It is as if they are using a telescope not only to look at space, but also at time.
Canadian scientists are already using spectacular data and images from the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope to look back at some of the oldest stars ever studied and forward at how new stars and planets are born.
“One of the holy grails of astronomy is finding stars that are the first stars to form after the Big Bang,” said Ghassan Sarrouh of the University of York, co-author of a study on star clusters that already has been published with James Webb. data “That’s what we think they are: the first stars.”
At the other end of time, Western University’s Els Peeters is looking into the future by studying hot young stars in the constellation Orion and their influence on the interstellar material surrounding them.
“Into this material is where the next generation of stars will be born,” he said.
Don’t forget the planets. A group at the University of Montreal is looking at exoplanets, especially Earth-sized ones with water and other essential elements in their atmospheres that just might host life.
“We already had a first result,” said Nathalie Oullette. “About a month ago was the first detection of carbon dioxide on an exoplanet.”
The James Webb is the result of $13 billion and more than two decades of work. The successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, Webb orbits much deeper in space and is between a hundred and a million times more sensitive.
Two of its main components, a machine that aims the telescope with impressive precision and another that analyzes light far beyond the visible spectrum, were designed and built in Canada. This has given Canadian researchers the right to claim five percent of the telescope’s observing time.
Scientists are almost giddy with the quality of what they are recovering.
“Amazing,” said Erik Rosolowsky of the University of Alberta, who uses Webb’s infrared capabilities to study how black holes create voids in interstellar dust, the sites of new star birth. “It’s like someone gave us a set of X-ray specs.”
Before Webb, astronomers could spend days analyzing murky data, separating the signal from the noise, Oullette said.
“It’s quite remarkable how clean the (Webb) data is,” she said. “With Webb, you don’t have to dig through the data to find the signal.”
Sarrouh puts Webb’s images next to Hubble’s.
“You can just see that one set of images is really fuzzy and blurry. The other is full of all these really sharp points that just glow.”
The results are pouring in. Rosolowsky and his team already have 21 papers in the works.
And already, scientists feel their mental star maps change.
It appears, for example, that things may have started much earlier than the Big Bang than previously thought, Oullette said.
“Maybe structure started earlier than we thought and galaxies started forming earlier than we thought.”
Rosolowsky has confirmed the existence of black holes so large that they leave large holes in the center of galaxies where stars would normally form.
“We can see directly and say that this black hole is tearing apart all of these protostars before they even get going.”
Peeters calls it a new era in astronomy.
“It’s only been operational for three months and we’ve already learned a lot.”
Sarrouh said it’s a great time to be a Canadian astronomer.
“It will allow us to see into a time that we’ve never seen before. You can almost think of the James Webb as a time machine.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published on October 10, 2022.
— Follow Bob Weber on Twitter at @row1960