During a March 14 keynote address called “Unfold The Universe: The James Webb Telescope,” an all-female panel of scientists unveiled the latest image captured by the largest and most complex observatory ever launched into space.
“At the end of a star’s life, they shed their outer material, their outer layers into the rest of the universe,” Straughn continued. “I think this is one of the most beautiful concepts in all of astronomy. This is Carl Sagan’s stardust concept. The fact that the iron in your blood and the calcium in your bones was literally forged inside of a star that exploded billions of years ago.”
“One of the primary reasons we built the telescope the way we did was to be able to look back in time and see the very first epoch of galaxies that were born in the Big Bang, right after the Big Bang,” Straughn said. “We’re talking about looking back in time over 13 and a half billion years to see a part of space that we’ve never seen before. The galaxies that we’re finding in the very early universe are much bigger and much brighter than we expected.
“We’re seeing things that we’ve never seen before, and that’s bringing out the curiosity and challenges we have as scientists,” said Dr. Stefanie Milam, planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “Why did that happen? How did that happen? What’s making that happen? What’s the evolution of this process? And what can we learn from it? I think this first couple of years of science with JWST is going to open to huge new questions and challenges that we have ahead of us.
One of the more interesting questions to come up during the address concerned the image colors from the telescope scientists “choose to depict.”
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