In the fourth century BC, Aristotle presented the first conception of the universe; Earth stationary in a center not far from a colossal handful of stars and planets strewn about in circular paths. This idea of the universe remained revered for about 2000 years, until the astronomer Copernicus replaced the earth with the sun as the center of the universe, and attributed the rotation of the stars to the movement of the earth, as it circles without reason around itself, while the stars stand against it and do not move. But it was Kepler’s three laws that completely overthrown Aristotle’s finite universe. Galileo is credited with liberating the universe from the narrow imagination of scientists and philosophers, by inventing the telescope to observe the universe with direct vision, and actually enabling him to monitor the sun and the moons of Jupiter, to begin with him the scientific revolution, and space observatories are working to open a “new sky” for astronomers, providing them with information that they did not know. They can obtain it from ground-based observatories, perhaps the most important of which is the Hubble Observatory, which changed the way we view the world and, over the course of three decades, captured the deepest images of the universe, penetrating ten thousand galaxies, as well as times that precede us by millions of years.
Hubble would have been able to continue performing its work for more years, had it not been for the need for a telescope beyond its capabilities, and to be replaced by the Spitters Space Telescope, which ended the service of Hubble in 2020.
In 1996, the American, European and Canadian space agencies, led by NASA, began working on that idea with a budget of $500 million, and an initial launch date of 2007, but the project was subjected to many delays, until the costs eventually exceeded $10 billion. It also underwent a major redesign in 2005, and was not completed until late 2016, entering the most sensitive phase; The stage of intense testing, holding your breath, and endless anxiety.
In March 2018, NASA postponed the launch after the solar shield was torn apart, with an area the size of a tennis court, and then again due to the Corona pandemic, until the moment of zero came, and it was finally launched on December 25, 2021 on the Ariane 5 spacecraft. French Guiana, on Christmas Day, to mark the rebirth of the entire universe.
“It was very difficult but we did it!”
The James Webb Telescope (after James Edwin Webb, Administrator of NASA from 1961 to 1968, who played a key role in the Apollo program) was designed to see a portion of the universe that could not be captured by the 2.4-inch Hubble mirror. meters, which entailed the formation of a 6.5-meter-diameter mirror composed of 18 hexagonal pieces of gold-plated beryllium mirrors. In contrast to Hubble, which monitors near-violet and visible spectra, James Webb monitors in a lower frequency range, from long-wavelength visible light to mid-infrared (from 0.6 to 28.3 micrometers), which allows observing objects with a high redshift, which would be so abyss, so far from us, that Hubble, despite its enormous potential, could not detect as it would have been required of Webb, its more advanced successor.
More than a quarter of a century of waiting, as well as six months from the moment of launch, and scientists biting their nails without being able to control their heart, especially the moment the “Webb” separated from the missile about 30 minutes after takeoff, to the moment it reached the chosen monitoring point His, Lagrange L2, the best point to keep it too cold to be able to observe without external interference, and the perfect place to see the three objects on the same side of it all the time, which took them and him a 30-day spacewalk to go through at least 344 steps. In order until it completes its preparations, while scientists and researchers follow it in every step towards its position, a million and a half million kilometers behind the Earth and the sun.
Looks like the wait was worth it. Against odds, Webb made it to his destination unscathed, creating himself in precise, calculated steps. On the morning of July 12, NASA released the first images taken by the new telescope in a matter of hours at a press conference. US President Joe Biden of the White House offered it to the world as “the most accurate picture ever taken of our vast and ever-expanding universe”. Biden described it as a “historic moment”, not just for science and technology, but “for America and all of humanity.”
The next day, the US space agency released more images from Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland amid massive cheers and triumphant applause, and the scientists’ delight and relief. Dr John Mather, chief project scientist at NASA, told the British Guardian: “It was very difficult, and it took us a long time. It is impossible to say how difficult it was… but we did it.”
“The problem for scientists is now no longer to think of the means so much as the end, our task now, says Mather, confidently and happily: to choose which stars we want to examine and which planets we will take pictures of, not whether or not the telescope is capable of doing so. It is more Who is capable of doing this kind of science, with amazing precision.”
The rebirth of the universe
Based on images taken so far, astronomers believe they can do all the science they’ve been hoping for with the Web, having proven its ability to harness gravitational forces and amplify distant galaxies. One of the images shows an area of the sky the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by a person standing on the ground. It’s Smacks 0723, our neighbor 4.6 billion light-years away, an enormous constellation of galaxies that astronomers describe as “attracting lenses”, because they collect the light emitted by the bodies far and wide. What we see of it now is nothing but the image it was in about 5 billion light years ago. “Web is in excellent condition, meeting or even exceeding its scientific requirements,” says Dr. Bill Ochs, Director of the Web Project. The SMAX image has shed light on galaxies as they were more than 13 billion years ago.
Behind the SMAX 0723 cluster, the telescope looked out over the Carina Nebula, a vast stellar nursery 7,600 light-years away and home to stars much larger than the Sun. It’s a breathtaking stellar nursery so rich in detail that researchers have been able to discern the bubbles, hollows and jets of newborn stars, along with hundreds of other stars they’ve never seen before. It appears as huge clouds of gas and dust in which new stars are forming. The Carina Nebula was a target for the Hubble telescope in turn, but scientists via “Web” came to completely different results, and were fascinated by what can be described as barriers of cosmic hills separating dust in the lower half and gas in the upper half.
One of Webb’s goals is to see the stars being formed, and there is nothing better than the star incubator Karina, but scientists, as usual, will not stop at knowing how to give birth, but will also aspire to know how to die.
With Webb’s sensitivity, which is 100 times greater than that of Hubble, he will be able to see how the universe’s first galaxies formed, a prize that scientists see as the real culmination of this creative effort, the moment the universe was first immersed in starlight.
British researcher Gillian Wright, director of the Center for Space Technology in the United Kingdom, told the BBC: “These images are very promising, and of high quality. The telescope was able to detect them within a few hours, which simply means that there are more discoveries in We are waiting.”
New land or new neighbors?
But Webb promises more than just looking back, when the universe was still crawling in its softness. In one image, Webb analyzed starlight as it passed through the atmosphere of a hot Jupiter-like planet called Wasp 96b, about 1,150 light-years away. Which revealed the presence of steam, even though the planet is too hot to harbor liquid water. Hence, scientists have thought of using the same technique to study the chemical compositions of atmospheres around distant worlds, perhaps finding distant planets with potential neighbors, or perhaps the promise of a new Earth.