The first batch of publicly released images from the James Webb Space Telescope has given mankind an unprecedented view into previously unknown worlds. The images have already surprised scientists with their spectacular clarity.
Elena Sabbi is one of those scientists. She's with the Space Telescope Science Institute.
Sabbi spoke with TPR’s Jerry Clayton. The conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Clayton: I have to know, what was your first reaction when you saw those first images coming in?
Sabbi: Always a surprise every day. A surprise every time. Breathtaking. This telescope continues to surprise us with how powerful, how superb it is and these last images really were amazing. They are opening a window on the universe that we haven't seen so far. It's a completely new universe, and a completely new understanding of what is happening out there.
Clayton: One thing I found fascinating in the deep field picture, some of the objects look very odd. They're elongated or distorted. Can you explain the effects of gravitational pull on the objects that we're seeing in this image?
Sabbi: The nearby galaxies have a large mass, a huge mass, and so they can pull the light to toward themselves. They don't just pull stars and other nearby galaxies closer, but they can even pull the light of background galaxies that is coming close to our eyes. And this is why you can see this distortion.
If the alignment is perfect, you are going to see perfect rings. And then if you start to have a little bit of misalignment, these rings are broken into the arches that you see in the images, other galaxies that you see in that image are distorted because they are nearby to each other and they are interacting. So they're doing this beautiful cosmological dance and you see that in better detail in the Stephans Quintet where you can see the galaxies that are going to eventually become one big system.
Clayton: Can you talk about the ability of the James Webb Space Telescope to analyze the atmosphere of distant planets?
Sabbi: That is spectacular. So every time a planet travels in front of a stars, it steals a little bit of light from the stars and the type of light it's stealing, it depends on the atmosphere of the planet. If there is water, it is going to remove a little bit of light from the stars at the water level.
If there is carbon, if there is oxygen, we are going to see a little dark signature on the light that is arriving to us. And it's light that is being absorbed by the atmosphere of the planet. It's an incredibly precise measurement, and you really need a fantastic, very, very stable telescope to be able to see that.
The first time we tried to take a spectrum of a planet with Webb, we were able to do that and we were able to see water and were incredibly pleased with how powerful this telescope is.
Clayton: What is something that hasn't been studied before close up that we're going to do with the telescope that you're really excited about?
Sabbi: Well, my field of interest is star formation. And star formation is very difficult to study from Earth, even with Hubble, because there's a lot of dust. And as you can see, when you try to look through a very dirty window, you cannot see what is behind the dust. The same is true for the light that is coming from a star forming region when we look at them with Hubble.
But Webb is a very special telescope because it can look in the infrared, and the infrared can travel through the dust. And so we are going to see the stars as they are emerging from their stellar nursery, as they are growing.
We are going to see how that the discs that are going to become planetary system evolve over time and how complex molecules can traverse through the disk and they can arrive in the internal system. This is the path that we think water follows to arrive on Earth. And we are going to be able to study that in incredible detail when we are going to look at the systems with Webb.
