In 1659, Christiaan Huygens published his ring theory on the origin of the appearance Saturn exhibited through his telescopes, the largest of which reached a lens size of about 20 centimeters in diameter. The largest telescope ever built to date, our Spanish gem Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), has a segmented mirror with a diameter of 10.4 meters. Just counting the difference in size, the GTC is about 3,000 times more sensitive than the first telescopes built nearly 400 years ago.

This week, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) began delivering data to astronomers around the world; in fact, anyone can download their data from today. JWST is approximately 3,000 times more sensitive (spectroscopically speaking) than any telescope ever built and/or still operating in the mid-infrared region. We made a leap that took us hundreds of years in twenty. We are witnessing a scientific revolution that began to take shape in 1996 with a very ambitious declaration by the then director of NASA who, after a presentation by a renowned astronomer on the possible construction of a space telescope of 4 meters that would work in infrared, commented, “Why are you asking for such a modest thing? Why not six or seven meters?”

The telescope webb wants to answer a few questions, simple, basic, perhaps fantastic, I would say full of transcendence. How was born the universe we know, full of stars, planets and galaxies? What do the planets of the Milky Way look like, how are they created, and how do they evolve to possibly have atmospheres and possibly ingredients to sustain life? What role do black holes, especially supermassive ones, play in the origin and evolution of our universe?

We’ll start to find some of the answers to these questions in the first JWST data released July 11-12, which was presented in style. First, it was US President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris who advanced (with some delay, more earthly issues crossing the agenda) the deepest picture of the universe ever. taken, and embellished it with reflections on collaboration between nations, for the benefit of humanity. through knowledge and technology, and the limitless possibilities of human entrepreneurship and exploration. It was a nice show of government support for science in the United States, should we learn.

Later, at a NASA press conference, ESA and CSA (acronym for US, European and Canadian space agencies, respectively) presented much more data on all that JWST can do in the impossible task of answering these questions, which, however, allow us to come closer to understanding the cosmos and our place in it. I would like to dwell briefly on each of these images; each will provide months of analysis and dozens of scientific papers. But it’s almost a crime to only put two or three sentences on every dataset presented these days, so I’m going to focus on two topics, covering the beginning and end of the evolution of where we live, the universe.

a cloudy planet

Never before has a spectrum of this quality been taken from an exoplanet from space, and the honor goes to what is called WASP-96 b (“b” because it is the first planet discovered around the star WASP-96). It is not a very different star from the Sun, just a little cooler, 5200°C against 5500°C for the Sun. This distant world is a planet about half the mass of Jupiter, but larger, which orbits its star every 3 days, compared to 12 years for Jupiter. In 2021, water was discovered in its atmosphere, understood as the outermost part of its structure, since in principle it should not have a solid surface, but be a large gas giant.

And the sodium was later discovered emitting in a manner similar to the orange lights of street lamps, observations that told us there were probably no clouds. However, here is the first surprise brought by JWST: the planet has clouds, mists, and much like those on Earth, they are made of water! The characterization of atmósferas de planetas más allá de nuestro Sistema Solar will be coser y cantar para JWST, queda demostrado, y eso nos acercará a conocer cómo deben evolucionar para dar lugar a los ingredientses de la vida, que muchos pensamos que no puede haber surgido solo here.

birth and death of stars

Planets with atmospheres and possibly life are the final fate, until today, of the universe. Along the way, there were the birth and death of stars (perhaps also with their planets), 2 other topics that JWST has already shown us what it can do. But I want to close the article with the other end of the life of the universe, the formation of the first stars in the first galaxies, which touches me most closely in my daily work. JWST taught us, presented by Biden, a manual of how the universe works, of the physics that governs the cosmos. In a unique but dramatic image of an area of ​​sky containing a cluster of galaxies called SMACS 0723, other galaxies are seen so distant that the universe was only 4% of its current age when they emitted the light that the JWST has gathered these weeks. And in the set of several thousand galaxies that we see in this image, there are insects of all colors and all kinds.

Distant red galaxies with lots of dust and forming stars 1,000 times faster than any nearby galaxy today. Also red galaxies, but already exhausted from forming stars at an early time and which will spend 50% or more of the life of the universe, aging irretrievably, without seeing new stars forming again in them. Galaxies whose image is terribly distorted by the gravitational lensing effect caused by the SMACS 0723 cluster. Or ultra-diffuse galaxies, much less dense than the Milky Way, which may have a very different origin associated with them , and of which we only knew a handful near us and yet they look perfect in this image from JWST.

Learn what the universe looked like

In JWST’s first deep-field image, you can even find out what the universe looked like before galaxies existed, because what fills this image that JWST doesn’t see directly, but will detect through unique spectroscopic abilities, is is dark matter. , which is several times more abundant in the universe than the matter that surrounds us, in our bodies, on the planets or in the stars. The work that was routinely done to detect distant candidate galaxies with Hubble and then observe, with great difficulty, low success rates and months, if not years of effort, with giant ground-based telescopes like the GTC, from from today JWST will do it in a matter of weeks, never before has there been such a powerful spectrograph in space. And this spectrograph will surely help us to understand the nature of the matter which dominates the mass of the universe, which we do not see, and which dominated and dominates its evolution long before the stars existed.

I’m finished. For some of us, the images from these days look extremely beautiful, for some reason we are dedicated to them (and they also make us nervous, we have a lot to learn about how to analyze this data). For others they seem spectacular, the vertigo of knowing that we are looking at the immensity of the cosmos, which we will never visit, undoubtedly excites our brain in a certain way and launches our curiosity and our imagination to try to understand . Others ask what is the point of studying the universe, a legitimate question, like all.

Perhaps, most likely, our lives and the cosmos are meaningless, but the fact is that they happen, everyone has their story and we humans like to tell and listen to stories, which last for longer. beyond our existence. Or maybe there is a meaning, the fact would then be that the universe ended (until today) giving rise to life on Earth, or maybe somewhere else and at another time? Again, the history of the cosmos would help us relativize, understand and transcend our limited time and our fleeting existence, at least that’s my dream.

cosmic void it is a section in which our knowledge of the universe is presented qualitatively and quantitatively. It aims to explain the importance of understanding the cosmos not only from a scientific point of view but also from a philosophical, social and economic point of view. The name “cosmic vacuum” refers to the fact that the universe is and is, for the most part, empty, with less than 1 atom per cubic meter, whereas in our environment, paradoxically, there are quintillion atoms per cubic meter, which invites us to reflect on our existence and the presence of life in the universe. The section is made up Pablo G. Perez Gonzalezresearcher at the Center for Astrobiology; Patricia Sanchez Blazquez, full professor at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM); Yes Eve Villaverresearcher at the Center for Astrobiology.

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