There’s been a lot of breath-holding since the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) launched on Dec. 25, but now astronomers can exhale: The $10-billion US telescope safely reached its destination Monday afternoon.
???? Home, home on Lagrange! We successfully completed our burn to start <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/NASAWebb?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#NASAWebb</a> on its orbit of the 2nd Lagrange point (L2), about a million miles (1.5 million km) from Earth. It will orbit the Sun, in line with Earth, as it orbits L2. <a href=”https://t.co/bsIU3vccAj”>https://t.co/bsIU3vccAj</a> <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/UnfoldTheUniverse?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#UnfoldTheUniverse</a> <a href=”https://t.co/WDhuANEP5h”>pic.twitter.com/WDhuANEP5h</a>
“We’re just really excited to announce today that Webb is officially on station at its L2 orbit,” Keith Parrish, Webb observatory commissioning manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center said in a media teleconference. “This is just capping off a remarkable 30 days.”
Lagrange Points are a kind of sweet spot in space where there is a pull between two objects like the sun and Earth and spacecraft can operate in either a stable or semi-stable orbit. Webb will sit at Lagrangian Point 2, or L2.
Webb is the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990. Hubble is still hard at work, providing astronomers with insight into our universe, but Webb is a new and improved telescope that will peer further back to a time when our universe was in its infancy.
Although Webb has arrived safely at the Lagrange Point 2, the telescope will still undergo several months of testing to ensure everything is functioning properly.
After that, the science begins.
Lagrange Points are positions in space where the gravitational forces of a two-body system like the sun and the Earth produce enhanced regions of attraction and repulsion. These can be used by spacecraft to reduce fuel consumption needed to remain in position. (NASA/WMAP Science Team)
“It’s going to be amazing when we get the first data coming back,” said Chris Willott, an astronomer with National Research Council Canada’s Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Centre.
“I can’t even predict the things we’re going to discover just within the first year. There are so many new things we’re going to discover.”
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Willott heads the CAnadian NIRISS Unbiased Cluster Survey (CANUCS) observing program, which will study some of the first galaxies that formed, as well as galaxy clusters. NIRISS stands for Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph.
One of the things Willott is most interested in is black holes.
“We know that today most galaxies have large black holes in their centres, including our own galaxy,” he said. “So I’ll be trying to look at how those black holes got started in the very early universe because we know that some of them got very large, very quickly, which is kind of surprising.”
This picture from a NASA TV broadcast shows the James Webb Space Telescope shortly after launching from French Guiana, on December 25. (NASA TV)
Large telescopes (even ground-based ones) are available to professional astronomers who want to use them. However, they first have to submit proposals and have them approved.
The reason Willott and more than a dozen other Canadian astronomers are getting time on Webb is that Canada contributed to the groundbreaking telescope by providing instruments: the fine-guidance sensor, which allows it to point and focus on objects, and the NIRISS that will be used to study the composition of the atmospheres on distant planets — called exoplanets — that orbit other stars.
Now, these astronomers are eagerly awaiting their time to study everything from the earliest galaxy formations to rogue planets (planets that don’t have stars), and look for possible signs of life on other exoplanets.
Using Webb, they will practically time-travel as they look back to a nascent universe.
Black holes and habitable worlds
Any light that reaches us takes time. The light from the sun takes eight minutes to reach us. So, when we (safely) look at the sun, we are looking at it as it was eight minutes ago.
The same applies to any light that reaches us from stars or galaxies. The farther they are, the farther back in time we’re looking. But we need powerful telescopes to look farther back, and Webb is the most powerful telescope capable of doing that.
To put it in perspective, our universe is roughly 13.8 billion years old. Webb will be able to see back to when it was roughly 100,000 years old, when the first stars and galaxies were forming.
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Els Peeters will be one of the first Canadian astronomers to use Webb. Her research centres around radiation — which is mostly seen in infrared light, something that Webb is built to see in — and how it influences young stars. Until now, she hasn’t been able to peer through the dust and debris that so often surrounds nebulas hosting young stars.
“The way I think about it is if you take a picture of a crowd cheering on, for example, a basketball game of the Raptors — with the old cameras, every face of the person would be maybe four pixels,” said Peeters, who is a professor in the physics and astronomy department at Western University in London, Ont.
“With the new cameras, every face, [will be] maybe 1,000 pixels. And so if you have many, many pixels over the same area, that means that you can track how the characteristics of a person’s face can change.
“Now, you can say ‘has blue eyes,’ ‘it has a broad nose’ or ‘a tiny nose’ and these kinds of stuff.”
This illustration compares the abilities of several space-based telescopes and their ability to see back in time. (NASA and Ann Feild)
This preciseness will allow her and her team to study new star formation in an unprecedented way.
Erik Rosolowsky is an associate professor of physics at Edmonton’s University of Alberta who will be using the telescope to study star formation.
“What I’m going to be doing is trying to establish how long it takes for stars to form,” he said. “This is a big question in astrophysics, and you might think that this is a boring kind of science topic or something, but the time it takes for stars to form actually tells us a bunch about how they form.”
And that can tell us a lot about not only our universe, but our galaxy as well as perhaps our own solar system.
“With James Webb, for the first time, we [will be able to] see individual stars forming in this nearby spiral galaxy called the Triangulum Galaxy,” Roslowsky said. “It’s a relatively simple experiment, but it’s been impossible to do until we’ve had the capabilities of the James Webb Space Telescope.”
One of the most intriguing observations will be of the TRAPPIST-1 system.
“We don’t know if those planets have an atmosphere or not,” said Olivia Lim, a Ph.D. student at the University of Montreal who will be using Webb to study the atmospheres of the innermost of these planets — the ones with the best chance of habitability.
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“They might be balls of rock with no atmosphere at all, we don’t know that. So we’re trying to figure that out,” she said. “If they do have an atmosphere, that means there may be a chance to look for traces of life in those atmospheres.”
Studying these things — star and galaxy formation, the atmospheres of distant exoplanets — may seem inconsequential and unimportant. But astronomers believe that it’s all part of humanity: understanding our place in the universe.
“It’s really about understanding our whole universe, understanding where we came from and what the future will be,” Willott said. “It’s a fundamental question for humans, I think, to understand, you know, what are we doing here and what is the nature of the universe?”
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — The body of Ugandan Olympic athlete Rebecca Cheptegei — who died after being set on fire by her partner in Kenya — was received Friday by family and anti-femicide crusaders, ahead of her burial a day later.
Cheptegei’s family met with dozens of activists Friday who had marched to the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital’s morgue in the western city of Eldoret while chanting anti-femicide slogans.
She is the fourth female athlete to have been killed by her partner in Kenya in yet another case of gender-based violence in recent years.
Viola Cheptoo, the founder of Tirop Angels – an organization that was formed in honor of athlete Agnes Tirop, who was stabbed to death in 2021, said stakeholders need to ensure this is the last death of an athlete due to gender-based violence.
“We are here to say that enough is enough, we are tired of burying our sisters due to GBV,” she said.
It was a somber mood at the morgue as athletes and family members viewed Cheptegei’s body which sustained 80% of burns after she was doused with gasoline by her partner Dickson Ndiema. Ndiema sustained 30% burns on his body and later succumbed.
Ndiema and Cheptegei were said to have quarreled over a piece of land that the athlete bought in Kenya, according to a report filed by the local chief.
Cheptegei competed in the women’s marathon at the Paris Olympics less than a month before the attack. She finished in 44th place.
Cheptegei’s father, Joseph, said that the body will make a brief stop at their home in the Endebess area before proceeding to Bukwo in eastern Uganda for a night vigil and burial on Saturday.
“We are in the final part of giving my daughter the last respect,” a visibly distraught Joseph said.
He told reporters last week that Ndiema was stalking and threatening Cheptegei and the family had informed police.
Four in 10 women or an estimated 41% of dating or married Kenyan women have experienced physical or sexual violence perpetrated by their current or most recent partner, according to the Kenya Demographic and Health Survey 2022.
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.
Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.
Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.
The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.
The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.
It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.
Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.
Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.
Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.
Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.
Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.
The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”
VICTORIA – The British Columbia government is partnering with a bear welfare group to reduce the number of bears being euthanized in the province.
Nicholas Scapillati, executive director of Grizzly Bear Foundation, said Monday that it comes after months-long discussions with the province on how to protect bears, with the goal to give the animals a “better and second chance at life in the wild.”
Scapillati said what’s exciting about the project is that the government is open to working with outside experts and the public.
“So, they’ll be working through Indigenous knowledge and scientific understanding, bringing in the latest techniques and training expertise from leading experts,” he said in an interview.
B.C. government data show conservation officers destroyed 603 black bears and 23 grizzly bears in 2023, while 154 black bears were killed by officers in the first six months of this year.
Scapillati said the group will publish a report with recommendations by next spring, while an independent oversight committee will be set up to review all bear encounters with conservation officers to provide advice to the government.
Environment Minister George Heyman said in a statement that they are looking for new ways to ensure conservation officers “have the trust of the communities they serve,” and the panel will make recommendations to enhance officer training and improve policies.
Lesley Fox, with the wildlife protection group The Fur-Bearers, said they’ve been calling for such a committee for decades.
“This move demonstrates the government is listening,” said Fox. “I suspect, because of the impending election, their listening skills are potentially a little sharper than they normally are.”
Fox said the partnership came from “a place of long frustration” as provincial conservation officers kill more than 500 black bears every year on average, and the public is “no longer tolerating this kind of approach.”
“I think that the conservation officer service and the B.C. government are aware they need to change, and certainly the public has been asking for it,” said Fox.
Fox said there’s a lot of optimism about the new partnership, but, as with any government, there will likely be a lot of red tape to get through.
“I think speed is going to be important, whether or not the committee has the ability to make change and make change relatively quickly without having to study an issue to death, ” said Fox.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 9, 2024.
