The images of James Webb show countless galaxies extremely far away, each made up of billions of stars. Contrary to what you might expect, it is precisely the barely visible dots of light that are of primary interest to astronomers. Some of those galaxies are so distant that we can look back to 250 million years after the Big Bang.
Baby period of the universe
“The light from such a galaxy has taken a lot of time to travel that enormous distance to Earth. So you see light that set off a long time ago – billions of years ago. That means you look back in time and in such a photo you can see what those galaxies looked like very shortly after the Big Bang.”
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“250 million years” may still sound like a lot, but that’s the baby’s infancy, Schilling says. “That’s as if I had only seen pictures of you from your childhood and teenage years and now all of a sudden I get a picture from an hour after you were born.” Spectacular, Schilling calls it.
Uninhabited island
There is great enthusiasm among astronomers about the data provided by the James Webb telescope. One scientific publication after another is currently being published. “It’s like arriving on a desert island with a group of people. You don’t know where to start researching yet, but you do know that you won’t be finished in the coming months. Nobody really expected that so much in advance. “
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Life on Earth Will Not Change by James Webb. “I sometimes compare the interest in galaxies – the origin of the universe – with people’s interest in their own family tree. It is of no practical use to know who your distant ancestor is, but it does give a kind of satisfaction to know where you’re coming from. This telescope allows us to look at what started it all, the Big Bang.”
We will not see the big bang itself, says Schilling. “The telescope does not look with the right ‘radiation type’ for that. To detect the energy of the Big Bang you need a radio telescope. That has already happened. Who knows, we may one day combine everything into one coherent ‘origin story’.”
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James Webb
The James Webb (named after a now deceased director of NASA) was developed by the United States, Europe and Canada. The space telescope was launched on Christmas Day. It is the successor to the famous Hubble Space Telescope, which is nearing its end. At the end of January, after about a month of flying, the James Webb arrived at its workplace 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. After arriving there, all systems were tested and the instruments on board were cooled, one of them to a temperature of 266 degrees below zero. The mirrors are also adjusted. They bundle the light that comes from the universe and send it to the measuring instruments.
The James Webb has eighteen hexagonal mirrors that sit together, but can move independently of each other to focus. The mirror is made of beryllium, topped with a tiny layer of gold 100 nanometers thick. That’s a thousand times thinner than a human hair or a sheet of paper. Beryllium is light, strong and can withstand extreme cold. The gold ensures that the mirror is better able to see infrared light.
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