UTSA astrophysics professor Chris Packham is part of a collaboration of scientists granted coveted access to the James Webb Space Telescope.
is an $10 billion international collaboration among NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. It uses a near-infrared camera to capture images at different wavelengths — allowing it to achieve depths even beyond the Hubble Space Telescope’s deepest fields of sight.
“We’re hoping that we will pull together a paper over the next couple of months which will be our first scientific paper using the James Webb,” he said. “We’re trying to share some of the quick scientific discoveries. We just want to share the excitement.”Success! You're on the list. Black holes form when a star runs out of energy and implodes, collapsing in on itself. Normal stellar black holes have a mass between about three and 10 solar masses, whereas supermassive black holes are astonishingly heavy with masses ranging from millions to billions of solar masses.
For Packham, astronomy is a unique science in that it’s not as “touchable” as other disciplines — it’s more a science that is studied through just observing.“So if you’re in chemistry, you can set fire to something; if you’re in biology, you can inject the cell with something; if you’re in physics, you can smash the box and look inside,” he said. “In order to understand astronomy, you have to be very literate in mathematics and physics.
Webb’s first deep field image, an image of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723, is approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length, Packham explained. This makes the number of galaxies it shows even more amazing because it shows how infinite the universe really is, he said.Public Domain / NASA
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