NASA Science Live: Webb’s First Year [Episode 47]

This month marks one year since NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope astonished the world with the release of its first images and data. Since then, the observatory has been transforming the way we see the universe - from revealing details of planets and moons in our own solar system, to providing new understanding of how stars and galaxies form. Join experts on Wednesday, July 12 at 4:00 p.m. EDT as they highlight Webb’s first year of science and answer your questions about the mission. Submit questions using #askNASA.

What is said in the film

Welcome to another episode of NASA's Science Live. An opportunity for you to interact with NASA experts and have your questions answered in real time. I'm your host Tahira Allen. And today, we're joining you live from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. One year ago today, the James Webb Space Telescope released its first full color images and data and had us all in awe at the beauty of the universe as the world's most powerful infrared space telescope.

Webb has been examining every phase of cosmic history from the first luminous glows of galaxies in the early universe to the evolution of galaxies, as well as stars, planets and objects in our own solar system. Today, we're going to highlight some of Webb's exciting discoveries over the past year. Get a look at what's next for this historic mission and answer your questions throughout the show. Send in your questions using the hashtag. Ask NASA on social media or drop them directly into the comment box wherever you're watching.

I'm joined today by two astronomers who are going to guide us through Webb's first year in science. Dr. Jane Rigby, who was the Webb senior project scientist at NASA Goddard, as well as Dr. Macarena Garcia Marin, who is a Webb deputy project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute and a member of the European Space Agency. Thank you both so much for being here with us on such a big day.

So if you could just start by telling us a little bit about your roles on the mission and then how you're just you're feeling today by all means. So thank you so much for having us. I've been part of a mission for about 16 years, since throughout those years I have had different roles. Right now I'm the Deputy Project Scientist for the Space Telescope Science Institute, and that means that I interact with the community. I oversee that things are working as expected and really try to give them what they need to publish great science.

How I feel today. It's incredibly happy for this accomplishment. The first year has been fantastic, really. And this is a testament to everybody who work on the mission. So we have three agencies, NASA, ESA, the Canadian Space Agency, certain countries and 20,000 people to make this happen.

So it's really it is amazing, amazing. Yet for one telescope. Oh, wow. And what about you? Sure.

So as the senior project scientist, my my job is to optimize the science that we do with this amazing telescope to make sure that we are doing the best science and giving the community what we need to really make these transformative discoveries, and then to make sure we're explaining those and sharing them with with the world. How I'm feeling today is so proud of the team people have work, poured their hearts and their souls into this mission. And we also are you know, it's so gratifying to see how many people around the world are with us on that journey. It's been such a wonderful year, and I know that we really are just getting started in terms of the scientific return from this telescope. I mean, like we have so much to get into today.

Let's do this. Let's go. Honored to have you all. So over the past year, Webb has provided new understandings of how stars and their accompanying planets form. Just this morning, a brand new image was released in celebration of one year of Webb science operations.

It shows us a detailed view of the closest star forming region to earth. Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex Macca, this image just practically begs for an explanation. Could you start by just telling us exactly what are we seeing here? By all means. I always like to take a second to really take in the image because it is really astonishingly beautiful.

It has a structure. It has this organic feeling to it. It's really amazing. Yes, it is Rho Ophiuchi which is the closest form a region to us. And in this case, we're looking at a region with about 50 stars for the most part, they are very similar to the sun.

They are in terms of mass and they are essentially information. They are just baby stars. It is like a nursery of a star. Some even though it is beautiful, it has all these structures and it's very there's a lot of activity going on. It is actually quite a relax for a star from the region.

So, Jay, why don't you walk us through some of the details. Sure. There's a lot to see. Let's go on a little tour. Tour?

Yeah, let's do it. All right. Okay. So as we're looking at the star forming region, one of the first things that catches your eye is this sort of glowing mane down on the bottom, the sort of yellow lion's mane thing. What that is, is a massive star is a little bit more massive than the sun that has gotten out of its birth cloud.

We also have regions that are still where the stars are still in their birth cloud. They haven't gotten out yet. And we can see their the glow of their disks as they're accreting matter onto onto the star. The you know, it takes a while for stars to form. They form out of a disk of of gas and dust and as they're it's just gravity, right?

It's just gravity accreting. And then there's more gravity. So then more stuff gets in. And then once those stars get once the stars get enough mass to start shining, they can push back at the clouds where they formed. And so you can get that beautiful, ghostly lit up structure where it's actually that that host that star lighting up its birth cloud.

We also have the colors here are really important that yellow is dust that's been lit up. That red is molecular hydrogen. It's hydrogen that is coming from jets being spat out in these little bi-conical, these little two jets getting shot out of each of these new stars. And so all together we have it really is like a nursery where the youngest stars haven't haven't really gotten born yet, but they're far along and they're right there along the path. And then the older ones are out there shining and they're having an impact on the region where they were born.

Well, I mean, we've been we've talked a little bit about Stellar birth right now. Right. So let's skip to the end of the movie. You know what happens at the end of a life cycle for a star like our Sun. So everything in a star depends on the mass, like the life and the number of years that it will be in the on the mass.

And in the case of a star like the sun, so not too massive. What will happen is that when it's nearing the end of its life, it will shed in the outer shell and creating this beautiful structure surround it, which are called Planetary Nebula. And they will just they get lit up and they are really that level of detail with Webb on these structures is really fantastic. It's really allows to study a lot of the fine detail of the planetary nebula. And so by the end of it, the star will slowly sort of switch off.

It will become a white dwarf and then slowly switch off and just disappear. And then we have other type of stars that are slightly more massive, let's say about like 30 solar masses. And those some of them are cold water again. And with Webb, we have a study of some beautiful cases of water in a star that are have like a companion rotating around it. And in that rotation it actually creates this beautiful shell around it.

So there was a this is a case where you have a work for your star. So it's a sort of mass as a companion. And when they get close, the star sheds because of the gravitational pull sheds of dust. Every eight years is one. It's like a tree trunk of information.

It's clockwork. You get how you can measure the time because it's related with the way the stars rotate around each other. So it's truly amazing. And again, with Webb, you're going to study all the fine details and really see many of these trees that have never seen before in this in this level of detail. And is amazing.

Wow. And these stars will end up like a supernova. And then we have the very massive ones. And what happens after a supernova? Sure.

So no. So with Webb, we have been studying stars that are close to dying that will free a star that's spitting out those dust clouds. And we've also been studying stars that are dead, that have already exploded, that so massive stars that have exploded as supernovae. And in their dying, they light up and blow up one of the brightest explosions in the universe and cast out these fast moving clouds of dust and gas that have in them all of the elements that get formed when a star dies. It really is true.

Carl Sagan used to say that we're all made of star stuff. That is literally true. The carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, iron in our bodies. We're all made in stars. Many of those elements are made in stars when they blow up.

And so by studying supernovae and their remnants, the gas clouds that are left behind, we can understand how the stuff we're made of got formed in the hearts of stars. And I mean, what just does such a beautiful job at peering through this dusk and like showing us things we haven't seen before. So this has been really, really phenomenal, not only just visually, but for the science. This is scientifically credible. And so many stars have planets orbiting around them.

The ones outside our solar system are called exoplanets. Up. How how is Webb studying exoplanets? So many use astro techniques. One of them is to direct the image and pick it up picture of the planet.

And to do that, you first have to start with your thumb, because on my block, the star glows when I and then you get the beautiful image of the platinum next to it. And Webb has that has demonstrated this can be done beautifully. And we are getting data with this technique. And then the other technique is what we call a planetary transits. So essentially, when a planet works its way in the orbit in front of the star, so we can measure the star before the planet goes in front of it.

And when the planet goes in front, that thing is like an eclipse. So in that in that process, the light of the star gets filtered by the planet atmosphere, and then we can measure that mass very composition of that planet thanks to that process of light filtering through it with, with that level of high quality data we're getting with this technique and stability and really worth of information, it's out of the chart. It really is. Well, Jane, can you expand a little bit on what we are learning from these techniques, say, with Massive Planet? Sure.

And now we're currently spending a quarter of all the observing time with Webb's Digitally on Exoplanets. We ask for the world's best ideas and then we pick the best so we can respond to what good ideas people are having. But right now, borrowing a lot of ideas for studying exoplanets. So some of the discoveries so far and again with so for exoplanets, this was the big uncertainty for us. Webb wasn't built to do exoplanets.

It was originally designed to study the most distant galaxies. So we kind of added that science case in kind of late in the games with that. And it was there was a little well, we'll see what we get. Yeah, right. It turns out the telescope has been so stable.

It has been gorgeous for exoplanets. And so the data that we're getting of in which we're looking at what the atmospheres around what's what's inside these atmospheres of these planets orbiting other stars. And so the first data we got on those exoplanets, the it basically just jumped out at us. We're like, Oh, that's those that's the fingerprint, that's the signature of molecular carbon dioxide. There it is right there.

Well, that wasn't hard. And then we took further observations with other with other modes of the observatory to get other elements. And what's been so wonderful with this telescope is that before we had to strain to maybe get one molecule, maybe for some of these planets, instead we're getting a whole soup, we're getting water, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, we're getting what's going on in there, what's the chemistry, what's happening? So we're able to understand what is going on inside these planets, what are they like? And that's something we've never been able to do before.

And I mean, planets that are so far away, right, like these are hundreds of light years away. Some of them some of them are really close, just a couple of years away. Wow. That is incredible. So, you know, we've talked about massive planets right now, but as an earthling, you know, so can Webb can Webb study, you know, small rocky planets like that as well?

It's gone. And actually, there is a very well known system, which is a TRAPPIST system, and that has seven planets within the mercury orbit for you, too. So it's a lot of like you have the stars and planets packed into that very small orbit. So with Webb, we're studying them all. So far we have results for the ones closest to the stars, and the results have been, well, they don't have an atmosphere.

We have been able to measure the temperature of one of them. And there is a lot of effort going along on the characterization of the rest of the planets. So what's everybody wants to to find, I think in this case for the rocky exoplanets is can we find one that has that atmosphere? So it's all about keeping pushing the boundaries and getting more and more data to get high quality results. So, Macca, could you, I guess, help us understand what all this means in the big scheme of things, Right?

So yeah, so in the nineties we didn't know about other exoplanets. Now we know about that. I mean we have found about 5000 of them. So it's all about pushing the boundaries of our knowledge on how our exoplanets form, what, what types are there, how are their atmospheres like, how must fears evolve and change with time? It's all about putting in context of planetary formation and then really perfect our models and keep on observing.

I mean, I see often this astronomy and science in general, like they're putting pieces of the puzzle together. Yeah. So get a really good view of the whole picture. So that's what we're doing. I mean, and it's that's beautiful.

So thank you both so much for such a great introduction. You know, Webb's last year in science and we are already getting so many great questions and online, but I'm going to take a step back and I'm going to toss it to our viewers. So for those watching, remember to send in your questions using the hashtag, ask NASA or drop them directly into the comment stream wherever you're watching. All righty. So our first question is from Instagram user Trevor Maria.

So he has a question about the anniversary image. He asks, This is a is this is a multi photo stacked on top of each other of different wavelengths of what each camera sees, Correct? This isn't what it looks like to the naked eye. Basically, it's what? Yeah.

Yeah, I can take that one. Sure. Go ahead. So we like that. Let me demystify this.

Okay. There's really not pulling a fast one here. We take So this is all one camera. So the NIRCam instrument. And with that camera we do two colors of light at once.

We get two, we get a two for buy one, get one free, which is useful. And so but when you get the raw data, you can download the raw data from from the telescope. You can go look this up for yourself. The raw data are gray, right where it's more light, less light. It's monochrome, but you can look at the raw data and it looks a lot like this.

What we do to make these really gorgeous images is we give them we give the data a spa treatment, right? I mean, we make them look their best. We clean them up, but they still look like themselves. We're not doing anything to really change what's going on here. We just kind of make it pop.

Yeah. And so what, would some blush? Yeah, exactly. There's a little bit of like, but. But it's.

We're not, there's not. There's nothing. You can look at the raw data and see everything that you see in this image. What we basically do is assign colors that our eyes can see to different colors of light that Webb is detecting. And so we try to do that in ways that make physical sense.

So in this case, we've assigned the yellow color to dust, to dust to emission from of smoke, from little pieces of smoke. And so then we're we're assigning red to molecular hydrogen. And so we can be flexible because of course, we can't see the infrared. Yeah, but there's something magical about our eyeballs, Right. My cat can see further in the red than I can and bees can see further in the blue than we can.

Telescopes allow us to see past the limitations of our own eyes, and then we map them into what we can see so that we can make sense of it because we go through life in in color. And so that, you know, astronomers do that when we are when we're analyzing images, we make three color images so we can help see, okay, what am I looking at here? What's going on? Well, I mean, that is just incredible. And, you know, it really, I feel like brings out that merger of art and science in a way.

Definitely. And so that's so cool. So our next Twitter user asks Red Viktor's. He's asking the question, if the Webb telescope can look with such detail at the very farthest reaches of the universe, Can it see with extreme detail what is in our own Milky Way galaxy? Basically, if it can look so far away, you know, does that mean if it looks a little bit closer, can it see with really, really great detail?

And he has an example. Can it catalog solar systems and the detailed compositions of the bodies orbiting them? So far? So yes. So answer the question.

Yes, certainly we're going to study and we are studying our own galaxy. And actually this image was 32 days from our own galaxy. So really close eye stuff on the equation. So yes, we are starting planetary systems like Trappist. I mean, they are really far away.

So what we see with these planets is maybe if you see the planet, you see adult, you don't see, you know, this beautiful rendition of Saturn more like ours than anything else. But yes, we study them. We do direct imaging with the a rainbow with a daytime. We that rainbow, we get all the chemical composition and we can characterize them. So, so far we are studying for outer star systems, let's say solar exoplanet systems, the planets themselves.

We haven't started yet doing any sort of other body there. But yes, we can certainly MRO studying our own galaxy. Well, I mean, that just leaves us excited for what's to come, right? You know, it's only the first year. So Astrosa on YouTube asks will JWST is to try to find distant quasars.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah we've already we had a bunch of in the first year we taught we targeted some quasars we already knew about that were discovered by other telescopes. And there have been recent results out studying those quasars and in particular wanting to understand. So these are supermassive black holes. A quasar is a name for a black hole with a mass of up to a billion with a B solar masses worth of stuff in a black hole that's about the size of our solar system. Wow.

That's at the heart of a galaxy. Every galaxy has a supermassive black hole in its center. Big galaxies have big black holes. Small galaxies have small, small black holes. We see quasars, supermassive black hole.

A quasar is a good question. A quasar is a supermassive black hole that is feeding that is accreting gas down on to it. Yeah. So it's fueling. It's getting bigger.

Yeah. And of course, once matter falls into a black hole, you can never escape. So none of that light gets back out. But as gas is falling down into the black hole, it's colliding with other gas and it glows white, hot and into the ultraviolet. And even you get X-rays and it can outshine the host galaxy.

And that's what we call it, Quasar. So in the first year, Webb has been studying some of the the galaxies that host those quasars to understand how did they grow so fast? How did they build a billion solar masses in a billion years? Down in the center, Webb has also been discovering of supermassive black holes. Accreting black holes that we didn't know about that are just popping up all over some of these deep fields where we stare at a blank field.

We find thousands of galaxies, and some of those are like, Oh, that's that's another that's a that's a quasar. There's another quasar. We've they've been popping up all over. There are a lot. And why are we so interested in studying them?

Quasars, black holes. It's all part of the galaxy puzzle. Some pictures are part of a puzzle. So actually your memory with a quasars, often you do have to remove the quasar to be able to see the galaxy. And there are techniques to do that.

But it's all about studying the galaxies and how they are forming and evolve. Well, we have another question from a Twitter user radio caster for asks, Could JWST take a picture of Voyager one or is it too small to pick up on camera? Oh, that's a good question. All right. Do math on the fly.

It's too small. It's just it's just like, yeah, yeah, you can do it. But I love the question. Yeah, Yeah, I know. That was an insightful question.

Thank you. I have to actually do the math to work out whether you can get the reflection, even if you can't resolve it. And I can't do that in my head. I'd have to go get a pencil. I got from a friend.

Yeah, well, we have Lane on Twitter who asks, What temperature does Webb operate in in deep space? Well, we have two ranges of temperature, so we have three instruments that operate in the near infrared and they are at about 40 K, which is like a few times of the grace over the absolute zero. And then we have MIRI that operates on the main infrared, which means that you have to be colder to be able to detect that signal. So MIRI operates at about 7K, which is just seven degrees above the absolute zero. And that means that MIRI needs to have a special cooling system.

It's like it has its own freight, so to say, to keep it cool and really make it functioning. The other ones are cooled down by the sunshield that protects everything from the radiation with the sun. Wow. The range is just it is. Yeah.

And then on the hot side, on the right hand side where the below this. So the telescope and the science instruments all really cold. What -400 Fahrenheit for it's above absolute zero on the hot side it's like room temperature and hotter. So the parts that like know where we keep the computers and the radio that phones home, all of that is nice and toasty. And then we have to keep that isolated from the cold side where we're doing the science.

It's like hundreds of vigorous difference between the two sides. It's really a fit. I mean, and it's just such a technological marvel, you know, like no wonder it took any thousand people to do this. Really. One of the hardest parts of designing a building web was separating those two temperature zones.

Very, you know, quite hot and very, very cold. And having the hot not bleed down into the cold. I mean, this is all so fascinating. And to those watching, thank you for such thoughtful questions. It really is a blast participating with you on today's show.

So please keep sending in your questions using the hashtag ask NASA or by dropping them directly into the comment box. Wherever you're watching today, we'll get to some of the some more of those in just a few minutes. Now, let's take a closer look at the planets in our own solar system, what has shown us clouds and storms on Uranus and Neptune, as well as their ring systems, which appear to be way more prominent and infrared light. Macca What can we learn from an image like this of Neptune? This is a beautiful image and actually we have not seen Neptune talking about Voyager.

We didn't see this rings many of these rings since the Voyager flyby in about, I think it was 1989. So it's been many years. And so with Webb, we can really see in great detail all the ways we can see seven out of the 14 satellites around it, and we can see all this bright shiny spots and those are clouds in the atmosphere that are made out of a material, a type of gas that is really reflective in the infrared. And that's how we see them that bright. So with Webb, we can see not only the gas, but now that there is more data, not only the first image.

So astronomers are looking for more rings. The satellites you can see and maybe even more satellites. So there's a lot of activity going on. And of course, at the core of it is like a star in those atmospheres, those clouds, dust storms. How do they move?

How does what is the dynamic around the planet and how do they evolve essentially year after year? So it's really why would one could think, well, these are so close, Why do you need such a powerful machine? The answer is because we need all this little beside the closest planets to us. So it makes a lot of sense to study them in detail and then to think, well, how does this fit with the exoplanets we talked about before? And I can only imagine that, you know, the more detail we get that must inform missions and things like that as well.

Right? So absolutely, absolutely. And in part, though, as Mark has said, the last time we got an image of Neptune that that crisp, we had to send a probe all the way to Neptune here. We're just, you know, the Webb telescope is not that far from the earth. It's just pointed out there and seeing.

So it lets us look at the outer solar system without having to actually go there. And we're also it also is informing things like places where there is activity in the outer solar system like Enceladus, the moon of Saturn, where we're following up on discoveries made by NASA's mission, Cassini, which is now over with. But now we can go back and look and see, okay, what was going on that Cassini saw and follow up on it on. So that's something I think is one of the neatest discoveries so far has been the the water plumes coming out of the moon Enceladus and how there's this plume of water that is escaping out of cracks in the icy crust from what is presumably a subsurface ocean down there. And we're seeing that escaped water.

And so Webb has captured that and has taken spectra a little rainbows to see what it's made of. And so that was something where we didn't have that instrumentation on board Cassini and but we could do it now after the fact. And we can visit all of the outer planets and the comets of asteroids corpora about objects without having to send a probe that is incredible. And so I do actually what you said just reminded me we have a few questions back. We asked, I think, about Webb's temperature in deep space.

Webb is not in deep space, is it? So Webb is about a million miles away, if you would consider it is okay. Yeah, it is pretty far away. It's yeah, I mean, it's 40 times past the distance of the moon. It's further than humans have ever gone.

Exactly right. But compared to the distance of even Jupiter, it's not that far. So, you know, we say hi to it, and it's like, less than a light second. It's okay. And that is an absolute scheme of things.

But it's not like Hubble. Yeah, you know, when Hubble is at its closest approach, it's only 300 miles over your head, right? So in that sense, it's a million miles away. Yeah. So, you know, if we're going to talk about ringed planets, we got to talk about Saturn.

Webb has released an incredible image of this planet. And so other than just sheer beauty, what could we what can we learn from this image? Sure. You want to take that one? Sure.

Yeah. So, again, the solar system, experts say, called Webb a ring machine because they are saying the rings of all these planets is saturated. And this is like a refreshing. And so this rings are made out of dust and ices. And that is where with infrared and with Webb, you can really see that it is and you can really understand other, you know, what are the satellites in the rings, what is the composition and their dynamics and are there more rings?

We don't see, For instance, and I was just like a little bit farther away in a ring. That is not the typical range you see in the images from Saturn. So again, lots of data, lots of new information. And really it's a fun fact. I said the planets, they are so bright that the challenge with where this is not to get too bright and then make the data difficult to solve.

So so the challenge is they really get good quality data in a really, really short time. And that's what we're doing. Well, I mean, it seems like it's knocking it out of the park. And so before we move on from solar System, I do want to ask you, Jane, are is there any other object in the solar system or anything else Webb has been doing in the past year? Oh, gosh, we've been doing a lot.

I don't have time to talk about all the comets and asteroids we've been studying. I do want to mention one asteroid that we observed when it was hit by another. NASA's mission, the DART mission, which on purpose slammed into one of a pair of asteroids that were orbiting each other in order to measure can we move an asteroid if we needed to do that, for to protect our own planet. And so that was something that was a real stretch for our team. Web was not built to track an asteroid that's moving that fast.

That was three times past hour speed limit. But there's a lot of cool science that we could do if we can track objects moving that fast. And so our team was really pretty eager for that challenge and embraced it. And in fact, we captured the the plume of junk coming out of that asteroid as it was hit by the dart by the dart probe. So that's pretty neat technically and also lets us study.

Okay, What's what's going on in there? And are are they rubble piles? What what is the composition of these? So we did spectra, we took rainbows to see what the stuff was that was coming off this this asteroid. But I'm proud of the team because I know how hard we work to get that, to get that to work because that thing was zooming past and we're like, you know, having to move our telescope pretty fast.

Thanks to that. Now we can move the telescope faster than we had thought about before launch, so we can do the science of faster objects. That's incredible. I mean, like talk about an all star a year for this telescope. So it really is amazing to see what it's been accomplishing.

And there are so many questions coming in online. So let's get to a few of them. As a reminder to those tuning in live, you can submit questions using the hashtag ask NASA or drop them into the comment stream. Wherever you're watching the show. We'd also love to know what has been your favorite web image from the past year posted online along with your question using the hashtag, ask NASA.

All right, Our next question actually, this is a collective question. So we have a few viewers on Twitter who want to know more about the anniversary image. So they're asking, is what we're seeing in this image in the past? Yes. Yes, it is in the past.

Can you explain how it is 390 light years away in the past week? Because that is a time the light travel takes to travel to us. So it is in the past. And actually everything you see is in the past. When you look at yourself in the mirror, you're looking at our self yourself.

That is like a tiny fraction of a second, slightly younger than you are at that moment. So yeah, it's it's light travel. And of course, the universe also expands. So depending on where you are, it might take a bit longer. But yes, everything we look with web is all there is test and we're looking.

Yeah, but it's like the light from the sun is just life into the past. We are looking at each other life into the past. It's boggling, you know, to really like, sit and think about that. And so actually, this is a great follow up question. Adam Updike on YouTube asks, Has JWST changed our perspective, perception of the universe?

And if so, how? You know, not yet. Yeah, I'm going to go for not yet. Why? I mean, yes and no, right?

Like, it's gorgeous. It's lovely. But we we kind of knew that we were going like this. This is this could knock you and socks off. Right.

And I remember having to reassure reporters before launch about what are the images going to be as good as Hubble. So I just wake sit back. That's all right. It's not going to be a problem. I would say that, you know, we are still getting started and I would say that.

So far for me anyway, what has given me confidence is that, you know, the data that we've gotten so far tells us, oh, yeah, this is working great. This is in fact, we can push harder than we thought. And so far I think that we have we know that we can push quite a bit harder. It maybe the we'll get to it. But I think the the high redshift the very, very most distant galaxies where we're looking back in time, not just 100,000 or a million years, but we're looking back in time, 13 billion years.

For me, that's probably the part where that's changed my perspective just because for me and for everybody else before launch, that was a big old question mark. What did the first billion years of the universe's history look like? Nobody really knew. And that's the one area where we've gone from saying, Oh, we just can't we can't do that with any telescope we have. We just had a cliff words like it's you.

We can't see that far back in time to where? Oh yeah, we're finding hundreds of these galaxies everywhere we look. And that's the part where we've gone from saying, How did it all get started? How did the first galaxies form from, oh, we don't know to okay, now we have lots of data and we're really starting to figure out how quickly galaxies got their act together. I feel like, you know, that only probably opens up more questions, right?

So I think it's giving us new information in every area that's really informing everything. So I have a great follow up to that. Webb is again knocking it out of the park. And so we have a few people asking what was the original life expectancy for Webb and has it changed after this first year? So I think that, yeah, so before launch the life expectancy.

So the requirement was five years before launch with a fuel onboard etc. with we thought it would be ten years a lot during launch. The launch was so optimized and so well done that we did save a lot of fuel. So now if we think we had to think about the limiting life factor, essentially if you think will think it will last 20 years or more, but we don't know exactly what will be the limits on how everything will evolve. We want a follow up.

That's perfect. So fingers crossed so that it is that it is the 20 years. So we have another collective, several users on YouTube are asking if Webb has found life on other planets. Now from what I understand, this is not a life seeking mission, you know and but that Webb looks for bio signatures. Could you tell us more about that?

So the answer is no. We have not found life on other planets. We'll let you know if that happens. Yes. Nor was Webb designed to do that.

Yeah, that is a job for a future telescope. And in fact, we are working on that. There is a design that they're starting to design, something called the Habitable Worlds Observatory, which would do exactly that uses a lot of the same technology as Webb. It looks, you know, it has hexagons, it deploys it, but it looks at up at the same light that we do visible and then ultraviolet light. Webb can't do that.

It's an infrared telescope. There's just some basic limitations. We're not going to find life in it. And it's not looking for signs of life. No, that is not our science.

What we could do is find places with Webb. We can we may be able, if they're out there and they're close to find planets that could be habitable that look nice and toasty but not too hot. They have liquid water. But we what Webb cannot do is say, Yep, that one has life on it. That is a job for future mission.

They can say this looks like a nice destination that life might want to vacate to stoke, to study in the future. Yes. And so. Okay. Thank you for that.

Okay. So we just we just asked viewers to share their favorite image in the chat. And now Chuck Starr on Twitter wants to know, oh, this is a good one. After a year, what is your favorite image from JWST I must say I'm going to go with today's image. Oh, really?

Before that, it was the Stephan's quintet. Okay. With Mary Beth. I have to say, the emotion today, it is mind blowing to me. It is exactly.

So it's organic, ephemeral. It's like beautiful. And the one before was Stephan Quintet for me that, okay, I'm going to go with Pandora as cluster O, which is a galaxy cluster. So thousands of galaxies all crammed into a space that in our neck of the woods is just a couple of galaxies. It is.

So that's probably my favorite. The other one I really love is S-max. So 723 which is the lensing cluster that we revealed a year ago have just because for that one it was so beautiful. And it's, it's also the science that I do. So I was like, this is exciting.

And it was also really easy. We got those data we started. The telescopes are observing around midnight. We had the data by breakfast. It was just one of these like, Oh, oh, okay, this is this.

It's working really well. So that one has a special place for me. Just because it was a demonstration to the world of how just of how transformative this telescope is, if I may have to. Just to add context, is the image where you have a group of galaxies that are interacting and you really see how they they have like this cosmic dance and they sort of distort each other. And in that process, you know, they may form a new galaxy, the feather that my for newest star.

So it is beautiful. I mean, thank you both to and I know that you all look at these images all the time. And so it really is incredible to hear which ones are your favorite. So our next question comes from Mr. Spockito on Twitter.

I know that's a like it's a good handle. How much time do the teams at STSCi, NASA take to publish Webb's data? So starting from observing from the telescope and then going through the whole process of analyzing and rendering them out and then publishing. So what's the timeline? So that the timeline.

It depends, right? So first of all, STSCi and NASA's institutions don’t publish data like there are scientists that do publicity. But the way it goes, you take your data and then it gets downlinked. We have done it twice a day, so it gets downloaded essentially, and then it goes through what we call a calibration pipeline, which is what Jim was describing before. You know, get rid of your electronic effects and the things you want from the data, and that is automatic and that is done at the station.

And then once process is finished, negative goes into the archive and then the investigator team grabs the data and then they say, Oh, I'm going to fine tune this, I'm going to fine tune that. And then they have to analyze it and do their science so it can be anytime from I've seen papers coming out in literally two days and others take maybe six, six months a year. It really depends. Wow. Well, thank you both so much for these answers to these questions.

For those watching at home. We'll get back to some more questions in just a few minutes. So keep sending them in. So we've now looked at our own solar system. Right.

Let's go back in time to when the first galaxies were forming. Webb is a powerful time machine with infrared vision that is peering back over 13. 5 billion years and is already providing the first look at the earliest galaxies that formed hundreds of millions of years after Big Bang. So again, we're hearing a lot about Webb being a time machine of sorts. Macca Could you explain how telescopes can even be time machines?

Yes. And this is nicely linked with a question we have before about in the past. So light is a wave and it travels. So we know it takes time to travel. And so I was at the speed of light.

So when the first galaxies and the stars they emitted their light 13 and a half billion years ago, that light started to travel in time and space. And it did travel in a universe that is just expanding. And in that expansion that way we get stretched. And in that stretching, it also extends from the visible light today and further lady gets weather and that's where Webb can catch it. It's really it's really a beautiful process.

So we are looking at the time of the universe we have never looked at before with Hubble. We looked until about 13 and a little bit billion years ago with or with other missions that looked even be like behind that like W map and Colby. That's that time where the first galaxies and the stars were formed. It's really new. And what we're looking at literally looking at the edge of what have all the and really pushing forward the limits.

So it's that's how it is a time machine. It's mind blowing. It's honestly mind blowing. And so, you know, Jane, but how can we really know how far away any given galaxy is with so much accuracy? Sure.

It's so convenient that so we take rainbows is the short answer. And very conveniently, there are little markers, little diagnostic, kind of like if you think about, like, CSI forensics, there's little fingerprints of what different elements and molecules are that just stand out and you can say, Oh, that's oxygen, that's carbon, that's hydrogen. And anywhere it is in the universe, you get these little, little spectral signatures on the rainbow and you say, well, that's that's hydrogen. There we go. And so it's really helpful that those signatures are there in galaxies.

But as Macca said, because the light has been redshifted, because of the expansion of the universe, all we need to do is say, oh, there's hydrogen. I measure what color I see it at. I know what color it was originally. That means I know how far, how much the universe's has been stretched as that light was traveling to us. So it lets us take what we measure, which is a redshift, and then we use a cosmological model to turn that into a distance.

So what it basically means is we get little rainbows of all our galaxies. We then can figure out distances to every one of the galaxies. And so if you think of like a take a deep field, like the famous Hubble deep field where we've got hundreds of galaxies, all peppered over an image, getting these little redshifts means that we can we can make that into a 3D radius on a flat image anymore. We can do. Yeah, we know the pain's right.

We can say, okay, this galaxies, these these are the ones these far away. And we can, we can start making a 3D model of where everything is. That means we can start saying, okay, these galaxies we're seeing as they looked 13 billion years ago, these galaxies are, as they look, 13. 4 billion years ago. And these galaxies are 10 billion years old.

And so for any galaxy we look out, we get a snapshot. We don't live long enough to see galaxies evolve. We just don't live long enough. But we can by getting all these snapshots put together that that picture of how galaxies evolve with time, it's as though we never got to see humans age. But we got snapshots of people at different stages of their lives, and from that we can piece together how people are born, mature and get old.

Yes, that is a great analogy. So, you know, what is Webb revealing now that we could have never known a year ago? Right. Can I one. Sure, go ahead.

Yes. So the big result. So there are a lot of results for the early universe. They're coming out fast and furious. So the ones that I think that sort of to kind of group them in are some big themes.

Yeah. So far we are learning that there are more galaxies at early times in the very young universe than we expected. That's cool. They're also brighter than we expected, so they're easier to study. Great.

There's lots of them. What we think is going on and we're getting spectra of them and we're finding. So what we're finding is that galaxies formed earlier than we thought and they are forming more stars than we kind of gave them credit for or thought we might optimistically get. Yeah, we didn't really know. Honestly, we had huge uncertainties and what we might get in this first billion years.

This really was a well, that's why we built the telescope, was to go find out. The main result that is emerging is that there are more of these galaxies, the brighter than we expected. I my interpretation of that is that galaxies just got organized early and we're still working out why what the details is. That is, these are all still very small galaxies compared to the Milky Way, both in terms of size and in terms of mass. But they have a lot of the properties of bigger later galaxies.

They've made some blood. I'm kind of proud of them. They've gotten their act together. They formed black holes in their centers. They're they're accreting gas, they're forming stars.

So that's a little these processes that we see in the nearby universe are working in that first billion years. And so we're understanding how we're really getting a gorgeous view of how galaxies turned on and got organized in the very early universe, which was the science case that sold the telescope. That's why we built it. And interestingly, some of them, they we know now that they have stopped star formation or very was they're taking a break. A break and maybe maybe some of them will start merging with their neighbors and really triggering star formation again.

So maybe their black hole, they don't know how they did. We don't know. But that's a neat result. Yeah, exactly. And that is how galaxies will evolve until today.

Oh, wow. So let's get to some more questions from our viewers. It But first, we want to know, where have you seen web images over the past year with the missions? Incredible window into the universe? I mean, we have seen pictures on clothing, billboards in Times Square.

Where have you seen Web drop your response into the stream wherever you're watching. All right. So now onto some next questions. We have some Facebook users who are asking more about how we apply colors to the black and white photos that we get from Web. Could you go into a little bit more detail?

Yep, I can do that. So as I was going before, every instrument has a camera. Let's we call the detector things like a camera talking about the images and what the cameras attract. They do that act photons. They detect light.

And in this case, we use filters to select which part of, say, in front of the black thing. If it was visible, you would use a blue filter and then you go to get all the blue photons. It's similar. You use a filter and then follow that. You get those specific photons.

So you take maybe three or four or five different filters and then you order their chromatically. So your blue filters, you assign them the blue color on the visible for the red filters, you assign the red color and then in between. So that's what the imaging experts call chromatic order. So they assign to each infrared color that we cannot see a color that we can see, and it's literally just one by one. And then they combine them.

And then that process of combination is that the space where you mentioned before that there's also art in this because you know, they really do this fine tuning. So let's optimize things. What is more pleasing to the eye? And they come up with this really beautiful, highly contrast to the images, what each of the colors, it's real and it's just a concept and something one will represent. That's the other molecular hydrogen, the other oxygen.

So it is in there and it really gives a scientific meaning to the image. I mean, you know, the phrase like a photo is worth a thousand words or something. Webb is really doing this. Right? Right.

Like, not only is it beautiful, you're just learning so much about the universe and just the connection of everything. So thank you for that wonderful description. We have another great handle. Tofu eating cat on Twitter asks a great question Are there any opportunities for citizen community science with web data? Sure.

That's a good question. Yes. So first, I should say what citizen science is. That is efforts that are efforts to get real interesting investigations that are done by large groups of people in the community who are not trained scientists. And there have been wonderful examples of this in all fields of science, ornithology, in astronomy.

And so for Web, we are still actually working on figuring out how we want to what our strategy for that should be. All of the data go public. Some of them have a one year period where they're secret except to the team that propose that data, but after that year they all go public. So we have a rich archive that anyone can access. And it really is fun to just start zooming around and start playing with the data yourself.

You don't need to be an expert to start wrestling with and making the same face that astronomers make, which is to confuse, you know, face as we're dealing with the real data. So that's the short. So so we're working on it. Yeah. If you have ideas, let us know because that's something for the future.

Yeah. Thank you. And so for those actually interested in citizen science at NASA you can visit Citizen Science dot NASA. gov and explore some of our projects there as well while we keep our fingers crossed for maybe one in the future with web one day. So we have Twitter user Christine Kuga who asks just how deep in the universe can web see as opposed to Hubble.

So I guess can we get a little comparison on their distances? Marker Yeah, I mean, Hubble was what, 13. 3 billion years ago and where this going 13. 5 and beyond. So it's what it feels like a small window when you think of the number, but it's really huge because that evolution of the universe and the times of what's happened there, because that first billion years did happen from, you know, getting organized.

Getting organized. Exactly. Get all your stars together. What are the results that's been so gratifying for me has been to see that with Hubble, we really could just look at the colors and say, well, that's the right color red to be one of those very distant galaxies because it's visible light. Well, right.

Or and just we could we couldn't take spectra, we couldn't get the rainbows. You could just get the colors and a couple filters. With Webb we can get beautiful rainbows and in fact, we can get rainbows for dozens of galaxies at the same time because the near spec instrument can has this neat multiplexing. Right. That one.

That one. That one. That one. That one all at the same time. And so with we're not only saying yup I know exactly how far way each of these galaxies is, but I know what they're made of.

Right. There's the hydrogen, there's my oxygen. Why is there so much nitrogen in that one, which has been a puzzle. And some of these. Right.

We're getting we're getting both very familiar diagnostics and some that we're like, oh, I'm not seen that before. What's different about these early galaxies compared to galaxies in the universe today? So really good follow up to that Twitter user. Arrow Spatial is asking if Webb needs to take a pause after each image. Essentially, is it true that Webb is always observing, always operating 24 seven?

It is always operating. I mean, you take an image, you take a pulse, say to switch your filter or switch your selection of your of your rainbow, and then take another image and then you finish shooting data for your say, role. And then then the telescope has to move to the next target. So while it moves, typically you don't get data from the sky, but it can get some calibration data and then it goes to the next target. So it is essentially observing all the time, except when we do particular like uploading on your software or taking a specific engineering data for processing and understanding how things are going.

But yeah, it is. I would say 24 seven there are little pulses in between and then you have to get there to your target. But usually when you go to of the sky, you optimize it and you do all the targets that are planned for that particular region. It's safe to say it's working over time. Yeah, it is.

Yeah. It's just constantly, yeah, constantly taking data and every week we give it a new plan for the next week and schedule a week out and twice a day we say hi and go download all the data that it's taken in the last half of the day and even when it downloads data, it keeps observing. I'm sorry if it keeps going. It's a very yeah very efficient the telescope that could you know so we are running out of time. But I do have one final, you know, what's next What's next for Webb Sure.

So we are exactly one year into our science mission. We have selected the science for year two. That science just started. We started observing that July 1st, and right now we're doing a mix of finishing the targets that we hadn't gotten to yet from the first year and starting the targets from the second year, and we'll do a mix of that. The first year will ramp down as the second year ramps up.

We have we're about to ask the world, All right, y'all, what are your best ideas for year three? We're going to ask that for a deadline in the fall and really just keeping it coming. And I think that one of the things I'm really gratified to see is that the the easy stuff came out in the first couple of months, and now we're starting to see the papers that really took some analysis with the harder analysis, which gets to the more interesting results. So I think our big results are still ahead of us. That is so exciting to think about, too.

And thank you so much, Dr. Rigby, Dr. Marin, for taking us through this journey of Webb's first year of science. I mean, I think it's safe to say that the best is even yet to come. So we really appreciate having you here today.

Thank you so much. Really a pleasure being here and sharing this celebration with everyone. Yes. And thank you. And thanks to folks who've been with us on that journey.

And, you know, stay with us. It's there's more to come. And thank you to everyone tuning in online. I mean, I love that we were able to answer so many questions and we really hope that you'll keep following the mission as Webb continues to peel back the curtain to the mysteries of the cosmos. To stay updated, follow NASA Webb on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

You can download the highest resolution images, videos and other assets at Webb Telescope dot org Now, remember And I cannot stress this enough. This is just the beginning. Webb's first year of science is an amazing start to what this observatory will continue to do as it transforms our understanding of the universe. To go more in-depth on the mission. Visit Webb dot nasa.

gov and make sure to follow along as Webb continues to unfold the universe. Thank you and see you next time.

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