An unusual Bethlehem star

Barbara Podstawczyńska

25th of December, 2021. Christmas Day, my father, wide-eyed in front of the TV. I am not able to share his excitement. In the 90s, when the idea of the James Webb Space Telescope first emerged, I wasn’t even born. Yet my dad read about it when it was just a little bud – an idea of a telescope most advanced, ready to uncover the spatial secrets. Now, a live YouTube transmission, the telescope in its full flowering, ready to penetrate the atmosphere. The reason why my father is almost biting his nails at the sight of NASA engineers (wearing masks, a true sign of the times) in front of their computers, impatiently awaiting the launch, is that just a tiny slip-up during the journey of the telescope can ruin decades of diligent planning and building.

A telescope in space is not a rarity, the first one launched almost fifty years ago and plans for sending more of them extend all the way to the year 2037! This said, this particular telescope has a unique opportunity to enrich our knowledge about space. One of the most anticipated phases of Webb’s telescope’s launch was the deployment of the sun shield, which, thankfully, went according to plan. Like a monstrous reversed origami, the five levels of the huge construction unfolded smoothly. Thanks to this element, the telescope is able to see in infrared light, the one which is most faint and best discernible in the unimaginably low space temperatures. One side of the shield makes the machine immune to up to -233 degrees Celsius, while the other will not yield to even 85 degrees, stopping the sun rays from blurring its image. Space has never yet seen a telescope which could operate in such conditions.

It’s only the first of the firsts; the telescope has more up its sleeve. For instance, Webb’s equipment will see as far as the exoplanets – planets existing out of our solar system. Consequently, it might even answer the most important space question of all, maybe the only question: is there life in space? Where there is water, there may be life, so if we do get an image of some spacelings, we have Webb to thank. Scientists will be able to observe the atmosphere of such planets and find water traces there. Not only is that possible, but the telescope will most likely succeed in discovering galaxies formed not long after the Big Bang. Back to the Future would be an accurate name for this kind of venture, providing humanity with new info about the billion years of cosmos formation. Unfortunately, it seems as though this one is already taken.

The name of the telescope, however, is as fitting as ever, given in memory of James Edwin Webb, responsible for getting the first humans to the Moon. Secrets unraveled by the telescope will commemorate this man, not void of mystery himself, being a member of the Masonry.

The images of the unknown will be provided in good quality, too. When setting out on a road trip to the mountains, an average tourist will be satisfied with their 12-megapixel camera, for instance. Webb’s telescope will be much better at sightseeing, of course, with its infrared light detectors which reach 4 million megapixels each. The telescope’s well-known little brother, Hubble, in contrast, could observe about 6 times less of the cosmos landscape in its vicinity, and in much worse quality at that. Not to mention, Hubble could be assisted or repaired quite easily as it was only orbiting the Earth. Webb, on the other hand, is orbiting the Sun 1.5 million kilometers away from our planet so its launch had to be perfect, allowing no room for any servicing.

The current mission of Webb’s is to explore Ursa Major a star in the constellations. Scientists estimate that the telescope can be active for even a whole decade. Who knows what secrets it will unravel? Even prior to its launch, Nature magazine dubbed it a telescope that “ate astronomy”. And the world will definitely witness it devouring new interesting space facts. We can only imagine what it can discover for humankind, or the non-human, for that matter.