically
Speaker 1: that kind of question. The cool thing about this deep
Speaker 1: field is not only you're seeing really really old stuff,
Speaker 1: you're also seeing the stuff between us and that old stuff.
Speaker 1: And something you can see in this deep field something
Speaker 1: we talk about in the podcast all the time, which
Speaker 1: is gravitational lensing. A lot of the galaxies in this
Speaker 1: image looks smear and stretched and kind of weird, and
Speaker 1: that's because there's a lot of mass between us and
Speaker 1: those galaxies, and that mass bends space, and so as
Speaker 1: the light from those galaxies is coming towards Earth, it
Speaker 1: gets distorted. But it's not just visible mass that we're
Speaker 1: talking about. We're looking at dark matter gravitational lensing. This
Speaker 1: is lensing from a huge gravitational cluster between us and
Speaker 1: the background galaxies, and that gravitational cluster is mostly dark matters.
Speaker 1: When you look at this image, you are looking very
Speaker 1: directly at the effects of dark matter, sort of like
Speaker 1: you're seeing a lens in space. It's as close as
Speaker 1: we can get to seeing dark matter. Yeah, you can
Speaker 1: see it. I think in that first picture that President
Speaker 1: Biden released, you can see there's a bit of a
Speaker 1: distortion or like a fish i effect in the middle.
Speaker 1: But I thought they said that was because there's some
Speaker 1: galaxies that we're in the middle, not because of dark matter. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: galaxies have dark matter in the most galaxies are mostly
Speaker 1: dark matter, and so it's because of this huge cluster
Speaker 1: of galaxies that are about like five billion light years
Speaker 1: away and that's mostly dark matter. So most of the
Speaker 1: lensing comes from dark matter. So it's just gonna let
Speaker 1: us study dark matter better. We want to know where
Speaker 1: the dark matter is, and the best way to do
Speaker 1: that is to see its effect on light, to use
Speaker 1: strong lensing and weak lensing to get a map of
Speaker 1: where the dark matter is in the universe, and that
Speaker 1: will help us understand how it was made and where
Speaker 1: it is and where it's going, and what it's temperature is.
Speaker 1: It won't help us understand things like is it met
Speaker 1: out of particles and how many different kinds of particles,
Speaker 1: not very directly, but it'll give us a better map
Speaker 1: for where the dark matter is in the universe, which
Speaker 1: is helpful. Yeah, which might tell you a bit of
Speaker 1: how it was formed, right or and where it came from. Yeah. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: I wonder if it could also be like a nuisance,
Speaker 1: Like if you're trying to look at a cool I
Speaker 1: don't know, nebulow or galaxy crash somewhere, but it's all
Speaker 1: distorted because some dark matter that's in the middle. You're like, oh,
Speaker 1: if I could just wipe that dark matter off my lens. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's true because if you don't know exactly how much
Speaker 1: dark matter there is, you don't exactly know how the
Speaker 1: lensing is happening, so it's hard to reverse it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that does add some uncertainty, like the universe has a
Speaker 1: little bit of myopia the dark matter. Yeah, And speaking
Speaker 1: of myopia, the next day after the first release, they
Speaker 1: also showed us a picture of Jupiter from the James
Speaker 1: web Space Telescope. Because James Webb cannot only look at
Speaker 1: really really distant things, it can also look at things
Speaker 1: in our solar system. What does that like focal range
Speaker 1: from like right next door to us to the edge
Speaker 1: of the universe. And actually the biggest challenge for seeing
Speaker 1: things in our solar system is being able to track them.
Speaker 1: Really distant things are easy to track because they're very slow,
Speaker 1: but close by things tend to move pretty fast. So
Speaker 1: they've designed James Webb to be able to track Mars,
Speaker 1: to keep an eye on Mars so that it could
Speaker 1: image it. And Mars moves like thirty milli arc seconds
Speaker 1: per second, and James Webb can actually do twice as fast.
Speaker 1: They get a sense for like what that means. That's
Speaker 1: like trying to photograph a turtle that's crawling when it's
Speaker 1: a mile away from you. It's not moving super duper fast, right,
Speaker 1: James Webb is not like panning zooming around, but it's
Speaker 1: capable of tracking those objects, and so it can do
Speaker 1: things like take pictures on the rings of Jupiter which
Speaker 1: are invisible to the naked eye and even the fairly
Speaker 1: powerful telescopes from Earth, but Hubble can see them. And
Speaker 1: it can also do things like look at the geysers
Speaker 1: on the moons of Saturn to see what it's spraying
Speaker 1: out into the universe. Wow, what kind of detail can
Speaker 1: you get? Like I wonder if you can see, for example,
Speaker 1: the Mars rovers on the surface or is that way
Speaker 1: too small. I'm more excited about seeing what's going on
Speaker 1: on those moons of Saturn and Jupiter that might have
Speaker 1: like underground oceans. You know, maybe there's some aliens spraying
Speaker 1: out messages in terms of geysers, and James will help
Speaker 1: us capture those pictures, right right, interesting, Although if you
Speaker 1: take a picture of the Mars rovers it's like the
Speaker 1: world's most expensive selfie, which is a record in itself,
Speaker 1: but so gorgeous it's worth it. The the world's longest
Speaker 1: selfie stick. All right, Well, these are some amazing new
Speaker 1: pictures that we've gone from the James Webb Space Telescope.
Speaker 1: And this is just the beginning. This is just like
Speaker 1: the first pictures they took with the camera. Right, these
Speaker 1: are just the first five. There's so many more to come,
Speaker 1: and we think they'll be about twenty years of science
Speaker 1: operation for this telescope, So it's really the beginning of
Speaker 1: a new era of astronomy. We're going to discover things
Speaker 1: we can't even imagine. Why don't we make more of
Speaker 1: them and put them out there in space? Wouldn't that
Speaker 1: be better twice as good? I totally agree, And so
Speaker 1: we have a program for four news space telescopes we
Speaker 1: hope to launch in the twenty thirties, which will give
Speaker 1: us all sorts of new amazing eyeballs to look even
Speaker 1: deeper into the universe to study exo planets, to study
Speaker 1: the first galaxies, to understand everything that's out there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: very cool, and so a shout out to the James
Speaker 1: Webb Space Telescope team, including Alexander Lockwood we interviewed here
Speaker 1: on the podcast about the telescope and who is also
Speaker 1: the star of the PhD movies. We hope you enjoyed that.
Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us, see you next time. Thanks for listening,
Speaker 1: and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is
Speaker 1: a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcast from
Speaker 1: my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Ye