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0s Pilots get ready to warp to the James
3s Webb Telescope please welcome to the
6s stage Professor Mark McLaughlin
12s good morning
14s thank you
16s so it's my job this morning to take you
18s back to real space from the space where
20s you spend most of your lives as far as I
22s can tell
23s um
24s I have a son who's about your age I'm
26s looking out I'm guessing most of you are
28s a bit younger than me
30s um but it's my job today to talk about a
32s project which has actually taken a very
33s long time so when I started on this I
35s was just as young as you were and I'll
38s show you some pictures at the end to
39s demonstrate that so this is the James
41s Webb Space Telescope it's a joint
43s project of NASA the European Space
46s Agency who I work for and the Canadian
48s space agency and I've been a member of
51s the science working group the science
52s team for this Mission since 2002 and I
57s started on the project in 1998. so a
60s long time ago to get to this point where
62s we are today
63s where finally this telescope is in Orbit
67s and taking science data
69s so let's see if we can make this machine
72s work here
74s maybe not we're going to have the
76s trouble right from the beginning
78s all right we have a backup
86s that doesn't work either
98s yeah it doesn't seem to be
102s let me try again we worked earlier
106s just give us a moment guys
119s all right we'll go with that
121s so on Christmas Day
123s 2021 the James Webb Space Telescope was
127s launched into orbit on an Ariane 5
130s rocket from French Guiana so the
132s European Space Agency is one of its big
134s contributions to this mission was the
135s Aryan 5 rocket you can see it going into
137s space here but this story actually
140s starts a long time before that
145s maybe if I go and stand all the way over
147s here
148s doesn't really matter where I stand on
149s stage
153s there you go
156s so the story starts actually back here
158s this is in the um in 1990 this is the
161s launch of the Hubble Space Telescope
163s which has now been in space for more
164s than 33 years and even before we
167s launched Hubble in 1990 we knew that at
171s some point we would need a new Space
172s Telescope to do things that Hubble
174s couldn't do and so in the mid-1980s up
179s until 1989 a study was started to look
182s at what we call then ngst the next
185s Generation Space Telescope so this
188s conference took place in 1989 even
190s before we launched the Hubble Space
192s Telescope and it took all of those years
194s that Hubble has been operating to get to
196s where we are today so these are very
198s long-term projects but we can go back
200s even further than that
203s and think about what human beings can
206s see in space with the naked eye so this
208s is a shot from a beach in New Zealand
211s and we can see the Milky Way our galaxy
213s the one we live in with roughly 200
215s billion stars we can see the two
218s external galaxies there on the left-hand
220s side a large and small magellanic clouds
223s which orbit around our Milky Way and we
226s can see with the naked eye about 6 000
229s Stars over the whole sky
231s so it looks like there are many more in
233s this picture of course this is a
234s photograph it can capture fainter light
236s than we can see with a naked eye but
238s astronomers are always greedy for more
240s light we always want to see fainter
242s things so over the years we've invented
245s machines called telescopes so starting
247s roughly 400 years ago with Galileo we've
250s built telescopes bigger and bigger
252s collecting more and more light to see
253s fainter and fainter objects and this
256s picture here
257s shows you one of the biggest
258s observatories in the world this is
260s called an astronomers are boring this is
262s called the very large telescope
265s um and this sets on a Mountaintop in
267s Chile at about two and a half thousand
270s meters you can see some small telescopes
272s there on the left hand side and this
274s giant telescope there which has a main
276s collecting mirror eight meters across so
279s roughly the width of the stage here at
281s the front and with that of course we can
282s collect much more light than the human
284s eye can collect but astronomers are even
286s more greedy than that because we not
288s only have one of them
291s on the same Mountain Top we decided to
294s build another one
297s and another one
300s it does stop soon and another one so
303s there are four of these eight meter
304s telescope which make up the very large
306s telescope and they can all be linked
307s together underground the light can be
309s channeled and we can actually collect
311s the light from all of those not only
313s with more sensitivity to see fainter
315s objects but also we can link them up to
318s do to get higher resolution more detail
320s on the objects now this is a place where
323s telescopes are cited especially if they
327s want to work
328s in the infrared or at millimeter
331s wavelengths this is the summit of Mauna
333s Kea in Hawaii so it's 4.2 kilometers
335s altitude and that puts you above most of
338s the water vapor in Earth's atmosphere
340s and water vapor absorbs infrared light
343s that's why it's part of the greenhouse
344s gas equation along with CO2 water vapor
348s absorbs the infrared and you want to get
349s above as much of it as you can in order
352s to be able to see that radiation coming
354s from space and the telescope on the left
357s hand side I'll come back to it right at
358s the end that's the United Kingdom
360s infrared telescope that's a four meter
362s wide telescope so very small by modern
364s standards but it's where I got my PhD
367s thesis in the 1980s and I'll come back
369s to that right at the end and just you
371s know one of those geeky astronomer
372s things I got married on the summit of
374s that mountain as well because that's
375s what astronomers do
378s thank you
380s so even Mauna Kea though is not the
383s perfect observational site for
384s astronomers clouds very often go
386s underneath
387s um because the Big Island sticking out
389s in the Pacific the clouds go below that
391s altitude quite often but not always so
393s there are times when there are clouds
395s above you on Mauna Kea
397s and even when there are no clouds
402s I'm getting two clicks now
405s then there's a glow in the sky humans
407s can't really see it but our telescopes
409s because they're so sensitive they
410s capture so much light they can see this
413s reddish glow in the sky and it's even
414s brighter in the infrared and what this
417s glow is is molecules at about 80
419s kilometers altitude made of one oxygen
422s and one hydrogen it's called the
424s hydroxyl molecule and that captures
426s ultraviolet light during the daytime and
428s at night it releases that energy in the
431s form of a visible glow and an infrared
433s glow so if you're trying to see faint
435s objects in space of course you're trying
436s to look through all of that bright stuff
438s in the foreground it's a bit like me now
440s I can really not see the people at the
442s back because they've got such a bright
443s light in my face if you turn that off I
445s would have a much clearer vision and so
447s that's again a problem with astronomy
449s you want to get rid of as much of the
451s bright background so you can see these
453s faint objects
455s now even if you manage to do that then
457s you have this to compete with on the
459s earth and that's called what we call
460s seeing this is atmospheric turbulence
463s heat rising in the atmosphere and that
466s causes the refractive index of the
468s atmosphere to change slightly from place
470s to place and if you look very carefully
472s you can see the moon is not just moving
474s All in One Direction at once to the left
476s then to the right bits of it are moving
478s in different directions all over the
480s place uh the kind of a rubber sheeting
482s there
483s and that means if I have a very bright a
485s source I want to look at which is a
486s point of light a distant star it gets
489s smeared out it gets blurred into a into
491s a rounder Circle and that limits the
494s resolution you can get from the Earth
498s we can correct some of that by using
501s lasers we can attach big lasers to our
503s telescopes shine them up to about 80
506s kilometers again hit sodium atoms in the
509s upper atmosphere make artificial Stars
511s which then help us deform the telescope
514s in a way which corrects the turbulence
516s so that's called laser guide star
518s Adaptive Optics and we use that for very
520s small pieces of the sky where it works
522s well but again it's not perfect across
525s big areas of the sky which you want to
527s survey so in the end you put telescopes
530s in space it's a lot more expensive it
532s takes a long time to develop them but
534s there are huge advantages to putting
536s these big machines in space this is the
538s Hubble Space Telescope which you see I
540s showed you at the beginning launched in
541s 1990 it's still in operation it's had
544s several missions over its lifetime
546s changing instruments changing faulty
548s Parts fixing the mirror which was broken
550s in the first place
552s um
553s we're having fun this morning and has
557s new solar panels and so on so Hubble Is
559s Still operational but Hubble is a
561s visible wavelength telescope it focuses
563s on the wavelengths you and I can see in
565s this room it goes into the ultraviolet
567s and a little bit into the infrared but
569s it's not really a very good infrared
571s telescope at all and the reason for that
573s is that this telescope is close to the
575s Earth you can see it's just at about 400
577s kilometers above the earth the earth is
580s heating the telescope from underneath
581s the sun is heating it from the other
583s side the whole telescope is about room
585s temperature we like to think that space
587s is cold well not if you're near a planet
588s and not if you're near a star it's
591s actually about room temperature out
592s there in space you'll die for other
594s reasons but you won't die of cold
597s um
597s so the telescope is heated up to 20
600s degrees and that means that it's giving
602s out light not in the visible it's dark
605s in the visible but it's giving out light
606s in the infrared heat radiation and that
609s means it has this bright background of
611s emission which makes it hard to see
613s faint objects in the infrared so it's
615s not a very good infrared telescope at
616s all
617s the other advantage of putting
619s telescopes in space is that the Earth's
621s atmosphere I told you it absorbs water a
625s water absorbs infrared light but other
627s molecules in the atmosphere absorb other
629s kinds of light coming from space and if
631s you look on the left hand side there the
633s atmosphere is completely opaque you
635s can't see through it at all at gamma ray
637s wavelengths or x-rays so if you want to
639s do that kind of astronomy you have to be
641s in Space the same for the whole of the
644s middle infrared between 100 Micron
646s wavelength and one millimeter you pretty
648s much have to be in space or on super
650s high mountains with no water vapor at
652s all
653s so Hubble works at visible wavelengths
655s there and you see just to the left
656s that's the infrared where the James Webb
658s Space Telescope works so we have all of
660s these different missions in space which
662s operate at different wavelengths and
665s jwst was designed to fit in at the red
667s end of the optical the visible that we
669s can see all the way out to wavelengths
671s about 50 or 60 times longer than that
674s and you can see some of that you can see
676s from the ground some of those photons
677s make it down to the ground but many of
679s them don't and with jwst we get rid of
682s all of those barriers at different
684s wavelengths
686s now
688s one of the most famous pictures ever
691s taken by the Hubble Space Telescope is
693s called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field it's
695s a very tiny piece of the sky it's about
697s the size of a piece of rice held at the
700s end of your your arm so it's very small
702s area on the sky and the Hubble pointed
705s at it for around about a month taking
707s images every few minutes and you add the
710s images together you stack them up and at
712s the end of the month you get this view
713s which is seeing galaxies
717s very few stars in our Milky Way because
719s we're looking at a tiny piece of the sky
721s but beyond that there are galaxies upon
723s galaxies upon galaxies and you see some
725s of the big ones in the foreground the
727s big Spirals and ellipticals and then the
729s galaxies get a bit smaller there's
730s plenty of smaller galaxies and there's
732s plenty of points of light in there so
735s we're seeing galaxies further and
737s further away the fainter they get but
739s here's the critical thing we're not just
741s seeing them further away we're seeing
743s them further back in time
745s because the further away we look the
748s longer it has taken light to reach us
750s and some of the galaxies in here the
753s light has been traveling for 10 billion
755s years before it gets to our telescope
757s and those are the smallest points of
759s light in this picture now here's the
762s thing we know that the universe is only
765s 13.8 billion years old there are many
768s reasons we know that many measurements
770s with different kinds of telescopes we
772s know there is a wall we cannot see
774s further away than 13.8 billion years
778s into the past
780s Hubble has seen about 10 billion 11
782s billion years and at that distance or
785s that time in the past there are galaxies
787s everywhere so the question is when did
790s the first galaxies actually form when
792s did the first stars form when did the
794s first galaxies form
796s Hubble will never see them Hubble cannot
799s see them even if it spends a year or a
801s hundred years observing and the reason
804s for that is what we call redshift
806s so as the universe is we see further and
809s further away we also know that the
810s universe is expanding every day every
813s second every year it gets bigger and
815s bigger those galaxies are effectively
817s moving away from us they're attached to
819s space-time and as space-time stretches
822s out in the expansion of the universe the
824s galaxies move away and they move away in
827s a in a sense faster and faster and
829s faster the further they are away from us
832s and the phenomenon of redshift says that
834s the faster something is moving away from
836s you the more its light gets moved to Red
840s wavelengths we know this from sound if
842s an ambulance comes towards you along the
844s street and it's moving towards you it's
845s blue shifted the notes go up to a higher
848s frequency and when it goes away from you
850s the note drops and it goes to a lower
852s frequency that's called Doppler shift
854s the same thing happens with light so
857s when you go further and further back in
859s time in the universe those galaxies are
861s further away moving faster away and the
864s light is redshifted
866s to longer wavelengths so what we call
869s redshift three and I'll say what this
870s means in a moment you see the light has
873s moved from visible wavelengths into the
875s near infrared
876s and if we go to redshift of 10 which is
879s where Hubble can see there's only a tiny
882s amount of light left at visible
884s wavelengths all that light has gone to
885s the infrared now
887s and just to show you what that means in
889s terms of age redshift of 10 is 13.2
893s billion years ago in the past so there's
896s still 600 million years since the
898s beginning of the universe and what
900s Hubble can see and somewhere in that Gap
902s the first galaxies formed so you need an
906s infrared telescope to see them you need
908s a telescope that can see at those
909s wavelengths where that curve is now and
912s Beyond and that's one of the reasons for
914s the James Webb Space Telescope
916s those objects also get a lot fainter
919s because the further away they are the
921s dimmer the light and when you add that
922s factor in then these galaxies get
925s incredibly faint on the axis on the
927s y-axis these are factors of a hundred
930s thousand in each step so they're
931s incredibly faint these objects so you
934s need a much bigger telescope than Hubble
936s to see them as well you need an infrared
938s telescope and a much bigger one
940s now once you have that you can do all
943s other kind of astronomy so one of the
945s other things that affects where the
948s light comes out is the temperature of
950s the object
951s surface of a fairly average star a bit
954s dimmer than the sun would be at about 3
957s 000 Kelvin 3000 degrees Kelvin and that
961s puts most of its light out at visible
962s and red wavelengths but if you go to
965s longer wavelengths
969s so 300 Kelvin for example is the
971s temperature we're all at in the room
973s here around 200
976s Kelvin is 2 minus 273 degrees Centigrade
980s so you just add on what your temperature
982s is in centigrade then you get your
984s absolute temperature so we're around 300
986s Kelvin and all of our light is coming
989s out in the infrared I mean I can just
991s about see you with reflected visible
992s light but if I was a snake and I had
994s infrared vision which they do you'd be
997s glowing in the room and I would be
998s running in your direction to have lunch
1002s and then you can get down to much much
1003s lower temperatures you see here but once
1006s you can see things that say a thousand
1008s Kelvin or 300 Kelvin you're looking at
1010s stars before they were born Stars before
1013s they heat up so the process of star
1015s formation and Planet formation is most
1018s naturally done in the infrared where
1020s these objects are still young and only
1021s just warming up at the beginning of
1023s their lives so this is another good
1025s reason to build a big infrared telescope
1030s and here's a sort of demonstration there
1032s are some unfortunate people on the
1033s left-hand side there have been who have
1035s been seen by a snake and will not last
1036s much longer
1038s um now the other thing is as I said
1040s before if you want to make sure you can
1042s see these wavelengths from space from
1044s this objects out at a great distance you
1047s need to make sure your telescope is not
1049s emitting light at the same wavelength
1051s again Hubble Is around that temperature
1053s Hubble would just be blinded if it tries
1056s to look at faint light in the infrared
1058s so the way you get over that is you cool
1060s the telescope down so the James Webb
1063s Space Telescope is designed to be called
1065s to minus 233 degrees Centigrade so it's
1070s not giving any light out at these
1072s wavelengths so it's a very different
1074s kind of telescope to the Hubble Space
1076s Telescope and then one last real
1079s advantage of looking in the infrared is
1082s that dust which is in the regions where
1084s stars and planets are being born they're
1086s being made from gas and dust dust
1089s absorbs infrared light very effectively
1091s so this is the famous Orion Nebula which
1093s I'll come back to at the end this is a
1095s visible light picture taken by the
1096s Hubble Space Telescope if you look at
1099s infrared wavelengths from the ground
1102s then you see many more stars in there
1104s they're hidden away in the visible
1106s because all of that gas and dust but
1108s when you go to the infrared suddenly you
1110s can see cooler objects and objects which
1113s are hidden by dust and so that's another
1115s reason we want to work in the infrared
1118s and if you can work in the infrared you
1120s can also start measuring the atmospheres
1122s of planets going around other stars so
1125s we're not just interested with a James
1127s Webb Space Telescope in taking pictures
1129s of things but also measuring their
1131s properties the chemistry the physics and
1134s maybe even the biology because we can do
1136s spectroscopy we can split the light out
1138s in different wavelengths
1142s and actually start measuring compounds
1145s in the atmospheres of those planets so
1148s that's a really powerful part of jwst is
1152s to be able to do spectroscopy Beyond The
1154s Imaging so I'll show you some examples
1155s of that when we get to that point
1157s so
1160s what do we need to do well this is the
1161s Hubble Space Telescope it has a main
1163s mirror two and a half meters across it's
1165s a big machine it weighs about 12 and a
1167s half tons and it operates at wavelengths
1170s between the ultraviolet and kind of near
1172s infrared
1173s it's now 30 years old still working
1176s everything's fine maybe we have a few
1178s more years left at some point it will
1180s drop into the Earth's atmosphere and we
1181s have to think about what to do about
1183s that
1184s but the James Webb Space Telescope has a
1186s main mirror which is six and a half
1187s meters across so close to the one of
1189s those VLT telescopes you saw at the
1191s beginning
1192s it's a much lighter telescope it's kind
1194s of a floppy telescope it only weighs
1196s about six and a half tons and it is at
1199s this operating temperature of minus 233
1202s and one of the ways we one of the things
1205s we need to do to make sure it gets cold
1206s is move it away from the earth it cannot
1209s be near the Earth and it can never see
1211s the Sun or the Earth so we have this
1213s giant sunshield underneath which is
1216s always in the direction of Earth and Sun
1218s and to do that we sit at a point one and
1220s a half million kilometers away from
1223s Earth which puts the Earth and the Sun
1225s permanently in the same direction we can
1227s put the sun shield the telescope then
1229s gets cold and we can do the astronomy we
1231s want to
1233s so let's have a look at some of the
1234s reality of this machine
1236s well so first we've also got all the
1238s instruments on the back side and the top
1240s there so we have the main mirror on the
1242s front uh the big sun shield underneath
1244s we have a big on the on the warm side we
1246s also have computers and electronics to
1248s send the data back to Earth so that's
1250s that's that doesn't get super chilled on
1252s that bottom side but all of this stuff
1254s on the top side is down at around 40
1256s degrees Kelvin so minus 233
1260s so just trivially this is how the light
1263s is collected it comes from a different
1265s object it's focused by the primary
1266s mirror and then by the secondary mirror
1269s these two mirrors are really interesting
1270s they allow the telescope effectively one
1273s of them is moving constantly and that
1276s makes the telescope stable it helps keep
1278s objects fixed on the sky even though the
1281s telescope itself because it's floppy
1283s might be wobbling around just by moving
1285s that third mirror tracking the movement
1287s of a star you can have super Sharp
1289s Images
1290s and then on the back side well I'm out
1294s of sequence today because I can't see my
1295s talk
1296s um so these are just six of those
1298s mirrors each one of those mirrors is 1.2
1300s meters across it's made of beryllium one
1303s of the lightest metals that has a gold
1305s coating on the surface very thin each
1307s one of those mirrors only weighs about
1308s 20 kilograms they're incredibly light
1310s it's all been sculpted out on the back
1312s they're only very thin on the front
1314s surface but they're very rigid and they
1316s work extremely well at low temperatures
1319s and then you put all 18 of them together
1321s with obviously a hole in the middle to
1323s let light through and this is in testing
1325s at Goddard space flight center in the US
1327s and you can see of course that it's
1328s curved you often see pictures of it
1330s looks flat that mirror it's not it has
1332s to be a curve in order to focus the
1334s light
1335s so this is a big very rigid system but
1338s very lightweight
1342s here are the four instruments which we
1344s have on board we have cameras for the
1346s near infrared and the mid infrared and
1348s we have spectrometers for both of those
1351s wavelengths as well so we have
1353s um the camera in the bottom right hand
1355s side which you'll see most of the images
1357s from and the big thing at the top there
1359s about two meters across is the European
1361s spectrograph called neospec and then the
1364s mid infrared instrument is between the
1365s European space agency and NASA and the
1368s Canadians supplied another camera and
1370s they also supplied this really important
1371s guidance system that allows us to keep
1374s the images very stable
1376s so just to show you how one of these
1378s things work we've got all of the
1379s examples this is just Miri the mid
1381s infrared instrument this is how it takes
1383s pictures the light comes in from one
1385s side it's reflected from some mirrors to
1387s start getting it ready and bending the
1389s light around it goes through a filter
1391s wheel so we can select just a certain
1393s color of light certain wavelengths then
1395s we take another picture we take another
1397s picture at different wavelengths we
1399s don't take color images at one time we
1401s take one wavelength then take another
1403s image another wavelength and if we take
1405s three of them we can put them together
1406s as RGB we can make a color picture if
1409s you like
1410s so Imaging is quite easy spectroscopy on
1413s the other hand where you have to split
1414s the light up into its individual
1416s wavelengths that's a bit more
1418s complicated
1419s so here we see the light coming in again
1421s it'll go past the camera unit which is
1423s in the top half
1426s and as it goes into the bottom half the
1429s light then starts getting split up into
1431s different channels well I'll just let it
1434s speak for himself because it's a bit
1435s crazy
1448s so amazingly that works
1452s and what that lets us do
1455s what that lets us do is take a patch of
1457s the sky and take each row in that in
1461s that patch of the sky then we rotate the
1464s row around and we split it into
1466s different Spectra for each row and then
1469s we assemble it all back again at the
1470s other end to make a cube a cube of data
1473s so you for each position on the sky you
1475s have a full spectrum and you can say
1477s well for that point in the Galaxy we see
1479s this kind of stuff happening this point
1481s in the galaxy and so on so this this is
1483s a really powerful way of taking a
1485s picture but having a spectrum for every
1486s point in that uh in that uh in that
1491s pixel so this is showing just one of the
1493s instruments being attached to the others
1495s this is the near spec the European
1496s instrument so these are big animals big
1498s beasts but very lightweight this is all
1500s made of silicon carbide for example
1502s which is a really lightweight material
1504s but incredibly stiff which is what you
1507s need to make sure all the Optics stay
1509s lined up the instruments that when
1511s packaged on the back of the telescope
1513s you can see on the left hand side being
1515s dropped down someone on the back of the
1516s telescope the telescope's facing down
1518s onto the floor at that point so this is
1520s all assembled
1522s and then has to be all tested at low
1524s temperatures so it's put into this huge
1526s chamber a Johnson Space Center in the
1528s U.S this is actually where the Apollo
1530s space modules were tested in the 1960s
1534s um and that so that chamber is big
1535s enough for the whole of Apollo but now
1537s we put the James Webb Space Telescope in
1539s there that the chamber gets to minus 233
1543s Celsius so down to those temperatures we
1545s need to operate out and for months it
1547s sat in there and we ran all the
1549s instruments and checked all the Optics
1551s made sure everything was good
1553s for launch but then we had to attach
1555s this big thing which is the sun shield
1557s and you can see how large that thing is
1559s look at the people on the Cherry Pickers
1561s there that is roughly the size of a
1563s tennis court 22 meters long and of
1566s course that has to be folded up before
1568s we go into space just like the telescope
1570s you can see here the telescope is partly
1572s folded up and we need to package all of
1574s that to get inside the rocket fairing
1577s so all of that was put together and then
1579s shipped on it on a on a ship a literal
1582s ship through the Panama Canal and down
1584s to French Guiana and here you see it on
1586s the left-hand side in its launch
1588s configuration with the sun shield folded
1590s up all of the layers those five
1592s individual layers pull together the
1594s whole telescope pulled together and then
1596s in the middle the Ariane 5 main core
1599s stage and then with the solid rocket
1601s boosters on the right hand side there so
1603s this was November December 2021 I was
1607s lucky enough to be down there to see the
1608s telescope in November and then also on
1610s Christmas day to see the launch so I'm
1613s going to show you the launch now this is
1615s a piece of a video a longer video you
1616s can find online which is a kind of a
1619s documentary about the the launch of jwsc
1622s and this is where I'll ask somebody to
1624s bring me some water because they get
1625s quite emotional when I watch this
1628s we could just make it as loud as you
1631s like
1638s foreign
1668s liftoff from a tropical rainforest to
1671s the Edge of Time itself James Webb
1673s begins a voyage back to the birth of the
1675s unit
1683s punching a hole through the clouds 20
1685s seconds into the flight good pitch
1687s program reported
1701s on 5 rocket continues to fly uphill in
1705s nominal fashion
1709s foreign
1714s as I say Christmas day right what a way
1716s to spend Christmas day
1717s I was if you if you may have seen me
1720s bold guy in the middle of one of those
1721s shots so it was a good place to be
1724s um so yeah we had to launch and then of
1726s course then the telescope had to get
1728s into space and one of the first things
1729s that had to happen we had to unfold this
1731s solar panel on the back of the uh
1734s Observatory to get some power we were
1736s only on batteries and we only had a few
1737s hours on batteries so this is the last
1739s shot taken of the telescope from the top
1741s of the Ariane five
1744s there it is all folded up this is faster
1746s than real time it's about five times
1748s faster than real Time That's Somalia and
1750s the Gulf of Aden down there and then
1753s you'll see now the solar array open up
1755s and this was the moment where people
1756s really cheered because we knew we had a
1759s space mission at this point without that
1761s we were dead but that all worked
1763s perfectly well I don't know that's as
1765s good as some of the graphics in Eve
1766s right I mean but it's real it's real
1770s hmm
1776s so this point where we where we needed
1778s to get out to the L2 point which is one
1780s and a half million kilometers away as I
1782s say it keeps the Earth and the Sun
1784s always on the same side of the
1786s observatory gravity balance is out there
1788s in a way which is very clever uh it
1790s still follows the Earth around it
1792s doesn't get further away from the earth
1793s but it enables us to be stable as we
1796s orbit around and we keep the sun shield
1798s pointed towards Earth and the Sun the
1800s telescope on the other side is looking
1802s out into the darkness of space and we
1804s can get down to that temp there's really
1805s low temperatures
1807s now we need to unfold it this is the 15
1809s second version
1815s all right I could spend the three-hour
1816s talk on that but
1818s um all incredibly complicated took about
1820s a month every single piece had to work
1822s there were lots of single point failures
1824s in there particularly the sun shield as
1826s the sunshield did not deploy fully then
1829s we would not have a mission because the
1830s telescope would never get cold the
1832s instruments would never get cold we'd
1833s never be able to see a thing but it all
1836s worked
1837s we were able then to again Orient the
1840s telescope pointing towards the cell on
1842s the right hand side uh the the sun
1844s shield and then the telescope looking
1845s out into space it looks sideways it
1847s doesn't look away from the Sun and the
1849s Earth it looks sideways but it looks
1851s into the dark so it's an incredibly
1853s sensitive
1855s telescope because the background is
1857s really low it's huge it's cold
1859s everything works extremely well and the
1862s main thing was to get all of those 18
1863s mirrors to all line up to act as one
1866s mirror and that happened in March 2022
1869s so from March 2022 once we had this
1872s image which me which we could read all
1875s the parameters of and know that all 18
1877s segments were working perfectly we could
1879s start taking science data so I have
1881s about 15 minutes left I'm going to take
1882s you through some of the highlights of
1885s what we have but there's more every day
1887s this telescope is now just producing
1889s floods of data and in the next few
1891s months lots of data will start becoming
1893s publicly available there's a lot already
1895s publicly available but after one year
1897s after it's taken all data becomes public
1900s and because we're roughly a year after
1902s launch after after first science at
1905s least then you'll start being able to
1906s see much more data in the archives all
1909s completely available to you
1911s so here's one of the early images that
1913s are released it's a big star-forming
1915s region called the Karina nebula in the
1917s southern hemisphere these are all
1918s Optical pictures taken from the ground
1920s and we're only able to see a small piece
1922s of the sky with jwst so as we zoom in we
1925s get closer and closer to this region
1928s where young stars are being born and you
1930s can see on the right hand side here a
1932s place where there's there's hot gas on
1934s one side and cold gas and dust on the
1937s other this is an old Hubble Space
1938s Telescope picture but now with the James
1941s Webb Space Telescope we see in there
1943s with much more detail and because we're
1945s in the infrared we can actually see
1946s young Stars forming in that gas and dust
1949s on the bottom so as we just kind of zoom
1952s in a little bit because these images are
1953s enormous they're many thousands of
1955s pixels tens of thousands of pixels in
1957s many cases as we Zoom along along the
1960s edge of this Cosmic Cliff as it's been
1962s called you'll see a place in the middle
1965s here where there's a young star being
1967s formed with this kind of jet this kind
1969s of material flowing away North and South
1971s not visible at all to the Hubble Space
1973s Telescope
1975s these are the shortwavelengths for the
1977s jwst we can also go to longer
1980s wavelengths out to wavelengths between
1981s about 5 and 30 microns 5 and 30
1985s micrometers
1987s and that's what the Miri instrument does
1989s so it's the same region again but we
1991s kind of now see those young embedded
1993s stars shining brightly in red they're
1996s only being seen at the longest
1998s wavelengths they're cool they haven't
2000s started fusing hydrogen yet then are
2003s only a few hundred degrees and they give
2005s out light in the infrared
2007s now a few months ago or yeah a couple of
2010s months ago this was the first
2011s anniversary image this is another
2013s star-forming region in a place called
2014s roafuki and there's in this picture as
2017s well as this big reflection at the
2019s bottom there's this enormous jet of
2021s material coming out in both directions
2023s to the top right and the lower left you
2026s can see a dark shadow two-thirds of the
2028s way along and right in that dark shadow
2030s is a very young Proto star something
2033s that might be only 50 000 years old and
2036s as it's accumulating material and it's
2038s surrounded by gas and dust so we can't
2040s even see it with jwst it's ejecting
2043s material out at high speeds as well it's
2045s a bit like a baby right you you put
2047s stuff into a baby and some fraction of
2049s it comes out again at high speed right
2052s um
2053s so that's exactly what happens in Star
2055s formation we get these big jets of
2057s material coming out they're a really big
2059s thing that we want to try to understand
2061s better
2063s now we can also see the planets on our
2065s own solar system this is Uranus and
2067s Uranus we've known for a long time has
2069s rings around it which we see and we see
2071s its moons very clearly here we are also
2073s seeing deeper into the atmosphere that
2075s you can see at visible light and we can
2078s see down to depths of hundreds of
2080s kilometers in the infrared and we can
2082s see different structures in this gassy
2084s atmosphere the same is true of Neptune
2089s and you can see here Neptune which is
2091s basically just boring and blue in infra
2093s invisible wavelengths in the infrared we
2095s can see hot spots which are high up in
2097s the atmosphere we can see cooler parts
2100s and then we can see hotter stuff even
2101s deeper into the atmosphere as well so in
2104s infrared we can see much more detail in
2106s the atmosphere of these planets and we
2107s also see that it has rings which we knew
2110s so ringed planets are more common than
2112s not actually we always thought it was
2114s just Saturn but Uranus Neptune Jupiter
2117s has rings Saturn has rings everybody has
2119s rings except us actually but we've just
2121s made an artificial ring with satellites
2123s so we got there in the end
2127s now those are planets in our own solar
2129s system what about planets Beyond so this
2131s is an artist's impression of an
2132s exoplanet this is a planet orbiting
2134s around a distant star it's very hard
2137s because they're so close to the star and
2139s they're so far away it's going to be
2140s very hard to take direct pictures of
2143s planets in most cases we will see some
2145s with jwst which are quite far away from
2148s their stars but in most cases what we're
2150s going to rely on is the fact that
2152s sometimes planets go in front of the
2155s star between us and so the planet goes
2158s between us and the star and as it does
2160s that some of the light of the star is
2162s absorbed by the atmosphere of the planet
2165s if it has an atmosphere
2168s so we call that a Transit as the planet
2170s moves in front it absorbs some of the
2172s light and because if it has an
2174s atmosphere
2175s some light will be absorbed more
2177s strongly at some wavelengths than others
2179s a bit like our own atmosphere
2181s if there's water in the atmosphere of an
2183s exoplanet some of the infrared light
2185s will be better absorbed than other
2186s wavelengths and that's what you can see
2188s on the bottom that those different
2190s colors indicate different wavelengths
2192s being absorbed differently and we can
2194s turn that into a spectrum
2196s we can actually see the chemical
2199s composition of an atmosphere by watching
2201s these transits so we see CO2 we see
2203s sulfur dioxide we see water we see
2206s sodium we see carbon monoxide and so
2209s we're beginning now to measure the
2211s atmospheres of Distant Worlds going
2214s around other stars I mean I know you
2216s guys can go there and actually look for
2217s real we can't quite do that yet in
2220s astronomy so we have to use this
2222s indirect technique but we there is a
2224s real hope now that we're beginning to
2226s look at planets which are like the Earth
2228s terrestrial-like planets and we can
2230s start to measure their atmospheric
2232s properties and maybe with this
2233s Observatory or a future one we'll be
2235s able to see Signs of Life in the
2237s atmospheres of those planets
2239s so one of the most famous places that
2241s Hubble looked at were the Pillars of
2243s Creation as they were called in the
2244s mid-1990s and of course James Webb Space
2247s Telescope went back to look at those it
2249s can start seeing in the gas and dust of
2251s those pillars but of course it also has
2253s much bigger detectors than Hubble had
2256s back in those days so if you actually
2258s look at the full image now that jwst has
2261s seen
2262s we see the pillars and where the big red
2264s patches are those are the places where
2266s young stars are being born inside these
2269s light year long pillars of gas and dust
2271s and so again with the infrared we're
2273s able to look in a different way than
2275s Hubble was able to do before
2278s and we can also go to longer wavelengths
2280s out into the mid infrared and if we do
2283s that they take on a very different
2284s appearance
2286s now they become something out of Harry
2288s Potter I think I'm not quite sure but so
2291s we're now seeing the gas and dust
2292s illuminated from outside by the
2295s ultraviolet radiation from the big
2297s massive stars which are out of the
2298s picture here and we're beginning to see
2301s all of the gas and dust in a different
2302s way and that's really useful to us
2304s because we're really interested in
2306s looking at how much
2308s gas and dust is being turned into stars
2310s in other galaxies here's this giant
2313s spiral galaxy this is a visible
2315s wavelength picture with Hubble if we go
2317s now to the new jwst picture
2321s then we see the places where the stars
2323s are being born so all the dark stuff the
2325s gas and dust in the J in the Hubble
2328s picture now starts glowing so we're able
2330s to start measuring how much of that
2331s material is being turned into Stars
2334s and then we know also that galaxies
2336s don't form on their own they often form
2338s in giant clusters at the beginning I
2340s showed you the large and small
2341s magellanic cloud in orbit around our
2344s Milky Way well this is a giant cluster
2346s of galaxies called the Stefan's quintet
2348s there are five galaxies in that picture
2350s four in a row on the right hand side and
2352s one on the left hand side the one on the
2354s left hand side actually isn't in that
2356s cluster at all it's in the foreground
2357s and if we zoom in you'll see why
2362s you can actually see individual stars in
2364s that Galaxy on the left-hand side little
2366s points of red light that tells us it's
2368s much closer to us than the other ones so
2371s this is just the chance alignment of
2373s those of that Galaxy with the ones on
2374s the right the ones on the right on the
2376s other hand are interacting with each
2378s other under Gravity they're orbiting
2379s around each other they're pulling
2381s material out of each other and that
2383s material gets heated up and the red
2385s stuff you see there is forming new stars
2387s so even on the galactic scale between
2390s galaxies we see new stars being born
2393s based in empty space between the main
2395s galaxies themselves
2397s and then we can look in again at the
2399s longer wavelengths in the infrared
2402s and we can see in the top Galaxy there's
2405s something red just appeared there and
2407s that red thing is gas and dust streaming
2410s into a black hole we can't see the black
2412s hole directly but we can see the heated
2414s material just before it falls in and we
2417s can split that light up and we can take
2419s a spectrum of it with jwst we can see
2422s that there's iron and argon and sulfur
2424s all of the basic elements but also
2426s molecular hydrogen gas which is at a
2429s very different kind of temperature so we
2430s can actually figure out what's going on
2433s in the region around the black hole we
2435s can split it in different ways and make
2437s images in the different species so this
2439s is a really powerful tool beyond the
2441s images to actually start being able to
2443s do the physics and the chemistry which
2445s is what we want now one of the main
2446s goals of course if jwst was to look at
2448s the most distant galaxies and so this is
2450s the one of the first images that came
2452s out this is a Galaxy cluster in the
2455s foreground the white stuff and then the
2457s stuff beyond the red and yellow stuff
2458s the galaxies are much greater distances
2461s and their light is actually coming past
2463s the foreground galaxies and being bent
2465s by gravity which is why you see all
2468s these curves and arcs this is called a
2470s gravitational lens and so the big the
2473s mass in the foreground Galaxy is bending
2475s the light from the background one
2477s and we can see over this image all these
2480s galaxies further and further and further
2482s back in time again we see these very
2485s weirdly distorted ones that's just the
2487s effect of gravity you're looking through
2489s a weird lens like a a kind of a mirror
2491s fun house then it's not what they really
2493s look like at all but the gravity is
2496s distorting their life the gravity also
2498s makes them look brighter so we can see
2501s fainter objects than normal if there's
2503s something to amplify the light these
2505s gravitational lens
2507s so that one field is now being joined by
2510s many others and the famous one again I
2512s go back to is the Hubble Ultra Deep
2515s Field which Hubble made back in the uh
2518s starting in the mid 90s and keeps adding
2520s data to now but it's a very small piece
2522s of the sky as I said it's just this one
2525s grain of rice at arm's length a tiny
2527s piece of the size of the Moon and yet
2529s there are thousands and thousands of
2531s galaxies each with billions of stars
2534s so let's put that in context Hubble is
2537s also surveyed a bigger area around that
2540s not as deep it hasn't taken as long but
2543s it can go wider
2544s and it's also drilled down even further
2547s and made a much deeper image this is the
2548s deepest image now which we had before
2551s jwst took about a month of time to get
2556s and if we look at the new image that's
2558s been taken by jwsc of exactly the same
2560s area in a few hours
2563s and we compare them
2568s so the top image took a month to take
2570s the bottom image took about three hours
2572s so we've only just started with the
2574s James Webb Space Telescope in terms of
2576s our ability to measure the faint
2578s galaxies once we've spent days and weeks
2580s we'll be able to go much deeper and see
2582s hopefully these very first galaxies that
2585s ever formed in the universe but to
2588s really nail down how far away they are
2590s we're going to need to make a spectrum
2592s of each one so this is another field
2594s which we've been measuring with jwst
2596s called the Sears field and in there
2598s there are lots of faint objects and
2600s people have been searching for the ones
2601s which might be candidates for the most
2603s distant Galaxy this is one of them it
2606s was thought to be at redshift 12 which
2608s would break all of the records
2611s and when you took a spectrum of it
2613s it turns out that it's pretty close
2615s 11.44 so just the images told us it
2619s should be at that redshift and the
2621s Spectrum tells us yes it is so that's a
2623s confirmed Galaxy but in the same field
2626s very close by
2628s there's another one which looks
2630s to the naked eye just the same but it
2633s turns out that it's a fake it's not
2635s actually at that distance at all it's
2636s much closer to us and our Imaging
2639s selection was slightly fooled when we
2641s took a spectrum of it we could say no
2643s that one's nearer so this is going to
2644s take a while you're going to see some
2646s false detections you're going to see
2648s some good ones this is a game which is
2650s going to go on for many years yet
2652s there's no big Discovery at the
2653s beginning which says Hey we've solved it
2654s we've sold the way the universe works so
2657s it's going to take a while stick with us
2659s but as I said at the beginning you know
2661s these projects take an enormously long
2662s time so I just want to finish I'm right
2664s at the end just want to finish with a
2666s personal note so I came into this game
2668s infrared Imaging right at the beginning
2671s when I started as a young astronomer in
2674s 1982 as a PhD student the only way you
2677s could take images in the infrared was by
2678s having a single Pixel and scanning it
2681s across the sky move the telescope and
2683s scan backwards and forwards and make a
2685s picture one pixel at a time
2688s man it was boring
2691s by 1986 we had the first detectors which
2695s could actually take real images there
2697s are only 4 000 pixels in that detector
2699s but that's four thousand times faster
2702s than anything we had before so it was a
2704s true Revolution it really changed the
2706s way we saw the universe and it led
2709s to the James Webb Space Telescope
2711s because without these detectors there's
2713s no point building a big cold in for a
2715s telescope in space if you only have one
2716s pixel I mean who would pay for that you
2719s want to see the pictures
2720s so that was taken in 1986 it was the
2723s first light image the first picture
2724s taken with that new camera the first one
2726s in the world used for astronomy
2728s and
2730s I then stayed in infrared astronomy I
2733s went to work for NASA I moved around I
2735s went to work in Germany for a while
2736s moved in the UK moved back to work for
2739s Esa now for the last 15 years
2741s and throughout all of that I've been
2743s using Hubble and I became involved in
2746s ngst when it was young now called jwst
2749s and I have time on that telescope to
2752s take pictures of things and do science
2754s and so you can imagine I was pretty
2756s pleased last year
2758s when we got the First Data exactly the
2760s same little piece the center of the
2762s Orion Nebula this is purely raw data
2764s nothing has been done to it it just came
2766s straight from the telescope it's roughly
2768s 20 times sharper we start to see much
2770s more
2772s that's great but it's just one piece of
2775s an enormous image that we've made and
2777s I'm not going to show it to you today
2781s I'll tell you why in a moment
2783s so this is the region that we're
2785s actually we've taken picture of that's
2787s not the jwst picture that's the region
2789s we've covered and the reason I'm not
2792s showing today is because in 10 days time
2793s it will become public and you'll all get
2796s to see it then and I thought about
2797s showing it to you today
2799s but and but I woke up at 3 30 and I
2801s realized there's lots of very clever
2803s people watching online with screenshot
2805s on the finger right there and I thought
2809s sorry guys not today so I apologize but
2813s I'm going to show you one little piece
2814s of that survey
2816s see that little dot there looks like an
2818s ordinary star in the ground-based images
2819s we have such Sharp Images with the jwst
2822s if you zoom in
2824s it's a young region it's a young star
2827s with a disc of gas and dust around it
2830s making planets today just a million
2833s years old but being attacked by the hot
2835s stars in the middle so the material from
2837s that disc the dark smudge there is being
2840s lifted away and streamed out into a tail
2842s so we're seeing star formation in action
2845s and the whole of my data looks like that
2847s it's just full of amazing details so
2850s October the 2nd 12 o'clock CEST on our
2855s website the images will be released and
2857s they are utterly stunning so
2861s just to show you that you can be a young
2862s person
2864s really excited about astronomy or
2866s excited about what you do in life it may
2868s take a while
2869s and you may become old and gray and you
2871s all will I'm sorry that's the way it
2873s works you will all become old and gray
2875s but if you're lucky enough you can be
2877s involved in something truly truly
2879s amazing and it's been a privilege to
2881s work with 20 000 other people in Europe
2883s and North America and it's been a
2885s privilege to come and tell you a little
2886s bit about that today thank you very much
2888s have a great meeting
2892s thank you