WASHINGTON: The world’s most powerful observatory — the James Webb Space Telescope — has made a variety of stunning discoveries since its launch in December 2021.
From exoplanets to galaxies and stars languishing in distant space, the James Webb Telescope has thrilled science enthusiasts across the world with its discoveries. The most recent (July 12) was the discovery involving two entangled galaxies-Penguin and Egg-situated at about 326 million light years away.
James Webb Telescope Pointing Control Team Head Sathyan Anandakrishnan, in an exclusive conversation with India Today, has further explained how big a role this observatory is going to play in unravelling the mysteries of deep space in the times to come.
Anandakrishnan, who joined the James Webb Space Telescope mission in 2004 leading the Pointing Control system, said that while the Hubble Space Telescope was optimised for visible spectrum, the James Webb Space Telescope was optimised for near and mid infrared visibility which can’t be seen through the naked eye.
“The reason is that as objects move away from each other, visible light emitted will be seen by the other object as a longer wavelength or shorter frequency. So a blue light emitted by a star, we will see it as red or infrared. The James Webb Space Telescope is designed to look 13.5 billion years into the past. After the Big Bang explosion and as everything started moving apart, visible light emanating from that time and reaching us only now will appear as Infrared”, Sathyan Anandakrishnan said.
Anandakrishnan had already been a part of the Hubble Space telescope as he joined the team in 1997 which was launched in 1990. He was the Pointing Control Engineer and was assigned the work of making sure that the astronomers could point the telescope towards their target accurately.
“The telescope must be steady for the astronomers to take those wonderful pictures. Also, if anything goes wrong, such as if a reaction wheel or gyroscope doesn’t function properly, the telescope must be maintained in a safe attitude to make sure that it doesn’t face towards the Sun, which would destroy the optics”, Anandakrishnan added.
The reason behind collecting such information is for public consumption, stated Sathyan.
“The coloured photos do indicate the composition of the particles. When a star explodes, a huge amount of dust and energy emanates. Observing a nebula, looking at what is the frequency of the light coming from it, tells us about the composition. One advantage of the James Webb Telescope is that it observes in the infrared. If you have dust, visible light gets scattered and blocked while infrared can pass through it. So we can look at what is behind the dust and what was the source of theist cloud, like if it was a blackhole or a star which has collapsed”, he observed.
“The James Webb Telescope is called a Time Machine as we are looking into the past 13.5 billion years ago. One of the major accomplishments of the Hubble Space Telescope is that the Big Bang happened 13.8 billion years ago. After that, there was a total period of darkness and the re-ionisation led to the formation of stars and galaxies and based on that we are getting a better understanding about how the Universe was formed”, stated Sathyan Anandakrishnan, also claiming that while the Hubble Space Telescope was able to look back 13 billion years ago, James Webb Space Telescope due to its huge data collecting area is able to look 13.6 billion years ago.
The James Webb Telescope, a specialist device for capturing infrared light, has helped bring about a series of discoveries and awe-inspiring images from space over the last two years.
The JWST continues to solve mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it.
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