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Ever wanted to look back in time? This week, we’re launching a kind of time machine – a telescope so powerful it will help us see back some of the first stars and galaxies made after the Big Bang.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the largest and most advanced telescope we’ve ever put in space. With revolutionary technology, it will study 13.5 billion years of cosmic history and help humanity understand our place in the stars.
Tomorrow, Dec. 25, at 7:20 a.m. ET (12:20 UTC), the Webb Telescope is set to launch from French Guiana, beginning a 29-day journey to a spot a million miles away.
Once Webb launches, the journey has only just begun. The telescope will begin a 2-week-long process of unfolding itself in space before settling in to explore the universe in ways we’ve never seen before.
Ready for a virtual adventure through the Orion Nebula?
Suspended in space, the stars that reside in the Orion Nebula are scattered throughout a dramatic dust-and-gas landscape of plateaus, mountains, and valleys that are reminiscent of the Grand Canyon. This visualization uses visible and infrared views, combining images from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope to create a three-dimensional visualization.
Learn more about Hubble’s celebration of Nebula November and see new nebula images, here.
Visualization credits: NASA, ESA, and F. Summers, G. Bacon, Z. Levay, J. DePasquale, L. Hustak, L. Frattare, M. Robberto, M. Gennaro (STScI), R. Hurt (Caltech/IPAC), M. Kornmesser (ESA); Acknowledgement: A. Fujii, R. Gendler
Think X-ray vision is a superpower found only in comics and movies? Unlike Superman and Supergirl, NASA has it for real, thanks to the X-ray observatories we’ve sent into orbit.
When dentists take X-ray pictures of a tooth, they use a machine that makes X-rays and captures them on a device placed on the opposite side. But X-rays also occur naturally. In astronomy, we observe X-rays made by distant objects to learn more about them.
IXPE will improve astronomers’ knowledge about some of these objects, like black holes, neutron stars, and the expanding clouds made by supernova explosions.
That’s because it will capture a piece of information about X-ray light that has only rarely been measured from space!
X-ray astronomers have learned a lot about the cosmos by measuring three properties of light – when it arrives, where it’s coming from, and what energies it has (think: colors). Picture these characteristics as making up three of the four sides of a pyramid. The missing piece is a property called polarization.
Polarization tells us how organized light is. This gives astronomers additional clues about how the X-rays were made and what matter they’ve passed through on their way to us. IXPE will explore this previously hidden side of cosmic X-ray sources.
What is polarization?
All light, from microwaves to gamma rays, is made from pairs of waves traveling together – one carrying electricity and the other magnetism. These two waves always vibrate at right angles (90°) to each other, with their peaks and valleys in sync, and they also vibrate at right angles to their direction of motion.
To keep things simple, we’ll illustrate only one of these waves – the one carrying electricity. If we could zoom into a typical beam of light, we’d see something like the animation above. It’s a mess, with all the wave peaks pointing in random directions.
When light interacts with matter, it can become better organized. Its electric field can vibrate in a way that keeps all the wave crests pointing in the same direction, as shown above. This is polarized light.
The amount and type of polarization we detect in light tell us more about its origin, as well as any matter it interacted with before reaching us.
Let’s look at the kinds of objects IXPE will study and what it may tell us about them.
X-rays give us a glimpse of the powerful processes at work during and after these explosions. IXPE will map remnants like this, revealing how X-rays are polarized across the entire object. This will help us better understand how these celestial cataclysms take place and evolve.
Magnifying supermagnets
Some supernovae leave behind neutron stars. They form when the core of a massive star collapses, squeezing more than our Sun’s mass into a ball only as wide as a city.
The collapse greatly ramps up their spin. Some neutron stars rotate hundreds of times a second! Their magnetic fields also get a tremendous boost, becoming trillions of times stronger than Earth’s. One type, called a magnetar, boasts the strongest magnetic fields known – a thousand times stronger than typical neutron stars.
These superdense, superspinning supermagnets frequently erupt in powerful outbursts (illustrated above) that emit lots of X-rays. IXPE will tell astronomers more about these eruptions and the extreme magnetic fields that help drive them.
Closing in on black holes
Black holes can form when massive stars collapse or when neutron stars crash together. Matter falling toward a black hole quickly settles into a hot, flat structure called an accretion disk. The disk’s inner edge gradually drains into the black hole. Notice how odd the disk appears from certain angles? This happens because the black hole’s extreme gravity distorts the path of light coming from the disk’s far side.
X-rays near the black hole can bounce off the disk before heading to our telescopes, and this polarizes the light. What’s exciting is that the light is polarized differently across the disk. The differences depend both on the energies of the X-rays and on what parts of the disk they strike. IXPE observations will provide astronomers with a detailed picture of what’s happening around black holes in our galaxy that can’t be captured in any other way.
By tracking how X-ray light is organized, IXPE will add a previously unseen dimension to our X-ray vision. It’s a major upgrade that will give astronomers a whole new perspective on some of the most intriguing objects in the universe.
Keep up with what’s happening in the universe and how we study it by following NASA Universe on Twitter and Facebook.
Iconic movie franchises like Star Wars and Star Trek feature
futuristic laser technologies, but space lasers aren’t limited to the realm of
science fiction. In fact, laser communications technologies are changing the
way missions transmit their data. The Laser
Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD) blasts into space this weekend,
demonstrating the unique – and totally awesome – capabilities of laser
communications systems.
Currently, NASA missions rely on radio frequency to send data
to Earth. While radio has served the agency well since the earliest days of
spaceflight, there are significant benefits to laser systems. Just as the
internet has gone from dial-up to high-speed connections, lasers communications’
higher frequency allows missions to send much more information per second than
radio systems. With laser communications, it would only take nine days to
transmit a complete map of Mars back to Earth, compared to nine weeks with
radio frequency systems.
LCRD will demonstrate these enhanced capabilities from
22,000 miles above Earth’s surface. And although the mission uses lasers, these
lasers are not visible to the human eye. Once in orbit, the mission will perform
experiments using two telescopes on Earth that will relay data through the spacecraft
from one site to the other over an optical communications link. These
experiments will help NASA and the aerospace community understand the
operational challenges of using lasers to communicate to and from space.
On Earth, there are
ground stations telescopes that will capture LCRD’s laser signal and send the
data to the mission operations center in New Mexico. The two ground stations
are located on Haleakalā, Hawaii and Table Mountain, California. These picturesque
locations weren’t chosen because they’re beautiful, but rather for their mostly
clear skies. Clouds – and other atmospheric disturbances – can disrupt laser
signals. However, when those locations do get cloudy, we’ve developed corrective
technologies to ensure we receive and successfully decode signals from LCRD.
This demonstration will help NASA, researchers, and space
companies learn more about potential future
applications for laser communications technologies. In the next few years, NASA
will launch additional laser
missions to the Moon on
Artemis II and to the asteroid belt,
even deeper into space. These missions will give us insight on the use of laser
communications further in space than ever before.
Ultimately, laser systems will allow us to glean more
information from space. This means more galaxy pics, videos of deep space phenomena,
and live, 4K videos from astronauts living and working in space.
Laser communications = more data in less time = more
discoveries.
If laser communications interests you, check out our Space
Communications and Navigation (SCaN) Internship Project. This program
provides high school, undergrad, graduate, and even Ph.D. candidates with
internship opportunities in space communications areas – like laser comm.
How will the James Webb Space Telescope change how we see the universe? Ask an expert!
The James Webb Space Telescope is launching on December 22, 2021. Webb’s revolutionary technology will explore every phase of cosmic history—from within our solar system to the most distant observable galaxies in the early universe, to everything in between. Postdoctoral Research Associate Naomi Rowe-Gurney will be taking your questions about Webb and Webb science in an Answer Time session on Tuesday, December 14 from noon to 1 p.m EST here on our Tumblr!
Dr. Naomi Rowe-Gurney recently completed her PhD at the University of Leicester and is now working at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center as a postdoc through Howard University. As a planetary scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope, she’s an expert on the atmospheres of the ice giants in our solar system — Uranus and Neptune — and how the Webb telescope will be able to learn more about them.
The James Webb Space Telescope – fun facts:
Webb is so big it has to fold origami-style to fit into its rocket and will unfold like a “Transformer” in space.
Webb is about 100 times more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope and designed to see the infrared, a region Hubble can only peek at.
With unprecedented sensitivity, it will peer back in time over 13.5 billion years to see the first galaxies born after the Big Bang––a part of space we’ve never seen.
It will study galaxies near and far, young and old, to understand how they evolve.
Webb will explore distant worlds and study the atmospheres of planets orbiting other stars, known as exoplanets, searching for chemical fingerprints of possible habitability.
For the first time in history, a spacecraft has touched the Sun. Our Parker Solar Probe flew right through the Sun’s atmosphere, the corona. (That’s the part of the Sun that we can see during a total solar eclipse.)
This marks one great step for Parker Solar Probe and one giant leap for solar science! Landing on the Moon helped scientists better understand how it was formed. Now, touching the Sun will help scientists understand our star and how it influences worlds across the solar system.
Unlike Earth, the Sun doesn’t have a solid surface (it’s a giant ball of seething, boiling gases). But the Sun does have a superheated atmosphere. Heat and pressure push solar material away from the Sun. Eventually, some of that material escapes the pull of the Sun’s gravity and magnetism and becomes the solar wind, which gusts through the entire solar system.
But where exactly does the Sun’s atmosphere end and the solar wind begin? We’ve never known for sure. Until now!
In April 2021, Parker Solar Probe swooped near the Sun. It passed through a massive plume of solar material in the corona. This was like flying into the eye of a hurricane. That flow of solar stuff — usually a powerful stream of particles — hit the brakes and went into slow-motion.
For the first time, Parker Solar Probe found itself in a place where the Sun’s magnetism and gravity were strong enough to stop solar material from escaping. That told scientists Parker Solar Probe had passed the boundary: On one side, space filled with solar wind, on the other, the Sun’s atmosphere.
Parker Solar Probe’s proximity to the Sun has led to another big discovery: the origin of switchbacks, zig-zag-shaped magnetic kinks in the solar wind.
These bizarre shapes were first observed in the 1990s. Then, in 2019, Parker Solar Probe revealed they were much more common than scientists first realized. But they still had questions, like where the switchbacks come from and how the Sun makes them.
Recently, Parker Solar Probe dug up two important clues. First, switchbacks tend to have lots of helium, which scientists know comes from the solar surface. And they come in patches.
Those patches lined up just right with magnetic funnels that appear on the Sun’s surface. Matching these clues up like puzzle pieces, scientists realized switchbacks must come from near the surface of the Sun.
Figuring out where switchbacks come from and how they form will help scientists understand how the Sun produces the solar wind. And that could clue us into one of the Sun’s biggest mysteries: why the Sun’s atmosphere is much, much hotter than the surface below.
Parker Solar Probe will fly closer and closer to the Sun. Who knows what else we’ll discover?
That’s a wrap! Thank you for all the wonderful questions.
James Webb Space Telescope Planetary Scientist Dr. Naomi Rowe-Gurney answered questions about the science goals, capabilities, and her hopes for the world’s most powerful telescope.
We hope you enjoyed today and learned something new about the Webb mission! Don’t miss the historic launch of this first-of-its kind space observatory. Tune in to NASA TV HERE on Dec. 22 starting at 7:20 a.m. EST (12:20 UTC).
If today’s Answer Time got you excited, explore all the ways you can engage with the mission before launch! Join our #UnfoldTheUniverse art challenge, our virtual social event with international space agencies, and countdown to liftoff with us. Check out all the ways to participate HERE.
Who’s ready to #UnfoldTheUniverse? The James Webb Space Telescope Answer Time with expert Dr. Naomi Rowe-Gurney is LIVE!
Stay tuned for talks about the science goals, capabilities, and hopes for the world’s most powerful telescope. View ALL the answers HERE.
@teamadamsperret: Congrats on your PhD!! When people ask what you do, what’s your reply?
@Anonymous: How does it feel, working in NASA?
@moonlighy: How did you find your love for this job?
@redbullanddepression: what the prettiest star in the sky in your opinion? also, you are a great role model as a queer woman who is attending university next year to major in aerospace engineering!!!
See that tiny blob of light, circled in red? Doesn’t look like much, does it? But that blob represents a feast big enough to feed a black hole around 30 million times the mass of our Sun! Scientists call these kinds of stellar meals tidal disruption events, and they’re some of the most dramatic happenings in the cosmos.
Sometimes, an unlucky star strays too close to a black hole. The black hole’s gravity pulls on the star, causing it to stretch in one direction and squeeze in another. Then the star pulls apart into a stream of gas. This is a tidal disruption event. (If you’re worried about this happening to our Sun – don’t. The nearest black hole we know about is over 1,000 light-years away. And black holes aren’t wild space vacuums. They don’t go zipping around sucking up random stars and planets. So we’re pretty safe from tidal disruption events!)
The trailing part of the stream gets flung out of the system. The rest of the gas loops back around the black hole, forming a disk. The material circling in the disk slowly drifts inward toward the black hole’s event horizon, the point at which nothing – not even light – can escape. The black hole consumes the gas and dust in its disk over many years.
Sometimes the black hole only munches on a passing star – we call this a partial tidal disruption event. The star loses some of its gas, but its own gravity pulls it back into shape before it passes the black hole again. Eventually, the black hole will have nibbled away enough material that the star can’t reform and gets destroyed.
We’re also studying disruptions using multimessenger astronomy, where scientists use the information carried by light, particles, and space-time ripples to learn more about cosmic objects and occurrences.
But tidal disruptions are super rare. They only happen once every 10,000 to 100,000 years in a galaxy the size of our own Milky Way. Astronomers have only observed a few dozen events so far. By comparison, supernovae – the explosive deaths of stars – happen every 100 years or so in a galaxy like ours.
That’s why scientists make their own tidal disruptions using supercomputers, like the ones shown in the video here. Supercomputers allow researchers to build realistic models of stars. They can also include all of the physical effects they’d experience whipping ‘round a black hole, even those from Einstein’s theory of general relativity. They can alter features like how close the stars get and how massive the black holes are to see how it affects what happens to the stars. These simulations will help astronomers build better pictures of the events they observe in the night sky.
Keep up with what’s happening in the universe and how we study it by following NASA Universe on Twitter and Facebook.
