As a New Yorker, I’d say trying to spot a star from Times Square is little more than a fool’s errand.
To catch even the faintest glimpse of one, you’d have to squint past fluorescent street lamps, flashing billboards, stock market tickers and other illuminated distractions. You’re better off taking the train a hundred or so miles upstate. Out there, stargazing no longer requires any effort. A breathtaking canopy of sparkles hangs over you, whether you like it or not.
But even from the deepest, darkest, most remote location, you will never see every star with your naked eye. You physically can’t spot all the galaxies, nebulae, exoplanets, quasars — I could go on — in your line of vision, even with your favorite off-the-shelf optical telescope. There are billions upon billions (upon billions) more cosmic phenomena out there. It’s just our human eyes aren’t built to see the light they emanate. It’s called infrared light.
Thus, quite a lot of space treasures are invisible to us. Fortunately, however, that doesn’t mean they’re beyond us.
As Stephen Hawking once remarked, humans are unique in that we always find a way to transcend our mortal limits. We do it “with our minds and our machines.” And, sure enough, over the years, astronomers have developed fascinating infrared workarounds — ultimately paving the way for NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.
Fighting a human restriction
Already, big-budget space telescopes like NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer elucidate some cosmic infrared secrets. They contain instruments that sky-scan for the elusive light, then translate that information into signals comprehensible by human pupils. This, in turn, allows us to see lots of stuff in the universe that’s normally hidden to our eyes.
However, if those massive telescopes are episode one and two of astronomy’s infrared detection series, the agency’s powerful new Webb Space Telescope — of which the first set of full-fledged images was released on July 12 — is an entirely new season.
Levels beyond the Hubble and Spitzer’s infrared capabilities, the JWST is literally built for the job.
The trailblazing telescope is a gold-plated, $10 billion machine stuffed with infrared detectors, accented with high-tech lenses and programmed with ultrapowerful software. Its holy grail device is called the Near Infrared Camera, or Nircam, and will lead the charge by collecting a wealth of deep space infrared signals for astronomers to view on the ground.
This is why the JWST is often said to hold the promise of unveiling an “unfiltered universe.”
Looking through the JWST lens instead of a standard optical telescope would be like looking up at the stars from my hypothetical New York dark zone instead of Times Square. There’d be a myriad more sparkles in both cases, even though you’re viewing the same sky. It’s just that in our shadowy dark zone analogy, we’re viewing extra stars because we’re uninhibited by light pollution. The JWST, on the other hand, is collecting deep space infrared light and decoding it for us.
It will point at the exact same universe that the Hubble has scrutinized for decades and scientists have studied for ages, but it will access luminescence we can’t see, possibly revealing concealed space-borne phenomena like violent black holes, exotic exoplanets, grand spiral galaxies and… maybe even signals of alien life?
Its first images have already taken much more than our breath away. In fact, NASA personnel who were the…
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