And after enough investigation, they discovered that the mirror had been ground to the wrong shape. But no matter what they did, the images were still blurry. Maybe they thought they’d need to adjust something. Well, once they started getting the first images back, all the images were blurry. But when it launched, it was a huge embarrassment for NASA. ken changīack in 1990, NASA launched the Hubble Space Telescope, which has produced these amazing pictures of the universe that almost everyone has seen. Tell us how this telescope came to be and how it became this defining moment for NASA. So when we look at the farthest things, we are looking back in time. Because light takes time to reach us, the farther anything is, the longer it takes light to get to us. ken changĪstronomy really is time travel. I don’t want to say the words time travel, but it feels the closest to time travel we have. And this is probably within 1/2 billion years after the Big Bang, the very star of the universe. It’s looking back to when the first stars and the first galaxies formed. James Webb is bigger, so that means it can gather much more light and see dimmer objects much farther away to almost the Big Bang. It’s the successor to NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, which has been taking photographs of the Earth for decades now. This James Webb telescope sounds like space’s newest, hottest invention. So tell us about the piece of technology that actually took these images. This is basically just scratching the surface of what we’ll be able to do in the coming years. It’s like taking your car for a quick spin, which you know it can do so much more. So these are basically the very first efforts just pointing the telescope at the very first few targets, and not even trying very hard yet. Someone was joking that all the astronomers in the world changed their background screens on their computers yesterday. One person said that she ugly cried when she saw the first data. The scientists kept on saying that they were speechless. What was the scientific reaction to these images? ken chang It really does, obviously, remind you of our smallness. This is how the oxygen in our bodies was made in stars, in galaxies, and we’re seeing that process get started. things going on that you never realized until you put a telescope in space to look at them. Kind of littered like jewels, all over the back of the image are these faint red galaxies. There’s just a sharpness and a clarity we’ve never had. But once you look at it in these new wavelengths of light, you realize there’s exciting structure - archived recording It’s amazing, is that you realize that the universe, you just look in the sky, it looks like it’s mostly empty. There are galaxies here in which you’re seeing individual clusters of stars forming, popping up just like popcorn. So this is what they call deep field, which is, basically, point this telescope at a relatively empty part of the sky and see what’s out there. You could see another picture of a dying star, another one of five galaxies that are in this intricate gravitational dance. You could see all these ripples of gas where new stars are being born. There was an amazing photograph of this stellar nursery. archived recordingĪnd they were just gorgeous. ken changĪnd then Tuesday, NASA had a separate event to show four other photographs. Are you ready to put the first image up? Oh, let’s do it. The universe is 13.8 billion years, so it’s going way back. Light where stars were born and from where they’ve died. ken changĪnd one of the things they saw was a galaxy where it’s so far away that the light took more than 13 billion years to get to us here on Earth. These images are going to remind the world that America can do big things. President Biden had a special event to unveil the very first photograph. So these first photographs from Webb were so amazing that on Monday - archived recording (joe biden)Ħ and 1/2 months ago, a rocket launched from Earth, carrying the world’s newest, most powerful deep space telescope. This is the biggest, newest telescope that NASA has. Yeah, we finally got pictures back from the James Webb Space Telescope. Can you tell us about these new pictures from NASA that were revealed? ken chang
So, Ken, there was big news in space this week. Today, my colleague Ken Chang on the telescope that took those images, its journey to launch, and what it can teach us about the universe. This week, NASA released new groundbreaking pictures taken from a point in space 1 million miles from Earth. Friday, July 15th, 2022 įrom The New York Times, I’m Astead Herndon. Transcript A View of the Beginning of Time What astronomers saw when the largest space observatory ever built sent its first images back to Earth.
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