A View of the Beginning of Time: An Update

[0] Hey, it's Michael.

[1] All this week, the Daily is revisiting some of our favorite episodes of the year and learning what's happened in the time since they first ran.

[2] Today, we return to an episode hosted by my colleague, Astead Herndon, about the incredible moment when the James Webb Telescope, the largest space observatory ever built, sent its first images back to Earth, and hear what it's discovered since then in its long journey across the universe.

[3] It's Wednesday, December 28th.

[4] So, Ken, there was big news in space this week.

[5] Can you tell us about these new pictures from NASA that were revealed?

[6] Yeah, we finally got pictures back from the James Webb Space Telescope.

[7] This is the biggest, newest telescope that NASA has.

[8] So these first photographs from Web were so amazing that on Monday.

[9] Six and a half months ago, a rocket launch from Earth carrying the world's newest, most powerful deep space telescope.

[10] President Biden had a special event to unveil the very first photograph.

[11] These images are going to remind the world that America can do big things.

[12] And one of the things they saw was a galaxy where it's so far away that the light took more than 13 billion years to get to us here on Earth.

[13] Light where stars were born and from where they die.

[14] The universe is 13 .8 billion years, so, you know, it's going way back.

[15] Let's do it.

[16] Okay, we've got the whole world watching.

[17] Are you ready to put the first image up?

[18] Oh, let's do it.

[19] And then on Tuesday, NASA had a separate event to show four other photographs.

[20] Okay, Amber, so here it is.

[21] Can you walk us through the final?

[22] They're just gorgeous.

[23] There was an amazing photograph of this stellar nursery.

[24] You can see all these ripples of gas where new stars are being born.

[25] You could see another picture of a dying star, another one of five galaxies are in this intricate gravitational dance.

[26] Okay, so the first image is a deep field, and it's also a deep field with a cluster.

[27] So this is what they call a deep field, which is basically point as a telescope at a relatively empty part of the sky and see what's out there.

[28] There are galaxies here in which you're seeing individual clusters of stars forming, popping up just like popcorn.

[29] It's amazing, you realize that the universe, you just look in the sky, it looks like it's mostly empty.

[30] But once you look at it in these new wavelengths of light, you realize there's exciting structure.

[31] There's just a sharpness and a clarity we've never had.

[32] Colors.

[33] Kind of littered like jewels all over the back of the image are these faint red galaxies.

[34] Things going on that you never realized until you put a telescope in space to look.

[35] kept them.

[36] This is how the oxygen in our bodies was made in stars, in galaxies, and we're seeing that process get started.

[37] It is really kind of like wondrous.

[38] What was the scientific reaction to these images?

[39] The scientists kept on saying that they were speechless.

[40] One person said that she ugly cried when she saw the first data.

[41] Someone was joking that all this drawing was involved changed her background screens on their computers yesterday.

[42] So these are basically, basically the very first efforts pointing the telescope at the very first few targets and not even trying very hard yet.

[43] This is basically just scratching the surface of what we'll be able to do in the coming years.

[44] So tell us about the piece of technology that actually took these images.

[45] This James Webb telescope sounds like spaces, newest, hottest invention.

[46] That's exactly what it is.

[47] It's the successor to NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, which has been taking photographs of the universe for decades now.

[48] James Webb is bigger, so that means it can gather much more light and see dimmer objects much farther away to almost the Big Bang.

[49] It's looking back to when the first stars and the first galaxies formed, and this is probably within a half billion years after the Big Bang, the very story of the universe.

[50] You know, I don't want to say the words time travel, but it feels the closest to time travel we have.

[51] Astronomy really is time travel.

[52] Because light takes time to reach us, the farther anything is, the longer it takes light to get to us.

[53] So when we look at the farthest things, we are looking back in time.

[54] Okay, Ken, so let's go back in time.

[55] Tell us how this telescope came to be and how it became this defining moment for NASA.

[56] Back in 1990, NASA launched the Hubble Space Telescope, which has produced these amazing pictures of the universe that almost everyone has seen.

[57] And it's a resounding success now, but when it launched, it was a huge embarrassment for NASA.

[58] In what way?

[59] Well, once they started getting the first images back, all the images were blurry.

[60] And they started tweaking, maybe they thought they needed to adjust something.

[61] But no matter what they did, the images were still blurry.

[62] And after enough investigation, they've discovered that the mirror had been ground to the wrong shape.

[63] And it's only by a tiny little bit.

[64] The mirror is eight feet wide and the edges were two microns too shallow.

[65] Which I knew with a micron to fully understand that sentence.

[66] Sure.

[67] A piece of paper is 100 microns thick.

[68] Okay.

[69] This is even crazy than I expected it.

[70] So a piece of paper is 100 microns thick.

[71] and you said this mirror was two microns, too shallow.

[72] Yes, over something that's eight feet wide.

[73] Wow.

[74] And that made such a huge impact in Hubble.

[75] Yes.

[76] It looked like the billions of dollars they spent on Hubble was a complete failure.

[77] And that was very embarrassing for NASA at the time.

[78] And it took several years for NASA to come up with a fix.

[79] And so in 1993, the space shuttle went up to Hubble in orbit around Earth.

[80] And the astronauts could actually installed this new, equipment.

[81] And after that, all the images from Hubble were clear again.

[82] And everything that people were hoping for from Hubble then succeeded.

[83] Okay.

[84] And with Hubble, NASA could send astronauts for the space shuttle to fix the problems.

[85] There was no such luxury with Webb.

[86] Because Web was bigger and because of its design, it had to be at super cold temperatures, which meant they had to put it at this point of space, that's a million miles from Earth.

[87] So everything that was on web had to work the first time, there was not going to be a chance to try it again.

[88] And that means you have to check everything and check again.

[89] And testing to make sure everything works one time correctly takes a lot of time and takes a lot of money.

[90] And that's where the web project kept on running into problems over the years.

[91] So when NASA gave the green light to the space space, telescope in the mid -1990s, they thought it would cost $1 .5 billion, maybe a little bit more than that, and they thought it would be ready for launch by 2007.

[92] They underestimated just how harder was and just how many things they had to event along the way.

[93] Like what?

[94] There was some major design challenges they had to solve.

[95] The first is that this mirror is huge.

[96] Hove's telescope was eight feet.

[97] Webb's telescope is 21 feet.

[98] It's as big as a two -story.

[99] building.

[100] So the other problem that they had was that everything had to be really cold because even just the slightest bit of heat would blur the images.

[101] And why is that?

[102] So the James White telescope is designed to look at infrared light because the universe is expanding the furthest objects, their light gets shifted to the longer wavelengths and in order to see them, you have to look in the infrared, the part of the spectrum that is redder than red.

[103] And more importantly, Infrared light is easily distorted if there's any sources of heat around it.

[104] And that's what led to the decision to put the telescope a million miles from Earth.

[105] So now the heat from the Earth's atmosphere can affect the Webb Telescope because it's so far away.

[106] The other thing I had to do is make sure that it stayed cold.

[107] It had to be about minus 380 degrees Fahrenheit.

[108] Wow.

[109] And to get it that cold, they had to build a sun shield, which is this big piece of fabric that's the size of a tennis.

[110] court that's blocking sunlight and keeping anything from warming up the telescope.

[111] So how do you fit something that's a two -story high mirror, a tennis court -sized sun shield, and pack it in a rocket because there's no rockets that big.

[112] And so they had to do something that was almost like origami.

[113] They broke the mirror part into little smaller hexagons that stacked on each other.

[114] They had to fold up the sun shield and pack that all into a rocket.

[115] and design it so that once it's in space, that it would unfold and move into place perfectly at the first time.

[116] So you can kind of see why it turned out to be a little bit harder than NASA thought at first.

[117] I mean, yeah, yeah.

[118] So originally, they thought they could get this done by 2007.

[119] And every time that you would look at the project, they were like, oh, the launch day is now pushed back 2010.

[120] The price tag is now $3 billion.

[121] And things were so bad that in 2011, they had a basic hard reset.

[122] And at that point, they said, we are now aiming for 2018, and we're going to say, this is going to cost no more than $8 billion, which is huge.

[123] Because, again, they thought it was $1 billion in change when they started.

[124] And it's hard to overstate how important this was for NASA.

[125] This was the signature program that's going to find NASA for decades to come.

[126] And now NASA had to go back to Congress saying, oops, we can't get this done on time, and we're going to have to ask for another few billion dollars from you.

[127] So with all these problems and the rising price tag, there was grumblings in Congress that maybe we should just cut our losses and cancel Webb.

[128] But in the end, Congress decided not to cancel Webb.

[129] It gave NASA's additional money.

[130] The project started moving forward again, and that brings us to launch, Christmas Day, 2021.

[131] You're looking at live footage of an Arian 5 rocket in Carew, French Guiana.

[132] At the very top of that extraordinary machine, we find the most ambitious space observatory ever built.

[133] Webb is on this Arion 5 rocket.

[134] It's a European rocket.

[135] The launch pad is in French Guiana in South America.

[136] It's actually a good place to launch because it's closer to equator.

[137] So when you're trying to get to space, if you're close to...

[138] to the equator, you can take advantage of the rotation of the Earth to add velocity to your rocket.

[139] I will remember that next time I'm going to space.

[140] This is live coverage of the historic launch of the James Webb Space Telescope.

[141] So, first thing in the morning, there are literally astronomers around the world watching the live stream of this rocket, and they're all completely nervous.

[142] What I'm thinking about is really looking at the universe in new light.

[143] We have never seen the universe how Webb will show it to us.

[144] This is something that they've been thinking about, dreaming about, since the 90s.

[145] And they're worried that there might have been some oversight, like the Hubble Mirror of not being quite right, that something would go wrong that they could not fix because this was a million miles away.

[146] Out on the launch pad, everything is in great shape.

[147] Don't let those clouds fool you.

[148] We are go for launch.

[149] Thank you.

[150] And we have engine star.

[151] And then...

[152] And lift off.

[153] The launch was perfect.

[154] Decolage, lift off from a tropical rainforest to the edge of time itself.

[155] James Webb begins a voyage back to the birth of the universe.

[156] This is it.

[157] We have witnessed and the confirmation that R &5 have safely delivered web into space.

[158] All I can say is good luck, Webb, and bring us incredible data from the deep universe.

[159] And for most space missions, once a spacecraft reached orbit, you usually get this big side release because you feel like everything else is not going to be as complex.

[160] But this wasn't true for Webb.

[161] The hard part was its mirror had to un -dack itself and snap into its final configuration.

[162] The Sun -Shield had to unfold and deploy, and now.

[163] NASA identified 344, what they called, single -point failures.

[164] So if something didn't snap into place, there was no backup system.

[165] And all 344 things, they all worked.

[166] It got to its final destination at the end of January.

[167] The instruments turned on.

[168] Almost everything worked as well as NASA could have possibly hoped.

[169] And all this preparation, all this calibration, all this testing, It all paid off.

[170] And by June, they were ready to start taking their first scientific measurements.

[171] And so far, Webb seems to be working better than promised.

[172] The microns were on.

[173] Yeah, I'm sure whoever was in charge of the mirrors made sure they checked every measurement 20 times.

[174] We'll be right back.

[175] So, Ken, as you told us, that James Webb is already starting to show us things that we've never seen before.

[176] What else do we expect for it to show us?

[177] Spaceplane to me. So again, what makes web special is that its mirror is so much bigger than Hubble's, and is looking at this new part of the spectrum of light, the infrared, to look at the universe.

[178] And because it's looking at the infrared, they can see details that they couldn't see before.

[179] That's why this image is so much more colorful, so much more detailed than what Hubble could do.

[180] And another major thing that they're planning to do with Webb is to start looking and examining planets around other stars, what we call exoplanets.

[181] Okay, exoplanets, planets around other stars, got it.

[182] So back in the early 90s, we had yet to see a single planet around another star.

[183] Everyone assumed, like, there's billions of stars.

[184] There must be planets around many, if not most of them.

[185] but no one had actually identified any.

[186] And it wasn't until 1994 where people started discovering them.

[187] And now we now know thousands of them.

[188] What web can do, web is great, but actually can't see individual planets.

[189] But it can do this amazing analysis of a planet.

[190] And this is kind of a trick, because for certain planets, they occasionally pass in front of a star.

[191] So basically you can just have a little black dot.

[192] What happens is that the atmosphere of the planet blocks certain colors of the starlight.

[193] So you can actually compare the colors of the starlight by itself versus what colors you see when there's a tiny planet in front of it.

[194] And it's going to be slight differences because different molecules, they will block slightly different colors from the starlight.

[195] And from that, you can actually identify what the atmosphere of that planet can be.

[196] So a planet that's about the size of Earth, it passes in front of stories, we can start seeing, is there oxygen in there?

[197] Is there water?

[198] Is there things that perhaps are evidence of life on that planet?

[199] So basically what this telescope does is not look at the exoplanets directly, but analyze the atmosphere around the planets, which can then basically see if there's things that could point to potential signs of life.

[200] Yeah, so we now know there are these star systems, and some of them are pretty close, where there's planets.

[201] In fact, there's one called Trappist 1.

[202] It's about 40 light years away, so not far at all.

[203] And it has seven Earth -sized planets in orbit around it.

[204] it's a pretty small star so the planets are actually pretty close to the star and three of them are in what is known as the habitable zone that's where it's not too cold or not too hot and if it's not too hot not to cold maybe there's liquid water on it if there's liquid water using process of elimination we don't know any of this information now we just know it looks like it's about the size of earth but we don't know anything about the property, the atmosphere, or what's on the planet.

[205] And with where we can actually start exploring, not just Trappist 1, but start looking across all these many stars and all the planets around these stars and start getting a sense of what is the range of planets that exist in our galaxy?

[206] How different are they from Earth?

[207] How common is something like Earth?

[208] Wow.

[209] So it is not far -fetched to say that this telescope is the furthest we have.

[210] gotten in terms of having a tool that can understand whether there is potential life on another planet?

[211] I mean, in terms of something like microbes living on a planet, this is the tool that will start giving us hints about that question.

[212] So how long do we expect the James Webb to be doing this kind of work?

[213] The original lifetime was they were aiming for 10 years.

[214] Because the launch went so perfectly, they didn't have to use very much propeller for getting the trajectory corrected as it went out to its final destination, they now say they have enough propellant to last at least 20 years.

[215] Wow.

[216] Now, of course, things in space, you never know what's out there.

[217] There's, you know, rocks just whizzing back and forth in the solar system, and if one of them hits the telescope in the wrong spot, it could just knock it out of operation tomorrow.

[218] I mean, it actually has already been hit by one micrometeoroid that damaged one in the mirrors already.

[219] But they were...

[220] Yeah, it happened.

[221] a couple months ago.

[222] They sort of anticipated it.

[223] It was a little bit bigger than what they were expecting, but they have ways to adjust for that.

[224] And they said it's still operating, you know, meeting all these specifications.

[225] Actually, they're actually hoping by measuring how many times it gets hit by different things, a better understanding of how much stuff there is in the solar system.

[226] So even by being damaged...

[227] We even learn things when it gets hit.

[228] Yeah.

[229] So by being damaged, NASA learns more about the solar system.

[230] If only I learned from damage, too.

[231] So can we now see this extraordinary scientific success from NASA, this telescope that is unique, launching to universal acclaim and excitement?

[232] But as you said on the show before, it comes at a time in which it's been private companies and specifically billionaires who have been making the most hay, in terms of space travel in recent years, not NASA.

[233] I'm thinking about SpaceX and Elon Musk travel.

[234] I'm thinking about Jeff Bezos and his brief spaceflight.

[235] How do we see James Webb and NASA's latest initiative in relationship with how these billionaires and how these private corporations have frankly changed our understanding of space travel?

[236] So the billionaires are changing NASA.

[237] And I would say in many ways that's a good thing in that it's more people going to space than have ever gone to space before.

[238] That's the human spaceflight part of NASA.

[239] With web, this is the other side of NASA, the space part.

[240] These are the things that NASA does that Elon Musk is never going to do.

[241] This is science.

[242] This is space science.

[243] This is space science.

[244] These are asking the fundamental questions that we all think about when we're up late.

[245] at night and can't sleep?

[246] Are we alone?

[247] Why is there a universe at all?

[248] These are questions that you can argue that this has no practical effect on your everyday life, but those are things that make people special, that we are curious.

[249] We wonder what's beyond the next hill.

[250] We want to see what's beyond the next star.

[251] And it's just like centuries ago, people were exploring the oceans exploring the new continents, NASA's exploring the solar system and the universe in ways that is very much in the adventure vein that people have always done.

[252] Well, I, for one, am deeply excited.

[253] Thank you, Ken, for teaching me and spicing up my wheat.

[254] It's good talking with you.

[255] After the break, Ken shares an update on what Web has captured during its time in orbit.

[256] We'll be right back.

[257] So, this Christmas marks the one -year anniversary of the launch of Web.

[258] It's been one year since NASA put this newest and most powerful telescope into space.

[259] And Web has continued to take amazing images better than almost anyone could have imagined.

[260] It can capture up to 57 gigabytes of data per day.

[261] And as it's peered through every corner of the universe, it's allowed us to see some pretty amazing things.

[262] So one of the main parts of Webb's mission is to look at exoplanets, that is, planets around other stars.

[263] And a few months ago, Webb captured its first image of an exoplanet.

[264] It orbits a star 385 light years from Earth, and a constellation called Centaurus.

[265] Because it's a giant ball of gas and because it's so far from its star, this particular exoplanet won't have life.

[266] But it's the first step to studying these planets.

[267] Perhaps the most striking web image that we've seen so far has been the Pillars of Creation.

[268] A lot of people probably remember the one that Hubble took years ago.

[269] It's these giant columns of gas in the Eagle Nebula, which is in the Milky Way, and it's a place where stars are born.

[270] They almost look like the fingers of the hand of God reaching across the universe.

[271] Webb also took a picture of the Pillow's creation, and that image is even more vivid and even more vibrant than what Hubble saw.

[272] That's because Webb is looking at these longer wavelengths of light that are able to pierce the clouds of dust that block the light from Hubble.

[273] And because of this, astronomers can now see details and structures that were previously invisible to them.

[274] That could be filaments of dust and gas, or even stars.

[275] Webb has also found galaxies that until now were too far away and too dimmed to sea.

[276] One of them is thought to have formed just 350 million years after the Big Bang.

[277] And while, 350 million years sounds like a really long time.

[278] The universe is almost 14 billion years old.

[279] So in the grand scheme of things, these galaxies are among the first to light up the universe.

[280] If we think about the arc of space imagery, it's kind of like the history of television, like how in the old days we had the equivalent of cathode ray TVs.

[281] And then Hubble came along, it was like we finally got HD.

[282] And now with Web, we've got 4K, we've got Dolby Vision, we've got everything.

[283] Everything scientists hope to be seeing, they are now seeing with Web.

[284] And this is just the beginning.

[285] Today's episode was hosted by Astridhernan in conversation with science reporter Kenneth Chang.

[286] It was produced by Sydney Harper, Michael Simon Johnson, Nina Feldman, Ossa Chatharvedi, and Ricky Nevetsky.

[287] and was edited by Michael Benoit, Patricia Willans, and Anita Badajo, with help from Liz Bailen.

[288] It contains original music by Marian Lazzano and Alicia E. Tube, and was engineered by Chris Wood and Corey Schreppel.

[289] Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly.

[290] That's it for the daily.

[291] I'm Michael Babarro.

[292] See you tomorrow.