Sailesh Acharya
HOD science
ars. While the Hubble telescope can look back at the universe roughly 500 million years after the Big Bang, JWST can go further and see nearly 200 years after the Big Bang. This helps us understand how the universe evolved and what will be the fate of our universe.
Timeline of the universe, Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA and STScl, https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/4352-Image
The other exceptional capability of the Webb telescope is to analyze the atmosphere of exoplanets. The radiation from the stars behind the planet passes through the atmosphere. The atoms and molecules present there absorb specific wavelengths. When we capture the radiation and study the spectrum, we find the missing wavelength which appears as a black band as shown in the image below and can tell the exact composition of their atmosphere. This can be used to look for biomarkers (Usually compounds produced only by living organisms) and study the possibility of alien life.
Absorption spectra, Credit: NASA, https://science.nasa.gov/ems/09_visiblelight/
We have been showered with hundreds of unseen images of nebulae, stars, planets, exoplanets, and megastructures (which are still beyond our understanding) by the James Webb Space Telescope. But understand this, Webb isn’t like our conventional telescopes. The furthest objects are not even visible to us, the radiation that Webb’s mirror assembly receives is infrared and we cannot see in infrared. The received data (wavelength of the radiation) is processed by computers to produce an image, which is what that object looks like. Complex mathematical algorithms are used for this post-observation process and of course, huge processing power is required.
Image 1: Uranus captured with NIRCam, Image 2: Crab nebula by Webb’s NIRCam and MIRI, Image 3: Jupiter with NIRCam, Image 4: Supernova 1987A with NIRCam, Image 5: Saturn with its rings and moons by NIRCam
Image credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScl, https://webbtelescope.org/images/
The argument persists and people will never stop saying it was not a worthy investment, but to those individuals who have been in love with the mysteries of the universe, it is by far the best investment of 10 billion dollars ever.