Over a thousand people and $ 12 billion to build the James Webb Space Telescope
The most powerful telescope ever, the James Webb Space Telescope aboard an Ariane 5 rocket, from the ESA base in French Guiana.
The revolutionary space telescope James Webb has successfully separated from the Ariane 5 rocket after about 26 minutes of travel and will thus continue its mission to discover the origins of the Universe.
At 12.20 GMT (13.20 in Italy), “an exciting new decade of science has begun. James Webb’s mission will change our understanding of Space as we know it”, tweeted NASA after the take-off of the Ariane 5 rocket, at 13.20 Italian time.
The telescope, to build which took about three decades, the work of over a thousand people and 12 billion dollars, is a technological jewel that will scan the universe with a power never seen before.
James Webb it is the successor to Hubble, launched into space in 1990 and now on its way to retirement.
“James Webb it will begin to observe the universe from May 2022 – explains Andrea Ferrara, full professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics of the Science Class of the Scuola Normale – is a very powerful instrument, six and a half meters long. It will face a journey of one and a half million kilometers from the earth and will be able to perform extraordinary observations thanks to the very high technological level with which it was designed and planned. His journey to his destination will last six months and, once he has arrived at the station, having made the necessary checks from the ground, he will begin observing “.
From its position in space, James Webb will be able to observe the oldest life of galaxies and the first to receive its data will be the researchers of the Normal. “Our project – says Ferrara – was selected from over a thousand proposals presented by scientists from all over the world in response to the call opened by Nasa in collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). The project of our group is one of the 286 selected: we will have 21 hours of observations that we will use to study the primordial life of three galaxies ”. The telescope costs around 10 billion euros, an hour of observation around 230 thousand euros.
“The telescope – explains the cosmologist – it is extremely powerful and can observe signals from extremely weak light sources. Why weak? Because their light took 13 billion years to reach us. In short, thanks to James Webb we will be able to see how these galaxies were 13 billion years ago. To give an example: when we look at the moon we see it not as it is now but as it was 1 second ago. The sun as it was 8 minutes ago ”.
“Our project has many questions – comments Ferrara -: we would like to understand how the formation of stars began within these first galaxies and what are the effects on the galaxy itself of the radiation that the stars produced inside it. In short, we may perhaps be able to reveal some secrets regarding how the environment surrounding the galaxies in theprimeval universe. We expect many surprises because we have never seen these realities before.
It is like looking for the progenitor of man; instead we want to explore the universe at its origins ”. James Webb will transmit the data to the NASA base in Baltimore and from there they will be sent to Pisa where they will be studied by the Cosmology Research Group of the Normale headed by Andrea Ferrara: “I am pleased to point out that our group includes four women and also students full professors and doctoral students “. Stefano Carniani, Simona Gallerani, Andrea Pallottini, Livia Vallini, Evangelia Ntormousi, Mahsa Kohandel will work with Ferrara.
“The telescopes currently at our disposal have allowed only a first superficial study of the characteristics of the first galaxies – explains Carniani. James Webb Space Telescope it will revolutionize the field allowing to obtain crucial information on the early evolution stages of galaxies. In particular, our experiment is dedicated to the search for the light emitted by the stellar population and by the ionized gas inside three galaxies dating back to only 500-900 million years after the Big Bang. These observations will allow us to understand precisely how these galaxies formed and when ”.