Webb telescope image of early universe 'moved me to tears' - NASA scientist

Record ID: 1680665

  • Title: Webb telescope image of early universe 'moved me to tears' - NASA scientist
  • Date: 12th July 2022
  • Summary: GREENBELT, MARYLAND, UNITED STATES (JULY 12, 2022) (REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE) (English) NASA ASSOCIATE ADMINISTRATOR FOR THE SCIENCE MISSION DIRECTORATE, DR. THOMAS ZURBUCHEN, SAYING: “So what’s really exciting about going to infrared, going to lower and lower wavelength. There's really two elements that matter. So, the first one is that as you look at the universe and the
  • Embargoed: 26th July 2022 23:29
  • Keywords: Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen James Webb NASA astronomy space telescope
  • Location: IN SPACE / GREENBELT, MARYLAND, UNITED STATES / KOUROU, FRENCH GUIANA
  • City: IN SPACE / GREENBELT, MARYLAND, UNITED STATES / KOUROU, FRENCH GUIANA
  • Country: USA
  • Topics: Science,Space Exploration,United States
  • Reuters ID: LVA009140612072022RP1
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: EDITOR'S NOTE: QUALITY OF SHOT OF WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE LEAVING ORBIT AS INCOMING
    A NASA scientist said on Tuesday (July 12) that he was ‘moved to tears’ by one of the inaugural photos from the Webb Space Telescope that shows a galaxy cluster, part of which dates to is nearly 95% as old as the Big Bang.
    Astrophysicist Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, told Reuters that the photo, among the first batch from the largest, most powerful observatory ever launched to space, is the reason the telescope was launched.
    “For me, that's just mind boggling. To the untrained eye, this is a red speck… this is why we built this telescope,” he said.
    The first full-colour, high-resolution pictures from the James Webb Space Telescope, designed to peer farther than before with greater clarity to the dawn of the universe, were hailed by NASA as milestone marking a new era of astronomical exploration.
    Nearly two decades in the making and built under contract for NASA by aerospace giant Northrop Grumman Corp, the $9 billion infrared telescope was launched on Dec. 25, 2021. It reached its destination in solar orbit nearly 1 million miles from Earth a month later.
    Zurbuchen said he was profoundly relieved after the first images came in.
    “You think of a thousand ways this could go wrong even before the launch and then after that launch, with all these complex deployments and the optics that have to be set up,” he said, “but now, everything went right.”
    The first image released, SMACS 0723, showed a "deep field" photo of a distant galaxy cluster, SMACS 0723, revealing the most detailed glimpse of the early universe recorded to date.
    One of the older galaxies appearing in the "background" of the photo - a composite of images of different wavelengths of light - dates back about 13.1 billion years. The Big Bang, the theoretical flashpoint that set the expansion of the known universe in motion, occurred some 13.8 billion years ago.
    Apart from the imagery, NASA presented Webb's first spectrographic analysis of a Jupiter-sized exoplanet more than 1,100 light years away - revealing the molecular signatures of filtered light passing through its atmosphere, including the presence of water vapor.
    Scientists have raised the possibility of eventually detecting water on the surface of smaller, rockier Earth-like exoplanets in the future.
    “Really the goal is to find the components of the atmospheres of planets that have the promise that they could be hosts of life,” Zerbuchen said.
    Among the four other Webb subjects getting their closeups on Tuesday were two enormous clouds of gas and dust blasted into space by stellar explosions to form incubators for new stars - the Carina Nebula and the Southern Ring Nebula, each thousands of light years away from Earth.
    The collection also included fresh images of another galaxy cluster known as Stephan's Quintet, first discovered in 1877, which encompasses several galaxies NASA described as "locked in a cosmic dance of repeated close encounters."
    Built to view its subjects chiefly in the infrared spectrum, Webb is about 100 times more sensitive than its 30-year-old predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, which operates mainly at optical and ultraviolet wavelengths.
    With Webb finely tuned after months spent remotely aligning its mirrors and calibrating its instruments, scientists will embark on a competitively selected agenda exploring the evolution of galaxies, life cycle of stars, atmospheres of distant exoplanets, and moons of our outer solar system.
    (Production: Kevin Fogarty, Ashraf Fahim)
  • Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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