James Webb Telescope Terrifying Image of The Big Bang Will Rewrite Physics!
there is no recent event in space and astronomy that comes close in hype to the launch of the james webb space telescope after a wait that seemed like an eternity and tortured people in the scientific community the new and powerful space telescope has made its way to its location where it will use its large lens to capture mind-blowing images of the universe some of the pictures will be of the much acclaimed big bang giving scientists their best chance ever to understand the great event that started it all however why do we need to understand the big bang and how will the james webb space telescope help us do that join us as we dive into the terrifying pictures that the james webb space telescope will take and how it changes everything you have probably gazed up at the stars and wished you could get a closer look at them that has been the dream of humanity for a long time and we’ve seen lots of space telescopes up there to give us better looks at the stars and other celestial bodies popular space telescopes include the solar and heliospheric observatory soho which has spent the last 25 years looking at the sun another one is the chandra the world’s most powerful x-ray telescope chandra named for indian american physicist subramanian chandrasekhar examines the x-rays emitted by some of the universe’s strangest objects including quasars immense clouds of gas and dust and particles sucked into black holes it was launched in 1999 by nasa the granddaddy of space telescopes was the hubble which has been observing from earth’s orbit for more than 30 years hubble the first of nasa’s great observatories has revolutionized astronomy providing stunning images of countless cosmic objects and giving astronomers their most distant views of the universe with the hubble deep field and ultra deep field hubble has meant so much during its 30-year run for one thing it sent us unforgettable jaw-droppingly beautiful images like those the lagoon nebula and the pillars of creation however none of these space telescopes are as powerful as the james webb space telescope which launched last december basically you can say the jwst represents the culmination of decades if not centuries of astronomy the jwst project was originally supposed to launch in 2010 and cost around 1 billion dollars his price tag ballooned to 10 billion dollars and it was way overdue but the weight would be more than worth it the jwst improves on hubble in two key ways the first is the sheer size while the hubble was about the size of a school bus the jwst is more like the size of a tennis court it is so enormous that it is by far the biggest telescope nasa’s ever attempted to send into space but the size is not the only improvement here that matters when you are building a reflecting telescope the key component is the size of its curved mirror the telescope mirror is like a light bucket the more light you can collect in your bucket the fainter and farther away things you can see in the universe hubble’s mirror was an impressive 7.8 feet in diameter jwst however surpasses that with its beautiful gold hued mirrors that combine to form a diameter of 21.3 feet overall that gives the jwst more than six times the light collecting area of the hubble the jwst has other advantages making it more powerful than the hubble one of them is the type of light it collects you see light comes in a lot of different varieties the human eye can only see a narrow band known as visible light but the universe contains lots of light outside this range including the higher frequency higher energy forms known as ultraviolet gamma rays then there’s the lower energy light with a longer wavelength infrared microwaves radio the hubble collects visible light ultraviolet and a little bit of infrared but the jwst is primarily an infrared telescope so it sees the light that’s in a longer wavelength than what our eyes can see this is what allows webb to look further back in time than the hubble and we will get to how this affects the big bang in a moment while one reason for all the launch delays had to do with contractor snafus and political interference a big source of all of them is the complexity of the telescope itself due to its size there weren’t any rockets that were big enough to launch it fully deployed so the telescope had to be folded up to fit inside a rocket upping the stakes is the fact that while hubble sits around 340 miles above the earth the jwst will be almost a million miles away four times the distance from the earth to the moon it means human hands cannot fix the jwst if it breaks that’s scary for a 10 billion dollar asset especially if you consider the history of the hubble shortly after the hubble launched in 1990 engineers realized there was a problem with its mirror the telescope’s initial images came back fuzzy and astronauts had to launch a space shuttle to fix it however that won’t be possible with the jwst the jwst will surpass the hubble in several ways it will allow astronomers to look farther out in space allowing scientists to make careful studies of numerous exoplanets that is planets that orbit stars outside our solar system they will even look for signs of life there however the jwst will not only dwell in the present because it’s taking us right back to the big bang the explosive event that kick-started the universe scientists have longed to understand the big bang better but lacked the tool but with the powerful jwst it is time to go back in history billions of years but why is the big bang important and worth sending a multi-billion dollar telescope to deep space well the big bang theory is the leading explanation for how the universe began simply put it says the universe as we know it started with an infinitely hot and dense single point that inflated and stretched first at unimaginable speeds and then at a more measurable rate and over the next 13.8 billion years it has been expanding to become the cosmos that we know today for most of human history observers of the sky assumed it was eternal and unchanging until edwin hubble dealt this theory an experimental blow in the 1920s his observations showed both that galaxies outside the milky way existed and that their light appeared stretched a sign that they were rushing away from earth george lementra a contemporary belgian physicist interpreted data from hubble and others as evidence of an expanding universe a possibility permitted by einstein’s recently published field equations of general relativity thinking backward lametra inferred that today’s separating galaxies must have started out together in what he called the primeval atom interestingly the first public use of the term big bang for lemetra’s idea actually came from a critic the english astronomer fred hoyle in 1949 hoyle coined the phrase during a defense of his preferred theory of an eternal universe that created matter to cancel out the dilution of expansion oil said the notion that all matter of the universe was created in one big bang at a particular time in the remote past was irrational hoyle would later deny intentionally inventing a slanderous name but the moniker stuck much to the frustration of some because we can’t see it directly scientists have been trying to figure out how to see the big bang through other measures in one case cosmologists are pressing rewind to reach the first instant after the big bang by simulating 4 000 versions of the current universe on a massive supercomputer it’s like trying to guess a baby photo of our universe from the latest picture the chemical elements of life today were first produced in the first generation of stars after the big bang we are here today because of them so the first stars must have influenced our own history beginning with stirring up everything and producing the other chemical elements besides hydrogen and helium so if we really want to know where our atoms came from and how the little planet earth came to be capable of supporting life we need to measure what happened at the beginning you can call the jwst a time machine because in astronomy the farther away things are the older they are that is simply because light from far away places takes a very long time to travel to earth that means photos taken by the hubble are not only a snapshot of space but also contain the history of our universe the captured galaxies appear to us as they were billions of years ago what the jwst will do is take that time frame and go even further allowing us to see farther back in time with the jwst astronomers like casey will be able to see so far back that they’ll potentially spot the very first stars and galaxies hubble has seen light dating to about 400 million years after the big bang which took about 13.3 billion years to reach us but jwst has the capability to take us to 250 million years after the big bang does the 150 million years gap make any difference it sure does it’s like the difference between seeing the first stars that ever turned on and arriving a bit too late after the funeral this period in time when the first starlight shone through the universe is known as the cosmic dawn with the jwst humanity will be able to glimpse at it for the very first time beyond that are barriers prior to the first starlight the universe was shrouded by a dense obscuring fog of primordial gas there is no light that reaches our telescopes from this time which is appropriately called the cosmic dark ages there is some background radiation from the big bang called the cosmic microwave background a faint glow that shines to us from before the dark ages but for the most part the dark ages is a blank spot in our timeline of the universe astronomers hope the jwst will help them make sense of the end of the dark ages and figure out what caused this fog to lift ushering in the cosmic dawn scientists suspect the starlight from the earliest galaxies did it they reason that if you have a cloud of gas and it encounters energetic light that vibrant light will ionize that gas and disassociate that cloud and so if that light has just turned on it then hits that gas and really transforms the entire universe from a dark place to a light place let’s hear what you think of the jwst helping us to understand the big bang theory better in the comments section
