Desk Report
Publish: 30 Jun 2022, 04:21 pm
An image obtained from Nasa on February 11, 2022 showing a mosaic created by pointing the Webb Telescope at a bright, isolated star in the constellation Ursa Major || Photo: AFP
Nasa administrator Bill Nelson said Wednesday
the agency will reveal the "deepest image of our Universe that has ever
been taken" on July 12, thanks to the newly operational James Webb Space
Telescope.
"If you think about that, this is farther
than humanity has ever looked before," Nelson said during a press briefing
at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, the operations center
for the $10 billion observatory that was launched in December last year and is
now orbiting the Sun 1.5 million kilometers away from Earth.
A wonder of engineering, Webb is able to gaze
further into the cosmos than any telescope before it, thanks to its enormous
primary mirror and its instruments that focus on infrared, allowing it to peer
through dust and gas.
"It's going to explore objects in the
solar system and atmospheres of exoplanets orbiting other stars, giving us
clues as to whether potentially their atmospheres are similar to our own,"
added Nelson, speaking via phone while isolating with Covid.
"It may answer some questions that we
have: Where do we come from? What more is out there? Who are we? And of course,
it's going to answer some questions that we don't even know what the questions
are."
Webb's infrared capabilities allow it to see
deeper back in time to the Big Bang, which happened 13.8 billion years ago.
Because the Universe is expanding, light from
the earliest stars shifts from the ultraviolet and visible wavelengths it was
emitted in, to longer infrared wavelengths -- which Webb is equipped to detect at
an unprecedented resolution.
At present, the earliest cosmological
observations date to within 330 million years of the Big Bang, but with Webb's
capacities, astronomers believe they will easily break the record.
20-year life
In more good news, Nasa deputy administrator
Pam Melroy revealed that, thanks to an efficient launch by Nasa's partner
Arianespace, the telescope could stay operational for 20 years, double the
lifespan that was originally envisaged.
"Not only will those 20 years allow us to
go deeper into history, and time, but we will go deeper into science because we
have the opportunity to learn and grow and make new observations," she
said.
Nasa also intends to share Webb's first
spectroscopy of a faraway planet, known as an exoplanet, on July 12, said
Nasa's top scientist Thomas Zurbuchen.
Spectroscopy is a tool to analyze the chemical
and molecular composition of distant objects and a planetary spectrum can help
characterize its atmosphere and other properties such as whether it has water
and what its ground is like.
"Right from the beginning, we'll look at
these worlds out there that keep us awake at night as we look into the starry
sky and wonder as we're looking out there, is there life elsewhere?" said
Zurbuchen.
Nestor Espinoza, as STSI astronomer, told AFP
that previous exoplanet spectroscopies carried out using existing instruments
were very limited compared to what Webb could do.
"It's like being in a room that is very
dark and you only have a little pinhole you can look through," he said, of
current technology. Now, with Webb, "You've opened a huge window, you can
see all the little details."
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