This week, JWST marked one year of official science missions. To celebrate, a special image was released, a standard birthday gift the telescopes tend to do. Veterans like Hubble have dozens of them, for example. We sat down with some of the astronomers working on JWST, and the excitement for the year was more than palpable. It has been a revolutionary instrument, performing better than people’s wildest expectations when it was first considered.
“I’ve been involved with JWST for more years than I care to remember, about 20 years,” Professor Tom Ray, from the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, told IFLScience during a press meeting at the European Astronomical Society Meeting in Krakow.
When asked about the images taken by the telescope, especially the very first images, he told us that it felt like working for a spy agency. The images were shared among the scientists but they were sworn to secrecy for about a week before the White House announced them. They couldn’t tell anyone, or even show their spouses.
“I have to say I was flabbergasted,” Professor Ray continued. “I was just amazed at the quality of the images themselves, really amazed! And the fact that everything went so well. That is astonishing. But it did. And we’re reaping the benefits now. It’s quite emotional, actually.”
The anniversary image is just a tease of things to come!
Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Klaus Pontoppidan (STScI)
The panel of experts also featured Dr Chris Evans, Dr Sandro Tacchella, and Dr Elisabeth Matthews, and they did a fantastic job in providing a brief but thorough recap of everything that JWST has seen in the last year. They also started dropping hints about what’s next and we couldn’t help being desperate to know what we might see in the coming months.
Dr Matthews works on exoplanets and her excitement centers around the ability of JWST to study so many different worlds, from protoplanetary discs where a planet forms to looking at the atmosphere of peculiar gas giants and studying nearby Earth-sized worlds, like the TRAPPIST-1 system. There are seven rocky worlds around that star, and the space telescope has already looked at a few of those worlds. And it’s just the beginning.
“There is so much more exoplanet stuff coming. That was the striking thing about preparing for this is that so many people have results but aren’t quite ready to share yet. They are on the way though,” Dr Elisabeth Matthews, from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, explained. “There’s a planet in a disk where we can learn about how those two things interact. There are more observations in the TRAPPIST system. And I just got my own data from the program that I’m leading a week ago. So I don’t have anything to share yet, but I’m very excited about it.”
Professor Ray ramped up the excitement on the ability of the telescope to look at newly born planets. JWST can peer through the dust of stellar nurseries to see where stars first and then planets, within a few million years later, are born. It is estimated that 10 new planets are born on average in the Milky Way every year.
JWST can peer to the very core of nascent star systems, looking at regions within 1 astronomical unit, which is the average distance between the Sun and the Earth. Like in the anniversary image, the initial moments of star systems with the new planets and the complex energetic events such as the jets are going to be heavily featured in upcoming research.
“There are a number of papers that I know are on the way, but I can’t say anything. But let me put it this way: I think they’re extremely revealing from the point of what conditions were like [at the beginning and at the center of the new-born star system],” Professor Ray teased in his answers to IFLScience’s question.
But it is not just exoplanets, either established or fledgling. JWST has cast its mirror (the biggest ever sent to space) towards the early universe. Due to the fact that the speed of light has a maximum speed, looking far into the cosmos is looking into the past. And with the space telescope, researchers were able to see the most distant galaxies yet. As well as breathtaking deep-field images with tens of thousands of galaxies.
There will be bigger samples of the galaxy population, which will allow scientists to work out a better picture of how galaxies evolve, from the behavior of their supermassive black holes to where stars are forming in those very primitive galaxies.
“Something I think that we work towards over the summer is actually really looking at the spatial distribution of those stars. Like the clumps. It seems that they’re very clumpy and seems that the star formation is very episodic, very bursty, and then having very localized clusters that we can actually now resolve up to very early times,” Dr Sandro Tacchella, from the University of Cambridge, said of the upcoming results.
Dr Jane Rigby, JWST Senior Project Scientist, joked on Twitter that the traditional gift for a first anniversary is papers. And all the international teams are delivering on that with a huge output of research papers. The first year was a whirlwind of discoveries and clearly, it is only just the beginning.
“There are a lot of programs around both the galaxy evolution [in the early universe] and as Elisabeth said about the exoplanets. There’ll be a lot more results coming through on the disks and on the star formation where it’s taken a bit longer to work through the analysis. Tom said there are some exciting papers coming in that area. I think we’ll see more papers on the local universe, on looking at the stars in the [Milky Way], looking at the populations of stars and galaxies beyond our own galaxy, where again it’s taken a bit of time to work through the imaging and also the follow-up spectroscopy,” Dr Chris Evans, the Hubble/JWST Project Scientist and Head of European Space Agency Office at Space Telescope Science Institute, summarized.
From investigating if exoplanets are Earth-like and not just Earth-sized to peering back to the very formation of the first galaxies, JWST is doing it all. The telescope is a collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency. And it has many years ahead to continue to change astronomy.
Source Link: Spoiler Alert – This Is What's Coming From JWST In The Coming Months
