I mentioned last Friday that the Webb Telescope was sending back its first images of almost the very center of the universe - as it was less than a billion years after the Big Bang.
Today I want to say a bit more about the importance of this incredible achievement and the kind of mindset it takes to envisage and then build such a discovery-machine.
The telescope was first imagined in the 1980s. For over 25 years, planning and designing and building and funding and engineering and science have been brought together to create something that will see into our very origins. This insight and imagination is impressive, but I think even more impressive is the commitment, determination, and sheer belief that keeps a project like that moving forward.
Over 20,000 people have worked on the Webb telescope project. It almost lost funding after setbacks, and Senator Barbara Mikulski led the Senate in 2011 to approve funding for it to continue (in the middle of a recession). This kind of insistence on investing in the future, in science, when the economic conditions were tough, shows me (and hopefully you) that we can make those sorts of forward-looking decisions again.
Science is always hard to justify, from a budget perspective, especially for long and involved projects. No-one knows if a project like Webb will succeed. So many pieces could fail - from the equipment to the launch to the communication of images back to Earth. Even if it did succeed, no-one knew whether it would show anything of value. And yet, we took a leap of faith, because if we DID succeed, it could show us the entire universe.
As John Mather, the senior project scientist said:
“All the tools are working, better than we hoped and promised. Scientific observations, proposed years ago, are being made as we speak.”
It worked! And in just the first few days….
“We have seen distant galaxies, as they were when the universe was less than a billion years old, and we’re just beginning the search. We have seen galaxies colliding and merging, revealing their chemical secrets. We have seen one black hole close up, in the nucleus of a nearby galaxy, and measured the material escaping from it. We’ve seen the debris when a star exploded, liberating the chemical elements that will build the next generations of stars and planets. We have started a search for Earth 2.0, by watching a planet transiting in front of its star, and measuring the molecules in its atmosphere.”
I’d say that it’s a success already, and I hope there are many more years of images and learning that we will have from Webb.
This is an important project from so many perspectives, including the specifics we will learn about our beginnings and whether we seem to be truly unique on our little planet or whether there are other places out there that have developed similarly to us.
But it’s even more important (in some ways) simply because it inspires us. It fuels our imagination and spurs us to continue to explore, uncover, test, and delve. It reminds us that we have more to give each other and create and build than we have up to now. It shows us that while what we do on Earth matters, we are still small, and sometimes, we can be too petty. I hope that some of our current crop of U.S. senators and representatives are reflecting about this endeavor, and allowing themselves to wonder how they too can inspire us and help us look forward and invest in our future.
With this telescope we have access to nothing less than the very essence of what we want to know about our place in the universe. Says Mather:
“We want to know: Where did we come from? What happened after the big bang to make galaxies and stars and black holes? We have predictions and guesses, but astronomy is an observational science, full of surprises. What are the dark matter and dark energy doing? How do stars and planets grow inside those beautiful clouds of gas and dust? Do the rocky planets we can observe with Webb have any atmosphere at all, and is there water there? Are there any planetary systems like our solar system? So far we have found exactly none. We’ll look at our own solar system with new infrared eyes, looking for chemical traces of our history, and tracking down mysteries like Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, composition of the ocean under the ice of Europa, and the atmosphere of Saturn’s giant moon Titan. We’ll be ready to study the next interstellar comet.”
I love this list. Some bits of knowledge will be technical - the amount of atmosphere on rocky planets. Some bits of knowledge will define us, our history and our future.
But there is one thing I want to highlight more than anything about this project and the people who have made it happen.
They all expect to be wrong.
Wrong about what we think we know right now, wrong about how the universe works or what it’s made of, and more. It is the best kind of humility because it’s born simply from curiosity, and the recognition that we are just beginning to scratch the surface of our understanding of space. And if that doesn’t capture the essence of humanity, I don’t know what does.
As a final reflection in a post on the NASA blog, Mather says:
“We know the Webb images will rewrite our textbooks, and we hope for a new discovery, something so important that our view of the universe will be overturned once again”
Fascinating.....