What did the first JWST images reveal?

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