Webb’s First Images

01Hi, Curious Universe listeners.

02Are you ready for a special season finale episode?

03I'm Nicole Colon, an exoplanet scientist at NASA who works on the Webb Space Telescope team.

04Patty's not able to join us this episode, but I'm honored to step in as your temporary tour guide.

05In the fall of 2021, we released a miniseries all about the James Webb Space Telescope, one of the most ambitious missions ever sent to space.

06This observatory is now situated a million miles away, and it's on a mission to reveal the secrets of our universe.

07We are thrilled to report that Webb has just sent its first detailed cosmic images and other information back to Earth.

08So settle in as we share a bit about Webb's journey since its launch date, and hear why this exciting image release marks the beginning of a new scientific era that might just change the way we see our place in the universe.

09As you listen to the episode, we recommend looking up these magnificent images.

10You can find them at nasa.gov slash webfirstimages.

11Thanks, and enjoy the show!

12It's been said over and over again that the James Webb Space Telescope is the most complex observatory we've ever launched into space.

13And so that meant that there were a lot of moments where all of us had our fingers and toes and legs and arms, everything crossed we possibly could.

14Of course at NASA, we test things, we design things.

15We have the best engineers and scientists in the world.

16But there always is this little bit of luck that things really do have to work.

17I mean, you can have a bad day, or you can have a good day.

18My name is Michelle Thaller, and I am an astronomer and science communicator at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

19After more than 25 years of development, and through the hard work of thousands of people worldwide, the James Webb Space Telescope launched from French Guiana on December 25, 2021.

20The world took a collective sigh of relief when this engineering marvel left the launch pad.

21But the most stressful part of the mission's journey was only just beginning for the scientists and engineers who work on Webb.

22As Webb soared through space towards its final destination, there were exactly 295 things that needed to go perfectly right during its deployment.

23If any one of these failed, the Webb mission would be over before it even really began.

24Imagine building a telescope so big, the mirror won't fit in the rocket unless you fold it up.

25I mean, it was risky.

26The engineering had never been tried before.

27So there was this huge adventure we were on.

28There was this large heat shield.

29It was five layers of very thin material, almost like a mylar, sort of reflective thin material.

30For this thing to unfold correctly, there were little wires that had to pull these sheets taut.

31The sheets had to separate.

32There were all of these little actuators that had to undo themselves for the sheets to unfold correctly.

33And so the first couple of days after the launch, I mean, to me, looking back on it, it was almost like a fairy tale.

34We knew everything that could go wrong.

35If one of these didn't work, then this heat shield would not unfold properly.

36And then one after another, every single one worked.

37Since that intense process of unfolding its various mirrors and tennis court-sized sunshield, Webb has been capturing information from its special lookout point over our universe.

38And now, for the first time ever, we get to experience the universe through Webb's infrared eyes.

39The first five released images from the telescope give us insight into some perplexing cosmic wonders.

40A stellar nursery where stars are formed.

41A giant exoplanet light years away.

42A grouping of galaxies.

43The aftermath of a star's burnout.

44And the deepest image of our universe ever captured.

45I had no idea that's what it looks like.

46Michelle was part of a small group of scientists who got the chance to see those first images from Webb before they were released to the public.

47Let's hear from her about what we are seeing in these incredible images.

48Everybody's heard the cliche, you know, an image is worth a thousand words.

49And it really is true in astronomy.

50And even as a trained astrophysicist, the images blow me away.

51I mean, literally, I get goosebumps.

52All of a sudden I feel part of this vast and large and beautiful system that is our universe.

53So the Webb telescope took a picture of a star-forming region called NGC 3324.

54Now, this is part of a vast cauldron of star birth, a place where hundreds if not thousands of new stars are forming.

55It's a gigantic cloud.

56And I have to say, this was the first image that I actually saw.

57It almost shocked me.

58Because, of course, we were waiting for images from Webb telescope.

59We knew this was the telecon.

60We'd be talking about them.

61But there it was.

62And it really got me.

63This journey of 25 years.

64Hundreds of people that I know.

65Tens of thousands of people around the world who made this possible.

66And the image was beautiful.

67Crystal clear.

68Gorgeously focused.

69And there in front of me was this edge of a glowing, gigantic cloud.

70We'd seen this cloud before.

71But deep down, inside the sort of colorful glow, the heat coming from this cloud, all of a sudden there was this structure we've never seen.

72There were these swirls and these bubbles being blown by winds around the young stars.

73And it now was like we had a ringside seat.

74We'd seen this from a distance.

75But here we are actually looking at every little detail inside the nebula.

76And there's so much mystery still in how stars form.

77There are so many questions about how this process really plays out.

78And it's in there.

79So, again, this was a glance.

80It just leaves you wanting more.

81I want to go in with a fine-tooth comb and look at every little bump and wiggle and wrinkle and find out what it's telling us about how stars form.

82To counterbalance the image of a star birth, Webb also took an amazing picture of a star death, the other side of a star's lifetime.

83It's a star unraveling itself into space after its main nuclear reactions go off inside.

84And we see many of these around the sky.

85The Hubble Space Telescope has taken so many gorgeous pictures of them.

86They're very popular poster subjects and all of that.

87And the Webb Telescope had this image.

88I'd seen the nebula before.

89But the reveal underneath as to what was going on was breathtaking.

90So in previous images, for example, there was a kind of a bright center that we knew was the dying star.

91We knew from other observations it was a binary star, two stars going around each other.

92But with the unprecedented resolution of Webb, we could actually see that binary star as two distinct stars.

93And the thing about infrared is it can actually look through layers of obscuring dust, dark material that gets in the way of seeing inside these clouds.

94So here is this dramatic moment where these stars are basically dying, shedding their material back out into space.

95This is where the chemistry of life begins.

96Pretty much all of the heavy elements in the universe, things that are heavier than hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, iron, phosphorus, sulfur, all these things that biology needs, you know, the calcium in my teeth.

97All of that stuff, stars form that naturally when they die.

98But if you look at how much of that stuff was around in the universe, most of that came from this first generation of stars.

99There was just this party of element formation.

100All of this stuff came pouring out of these exploding young stars.

101We haven't been able to see that.

102We simply know that the universe all of a sudden had this chemistry that it could start to build molecules and life and planets and everything else.

103So we're looking back to the beginning of us.

104The place where a lot of the atoms inside your body were formed.

105There it is, right in front of you.

106The dying star.

107So there's the image of a grouping of galaxies called Stefan's Quintet.

108Stefan's Quintet is a group of galaxies that are interacting with each other.

109They're tugging on each other gravitationally.

110Galaxies are such monsters.

111These are these families of hundreds of billions of stars.

112And they don't really exist in space alone.

113They tend to cluster.

114They tend to interact.

115I mean, our own Milky Way galaxy turns out to be swallowing up smaller galaxies left, right, and center.

116So with Stefan's Quintet, this is something that as an astronomer I've known about for quite a while.

117They're doing this beautiful dance.

118They're slowly colliding and ripping each other apart over billions of years.

119When I saw the James Webb Space Telescope image, what I'd never seen before is the depth into the galaxies that we're looking.

120So in a visible light image like Hubble, you can see the beautiful glow of all the stars.

121But with the James Webb Space Telescope, all of a sudden there was this detail underneath, this almost skeleton of where the gas and the dust were going, how the collision was really unfolding.

122And this is exactly what we wanted James Webb to do.

123The story is there.

124Just a glance told me that.

125And now we're going to go back over weeks and months and years and find out every single little detail about what's really going on there.

126Webb also sent data back from an exoplanet called WASP-96b.

127One of the big things we were waiting for with the James Webb Space Telescope was the measurement of an exoplanet's atmosphere, the actual chemistry.

128So we've been detecting exoplanets left, right, and center, but all we can see is just them blocking out the light from their stars.

129What is the atmosphere really like?

130WASP-96b is a planet around another star a bit more than a thousand light years away from us.

131And it's a big planet.

132It's about the mass of Saturn, we think.

133It's actually bigger than Saturn because it's very close to its star, and therefore it's very hot.

134And so basically it's kind of puffed up.

135It's so warm, the gases are kind of expanding in the atmosphere.

136And so it's this big puffball of a planet.

137The amazing thing to me, and I think this is something people don't appreciate, Webb was able to measure the chemical content of this planet quickly.

138And just exploding in front of our eyes were multiple signatures of water.

139Now, in this case, the planet's very warm, so we're looking at water vapor, probably reasonably hot water vapor.

140And so we're not looking at liquid water the way we have here on the surface of Earth.

141But just as a demonstration, look at one planet for a fairly short amount of time, and there you have it.

142There's the chemistry.

143We know it has all these different signals, not just water, but many other chemicals that we can see in that spectrum.

144It's a squiggly line, but there's so much wonderful information in there.

145So this was an amazing start for Webb, just to show that we can make one of these beautiful observations detect the chemistry quickly.

146And I have to say, for this one, I'm really looking forward to what goes on from here.

147Because soon enough, I really think we're going to find a planet that's about the same temperature and the same size as Earth.

148And when we start finding things like water vapor there, that's truly exciting.

149There were some things with the Webb Telescope that everybody was looking forward to.

150We all knew that we were going to see.

151The James Webb Space Telescope took a picture of a distant group of galaxies called SMACS 0723.

152Now, this was one of the images that everyone was waiting for.

153I mean, you could just tell.

154When we were on the telecon and they were showing us images, we were gasping and we were all texting each other little applause symbols for the different images that came up.

155But we knew that the last one they were going to show us was going to be a deep image of the universe.

156So this was the big deal about the James Webb Space Telescope.

157How deep can we go?

158How far away?

159And therefore, how deep back in time?

160Because the light took so long to get to us.

161So this is a beautiful cluster of galaxies.

162And it's very dramatic because you'll see all of these kind of arcs and things that look sort of smudged all around it.

163And what that really is, it's just kind of mind-blowing, is you're looking at the gravity of some galaxies actually creating natural lenses out of space itself.

164The gravity of galaxies that are a bit closer to us, they're still very far away, but they're actually bending space into a natural telescope.

165And that actually leaves the images from distant galaxies even farther away than the cluster.

166As they pass through this lens, they get distorted and warped into these wonderful, smeared-out images.

167To me, when you see this image, it's almost hard to believe that this is really what you see on the sky.

168This has not been altered or created by computer animators.

169If you had eyes as sensitive as James Webb, you would see these smears and these arcs that are really the consequence of bent space, lensed space.

170That's amazing.

171But it's safe to say that you're looking at the universe the way it was probably only about 500 million years after the Big Bang.

172And that's amazing.

173That's the dawn of the first galaxies.

174I think as we get better with our observations, we might even tease out some of the signals from the first stars.

175Let me just say, the thing about this particular deep image of the universe was when I first saw it, I was just impressed by the beauty.

176I know what we're looking for.

177I know the scientific questions that we're trying to ask with this image.

178But just for now, just sit back and look at this.

179This grandeur, this beauty on a scale our minds don't process.

180This is the treasure we get to begin picking through.

181And let's just see what we're going to find.

182The first images from Webb signal a new era of discovery for NASA and for the world.

183In this new era, we'll gain a new perspective on the universe's cosmic history.

184We'll open the door to new ways of probing the atmospheres of terrestrial planets.

185And even look for signs of potentially habitable worlds.

186These new images still only scratch the surface of what discoveries will be made possible with Webb.

187Scientists like Michelle can't wait for how Webb's research will change our understanding of the universe.

188It's so easy to think of scientists and science as sort of this, you know, this sort of monolithic population that is different than us.

189You know, somehow scientists don't have the same feelings.

190These are real people.

191And people who dedicated their lives.

192It is a privilege to work for NASA and to be involved in this pure exploration.

193And to be surrounded by people that share those goals.

194That want to spend their lives doing that thing.

195I want you to realize when you think about Webb.

196And when you think about these images.

197The wonderful, real, warm people that made this possible.

198And how much joy they feel in presenting these images to you.

199These belong to all of us now.

200And the universe is about to change.

201Wow.

202I know when I first saw these images, I was blown away.

203And remember, you can see these incredible images by visiting nasa.gov slash webfirstimages.

204This is NASA's Curious Universe.

205This episode was written and produced by Katie Atkinson and Erica Kreiner, with additional support from Liz Landau.

206The Curious Universe team includes Patty Boyd, Christina Dana, Michaela Sosby, and Maddie Arnold.

207Our theme song was composed by Matt Rousseau and Andrew Santagueta of System Sounds.

208Special thanks to Mike McClare, Mike Menzel, and the James Webb Space Telescope team.

209Thank you for tuning in to the fourth season of NASA's Curious Universe.

210We've enjoyed taking you along with us as we've explored even more of our wild and wonderful universe.

211From the lunar surface to supersonic flight and more.

212We're taking a break now, but we'll be back this fall with more adventures.

213Until then, you can continue exploring with NASA by visiting nasa.gov.

214And find more NASA podcasts, like Houston We Have a Podcast and On a Mission, in your favorite podcast app or by visiting nasa.gov slash podcasts.

215Patty, we love you.

216Get well soon.

217Thank you.

218Thank you.

219Thank you.