NASA, ESA, CSA, AND STSCI VIA AP
This image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows the edge of a nearby, young, star-forming region NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula. NASA calls it “cosmic cliffs,” and its rich shades of sable brown and sapphire blue are artistic enough that UNLV astrophysicist Jason Steffen says it’s something he’d hang on his wall as art.
By Hillary Davis (contact)
Tuesday, July 19, 2022 | 2 a.m.
When someone asks UNLV astrophysicist Jason Steffen why regular people — or at least people who don’t study the sky in intricate detail — should be interested in the images coming back from the James Webb Space Telescope, he asks them what they value before he responds.
WADE VANDERVORT
UNLV physics professor Jason Steffen, who studies exoplanets, or planets that orbit distant stars, poses for a photo on the roof of the Bigelow Physics Building at UNLV Tuesday, Dec. 28, 2021.
The existential? The pragmatic? Awe at the cosmic aesthetic? All of those can be satisfied by the images that have started beaming back to Earth, explains Steffen, a physics professor who studies exoplanets, or planets that orbit other stars.
NASA released a set of colorized images last week that looked further into the universe than ever before and showed the breadth of science the Webb telescope, the $10 billion successor to the Hubble telescope, could accomplish from its deep-space position a million miles from Earth, he said.
What scientists will learn from Webb will tell us about our own history — how did our Sun and Milky Way galaxy form, and how might they differ from other stars and galaxies, Steffen said.
Other than getting to the root of humanity and the physical environment that existed long before man, astronomy research also develops new technology that is literally and figuratively down to earth, he added.
“The medical industry is filled with astronomers who have developed image processing. So when people take ultrasounds and they can actually see the features of the face of the baby, or when they have here’s what your brain looks like and here’s the tumor that’s sitting in there, that capability was developed by people who basically did image processing as graduate students in astronomy,” he said.
Webb, a collaboration between the U.S., Canadian and European space agencies, launched in December and got into place above Earth’s atmosphere in January.
Webb is so powerful because it sees in the infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Electromagnetic energy travels in waves. Radio waves are long. Gamma rays are short. The human eye can only detect “visible light,” a small portion of the spectrum. Infrared has longer wavelengths than visible light, so we can’t see it. Webb’s camera can.
Because Webb is an infrared instrument, it has the sensitivity to see through the thick galactic dust that obscures the processes of star birth and death and see the light of further galaxies with sharper clarity, to the dawn of time and the origins of the universe.
The images sent back are the furthest back, in time and distance, that humanity has ever seen. NASA says that some of the light captured in them is from not too long after the Big Bang, some 13.8 million years ago. Hubble, which launched in 1990, has stared as far back as 13.4 billion years. (Astronomers measure how far back they look in light-years with one light-year being 5.8 trillion miles.)
“Webb can see backwards in time to just after the Big Bang by looking for galaxies that are so far away that the light has taken many billions of years to get from those galaxies to our telescopes,” said Jonathan Gardner, Webb’s deputy project scientist.
Seconds before he unveiled a “deep-field” image that shows hundreds of specks, streaks, spirals and swirls of white, yellow, orange and red stars and galaxies on July 11, President Joe Biden marveled at “the oldest documented light in the history of the universe from over 13 billion — let me say that again — 13 billion years ago. It’s hard to fathom.”
Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s science mission chief, said when he saw the images he got emotional as did his colleagues: “It’s really hard to not look at the universe in new light and not just have a moment that is deeply personal.”
Scientifically, Steffen is gripped by an image that shows the change in brightness of light from a star system over time as an exoplanet transits the star.
But for artistry, something he’d hang on his wall, he favors the image that NASA calls “cosmic cliffs,” which shows the star nursery that is the Carina Nebula in dreamy, rich shades of sable brown and sapphire blue. This is where stars are born, a relatively nearby 7,500 light years away. All around the cloud twinkle young stars that look like elongated asterisks or like the iconic star
“You have all these stars that have this spider-looking structure around them, which totally looks like an artist’s rendition, but it’s not,” Steffen said. “That’s actually what the telescope saw.”
Eddessa_Knight w/Bright & Beautiful STAR LIGHT