More than 120 scientists gathered this week at Baltimore’s Space Telescope Science Institute on the Johns Hopkins campus to present and review first findings from the James Webb Space Telescope, which orbits in space one million miles from Charm City.
Some findings elicited oohs and aahs from the thinkers who had gathered at the facility where the groundbreaking telescope is being managed.
“It looks like we’re going to get a good understanding of what the atmospheres of potentially small planets are like – so planets maybe not bigger than the Earth,” said Susan Mullally, a scientist with the institute’s Data Science Mission Office. “The data is looking great. It was just a whole week of being blown away by how amazing the data is and seeing what people can do with it.”
That even deeper knowledge of the atmospheres of planets outside Earth’s solar system may be arriving in 2023 has Mullally energized.
“I was really excited to see that we’ve really started to dig into the atmospheres of exoplanets,” she said. “We’re starting to trace what they’re made of. Do they have winds? How does the temperature change going down into the planet? Things like that. To be able to start to understand weather on a planet that’s outside our solar system would be cool.”
Another major Webb development has been the publishing of data-generated images showing the farthest galaxy from Earth ever discovered. It was created 400 million years after the creation of the universe. The discovery accelerating the competition for scientific groups to find even further images detectable by the telescope – a happy new space race.
“That light has been traveling for like 13.4 billion years,” Mullally said. “It was just this last week that it (the oldest galaxy image) came out. We’re going to get a very good picture of what the early universe looked like. In this case I think it’s a good competition. They (scientists) all want to be the first to see so far away. It drives them.”
Presenters at the Baltimore conference provided papers on subjects ranging from the furthest galaxies to exoplanets, quasars, comets and more.
Over 4,000 hours of scientific observations have been conducted via the telescope in at least 2,100 investigations.
Hundreds of scientists from around the world applied to reveal their results this week. Data sent back from the telescope was available to them online, but only fifty candidates could be accepted to present at the conference due to time and space constraints.
The conference was a chance for the global astronomy community to come together once again after being limited to remote interaction due to the pandemic. It was the first put on by the institute since Covid, Mullally said.
John Mather is NASA’s Senior Project Scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope. He wrapped up Wednesday’s Baltimore presentations by congratulating those involved on the first year-end gathering.
Earlier in the year, there was apprehension that the telescope would not deploy correctly, before it became fully operational in January. Just months later, it is changing understanding of the universe we live in.
“Congratulations to all of you,” Mather said. “You have used the tool beautifully. Thanks to the teams that made it happen, the agencies that organized, the taxpayers that paid…It was worth it. Everything that we did has turned out to be worth it.”
What’s Next?
In addition to future findings from the James Webb and other telescopes, scientists are looking toward what might be possible with the next major space telescope projects.
Mather said the James Webb budget is three percent of the entire NASA budget, and the NASA budget itself is just seven percent of the world’s entire space budget.
“Imagine who gets the rest of the budget–mostly commercial and military,” he said. “So when it comes time to say what you want next, just ask for it. Don’t be ashamed because it costs what we think of as a lot of money.”
He and other scientists believe that the next big telescope budget should make room for an optical telescope that can detect, analyze and seek to understand exoplanets. The process of creating it, he thinks, will likely be easier than the creation of the James Webb telescope.
That’s because much was learned though the Webb telescope deployment and rockets are becoming cheaper and larger. The new telescope could be made modular too, to be more serviceable.
The Webb telescope has a mass of just 6,000 kilograms. It was designed at a time when American rocket capability was more limited, so the design was created to be ultralight.
Some think a payload of up to 100,000 kilograms is possible, and Mather is speculating on what might be possible with an optical telescope that might be much larger.
“The (National) Academy of Sciences said, build us the next telescope,” Mathers said. “We have now given it a new name. From our contacts at headquarters we are calling it the ‘Habitable Worlds Observer,’ or ‘Observatory’.’ We’re going to find those planets. We’re doing it.”
But both Mather and Mullally don’t believe it is likely the James Webb Space Telescope will find evidence of extraterrestrial life or civilization. A future Habitable Worlds Observer, in design and proposal stages, could theoretically do that, by delving deeper into what is visible on planets and their solar systems.
“NASA is exploring how much they’re willing to fund that kind of research,” Mullally said. “The universe is really big and we can only look at so much of it, is the problem. Unless we are targeted by an alien civilization, it might be hard for us to notice it.”
While thinking ahead, scientists in Baltimore were reveling in what the James Webb Space Telescope had already allowed them to learn. It has taken decades of work to get the telescope from the planning stages to actual operation. From exoplanets, galaxies far, far away and more –there is much for them to celebrate this December.
“Despite all those nights and weekends, and … stuff that wasn’t so pleasant all the time – look at what we got. We are here. This is a celebration party of getting the first peak at what’s out there.”
