The Great Great Beyond

The James Webb Space Telescope - 100x more powerful than the Hubble - is set to launch on Christmas Eve and sounds absolutely bananas:

While Hubble’s “deep field,” the famous shot featuring thousands of galaxies, could fit on a standard sheet of paper, Webb’s equivalent would be so expansive, one astronomer told me, that it would need to be printed on wallpaper. This time, the shot would reveal 1 million galaxies, including some of the earliest.

Astronomers will be thinking deeply about those first chapters, approximately 13.8 billion years ago. The Webb telescope’s prime objective has always been to capture that first light, which has become so stretched on its journey across the expanding universe that, by the time it reaches us, it can’t be seen in visible light, only in the heat of infrared. The most distant galaxy that Hubble has detected existed 500 million years after the Big Bang. Astronomers believe that galaxy formation began earlier than that, and they think Webb can see that far back, possibly to just 100 million years after the explosive moment. And they think that it can not only see the galaxies from that time, but also discern what they’re made of, says Steve Finkelstein, an astrophysicist at the University of Texas at Austin. “We can actually make detailed measurements of how much of every chemical element is in these distant galaxies,” Finkelstein, who is leading the effort to create a Webb deep field, told me.

In the end, Webb could provide what I’ve come to think of as “from now on” moments. There’s a great scene in the movie Apollo 13 where Jim Lovell hosts a watch party at his home for the first moon landing. After the guests watch Neil Armstrong step onto the surface on a grainy black-and-white television, Lovell says, “From now on, we live in a world where man has walked on the moon.” Space exploration since has been in pursuit of more occasions like this. Landing a spacecraft on Mars, discovering the first exoplanet, seeing so many galaxies with Hubble—these were all “from now on” moments, junctures that shifted our perspective on our place in the universe. Astronomers have waited years for Webb, and they’ve set themselves up to make new discoveries, prepared to be right, or wrong, or stunned. We can try to see everything, but we can’t know exactly what we’ll find.

 I warned you people - bananas!!