Inside the new telescope that probes the wonders of the universe and life itself
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Summary
In July, the public got its first look at images released from the James Webb Space Telescope, a massive piece of equipment that was launched into space this past December. Our guest, Dr. Adam Musen, is a professor of physics and astronomy at York University who focuses on galaxy formation and evolution, particularly the high redshift universe.
Transcript
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the latest episode of Full Comp. Please consider subscribing if you haven't already. In July,
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the public got its first look at images released from the James Webb Space Telescope. Some of the
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most remarkable images of the broader universe that we've ever seen. Humbling is perhaps an
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understatement to explain what I certainly felt after viewing these images. And there will only
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be more to come and what we learn from it may prove to be mind-boggling and game-changing.
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The James Webb Space Telescope is not some normal little backyard skywatcher. It is a massive piece
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of equipment that was launched into space this past December to pursue some extremely lofty goals such
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as to search for light from the first stars and galaxies that formed in the universe after the
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Big Bang to study galaxy formation, to understand star formation and planet formation, to study
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planetary systems and the origins of life. Wow, a little above my pay grade. Let's unpack all that a bit.
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It's quite something. It is truly fascinating. Our guest joining us today is a professor of physics
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and astronomy who isn't just following what's going on with the telescope, but actually uses its images
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and engages with it. Professor Adam Musen is with York University. He joins us now. Hello,
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Professor. Great to have you on the program. Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, thanks so much for
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joining us. I mean, like I said, it's really just a mind-blowing topic, but it's also your daily job here.
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I'm looking at your website, your bio at the York University site, and it says, my research focuses
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on galaxy formation and evolution, particularly the high redshift universe. I thought, wow,
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my mind is already blown just by reading a bio on your website. Yeah, well, I mean, you're right.
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This is what we do every day and trying to figure out where galaxies come from, where our Milky Way
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comes from and ultimately why we're here. And it's a real privilege to be able to do that.
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The James Webb Space Telescope. Tell us its origins, how it came about and what it really does. What
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makes it so significant and different from its precursors? Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean,
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the project is actually very, very old. The initial inception of James Webb goes back to 1997
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when, you know, I was just out of high school and it took a long time to get to this point.
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But basically the inception of the project was, you know, the Hubble Space Telescope was launched
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in 1990 and then repaired in 1994. And astronomers, you know, were doing fabulous work with that.
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And of course, we asked what's next. And, you know, the next thing to do was build a bigger and
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better and more powerful telescope. And it's taken a long time to get there. But ultimately,
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we have gotten there almost 25 years after the initial inception of the program. And,
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you know, your program is only so long, so I don't have time to go through all the ups and downs over,
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you know, two and a half decades that James Webb went through from, you know, thinking that the
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mission would be launched in 2002. Ultimately, it was launched 20 years later at budget cuts,
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budget expansion. I mean, so many different things happened to the program over 25 years. But
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ultimately, you know, here we are with this new telescope. And you asked me, you know, why is it
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better? It's better in so many different ways. And in many ways, it's also complementary. But
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ultimately, the thing that makes it so much more powerful is that the way telescopes work is we
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reflect light off a primary mirror. And the more light you can collect, the more faint objects you can
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see. And so the James Webb Space Telescope has a mirror that is six and a half meters across,
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whereas the Hubble Space Telescope has a mirror that's only two and a half meters across.
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So it's almost triple the size. And of course, in collecting area, you square that. So it's about
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nine times bigger in terms of collecting area. So it's like having 10 Hubble Space Telescopes
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effectively, which makes it able to see objects that are much fainter than anything we've ever seen
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with Hubble. So things like very distant galaxies. But the other key ingredient to it is that it is
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optimized to observe light in the infrared. And your eyes observe light that is what we call in
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the optical part of the spectrum. But you can go beyond that into the infrared. And that's very
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important for all sorts of astrophysical processes. For galaxies that are very far away, there's a process
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called redshift, which maybe we can talk about. But the light is shifted to the red, and we need to
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see those we need to observe in the red. Also for studying things like star formation, a lot of
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that process is hidden behind dust. And the light that you and I see gets obscured, but infrared
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light gets through. So James Webb allows us to see things much fainter than we've seen before.
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It allows us to see things in the infrared that we have never seen before. And then ultimately,
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with a bigger mirror, you also get finer details of what we call higher angular resolution, or you can
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see much finer details than Hubble. So in so many ways, it surpasses what the Hubble Space
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Telescope is able to do. So I know it was launched in December, where is it right now? And what does
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it kind of physically do? Like, is it trying to sit in one place? Or is it just kind of drifting all
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around? Absolutely. So it goes out past the moon's orbit. So it's sitting sort of in a line between the
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earth and the moon and the sun. And this is a point called L2, where the gravity of the moon and the earth
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and the sun all cancel. And it's sort of this little anti gravity place that we like to, you know, put
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satellites so that they can maneuver around very easily. So it sits there in this orbit out past
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the moon. And it keeps its it has, you know, people if you're your listeners have have seen pictures of
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it, it has this gigantic sun shield, which it always keeps facing the sun. And effectively, you know, it is
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in an orbit like the earth going around the sun, keeping its sun shield to the back of the sun,
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and you can move the telescope in different directions, in order to view different parts
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of the night sky. Wow, and I understand that you, you interact with this telescope, and that you have
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like a time allotment for it. Like, how does that work? Or do people kind of use it like one would a
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computer interface, you get to like move around where it's looking? I wish yeah, that there was a joystick,
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right? I have no clue. Maybe there was, I don't know. I wish there was one, I think that would be
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a lot of fun. So so the way it works is, so I'm on several different teams, including some some teams
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that I lead, that have been given access to observing with the telescope. But the way that works is the
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telescope is controlled by the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. And what we do as
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scientists, as we say, look, we want to look at this object, we want to use this camera, we want to,
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you know, expose for a certain amount of time. And we send the those requests to them, you know, they've
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been approved. And then it is operators at the Space Telescope Institute that ultimately execute the
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commands to the telescope. And there is unfortunately no joystick, it's really, you know, pre-programmed
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commands that cause the telescope to move and the cameras to, you know, open the shutter and take pictures.
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So unfortunately, I don't have that level of control, but I would, I would love to.
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I know a lot of basic questions that regular folks are going to have from all of this in terms of what
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will we find? Can the telescope tell us, will it potentially tell us that there is life on other,
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other planets, other galaxies, or that there was life? Will it be addressing those questions potentially?
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Absolutely. So, you know, we can't say for sure if James Webb will give us a definitive answer about
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life on other worlds. But one of the things it is optimized to do is to study the atmospheres of
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planets around other stars, and these are often called exoplanets. And so we can do a process called
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spectroscopy, which is taking light and dispersing that light into a spectrum, kind of like what you
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get when you put light through a prism and you see a rainbow. And different chemical elements display
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different signatures in spectroscopy. And so one of the things we can do is by studying the atmospheres
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of planets around other stars is understand what those look like. You know, is there water on those
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planets? And ultimately, you know, in a perfect world, if you wanted to look for signatures of
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life, the thing you would potentially look for is, you know, an abundance of oxygen, which is, you know,
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oxygen is a very, very unstable element. It loves to bind to things. And the only way that it's in the
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atmosphere of planets is if it's constantly created. Here on Earth, it's constantly created by plants,
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right, which sadly we're killing. But if we were to see a signature like that, you know,
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water and oxygen in the atmosphere of a planet around another star, that would be great hope
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that there was potentially life on that planet. And so we may find that with James Webb, which is
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extremely exciting, but we'd have we have not done that yet, of course. When you talk about
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understanding galaxy formation, would this be seeing sort of signs of how things happened? Or would it be
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actively watching other things happen sort of as they unfold super far away?
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things move very slowly in the universe. For example, if you know, we live in this Milky Way galaxy,
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and it rotates, it's this beautiful disk galaxy. But it takes about 200 million years for a single
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rotation of the Milky Way. So if you wanted to watch just one rotation of the Milky Way, you'd have to
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live a very, very long life. So when we study galaxy formation, we can't really watch the process
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itself going on for a single galaxy, because the timescales are too long. But one of the thing that
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the James Webb telescope is so powerful for is, and this is a phenomenon that maybe some of your
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listeners are familiar with, it takes light travels at a finite speed. So if something is one light year
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away from you, it takes a year for that light to get from that object, you know, for you to see it. And
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what that means is, you're effectively viewing that object, what it looked like a year in the past. And if
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something is two light years away, you're observing it as if it was two years in the past. And so if you scale this
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up to the, you know, the distances that galaxies are, we're looking at galaxies now that are potentially,
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you know, so far away that the light has been traveling basically, since the beginning of the
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universe, or at least since, you know, those galaxies formed up to 13 and a half to, you know, almost 14
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billion years in the past. And so by looking at these very, very distant galaxies, which James Webb is
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completely optimized to do, we're able to see the past, the very, very distant past. And we're able
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to see what galaxies looked like in the very, very distant past. And we can look at them in the very
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distant past, you know, the middle past, more nearby galaxies, and try to connect the dots in what,
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you know, is the lifetime of a gal, you know, the life cycle of a galaxy, how galaxies begin and,
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you know, live their life. And that's ultimately what we're trying to do with James Webb. Those very,
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very early stages of galaxy formation, which we've never seen before, we know are critical. And,
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and we're really, you know, able to unlock those with James Webb.
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We'll be back with more full comment in just a moment.
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Professor, when we talk about the James Webb telescope being able to help us figure out the
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That's a hard question in many different ways. We talked earlier in the thing about looking
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specifically for, you know, life on other worlds, and that's one thing you can do. But one of the
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things you really need in order to have life, and you know, it's everywhere here on Earth, is the
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complex elements, right? Things like carbon, things like oxygen, right? Life as you know, most creatures
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on Earth are made of water, you know, highly of water, and water is H2O, so has, you know, oxygen in it.
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And so we need to understand where those chemical elements came from. Right after the Big Bang,
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there was nothing like that. The only thing, we know this to be true, that the only elements in the
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universe that existed after the Big Bang were hydrogen and helium, which are very, very simple
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elements, and they're not really the building blocks of life. You need all these other things,
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and we know for many years of study that all of the more complex chemistry that makes up life
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comes from the insides of stars, that stars fuse hydrogen and helium into things like carbon and
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oxygen and nitrogen, and ultimately die and expel those. And so one of the things the telescope is
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optimized to study is, you know, star formation and star death. And in fact, one of the early pictures
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from the telescope was of a dying star, one of these planetary nebulae. So we want to understand where
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this complex chemistry comes from. And, you know, studying all these different aspects of star formation
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and star death, and the chemistry of that is exactly what the telescope does. And that can help us
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better understand, you know, why the Earth has the chemicals enrichment it does in order to support
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life. One thing I often wonder about some of these ideas, theories that we have about all of these big
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questions, is I know, sometimes our perceptions change. When I was a kid, Pluto was a planet, you'd list
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off the planets, I guess now my children at school, they're not taught Pluto as a planet, Pluto has a
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different classification. Are there any things right now that are that are kind of potentially in
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flux or in the mix when you go out and look at the possibilities with the James Webb telescope?
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Ah, yeah, that's a good question. I mean, you know, my own interest is in galaxies. And I think,
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you know, in terms of that, there's so many questions in terms of, you know, what do the early stages of
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galaxies look like? And I'll try to not get too technical. But it kind of relates back to what I
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was saying is that in the very early universe, there was no complex chemistry. And so the very,
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very first generation of stars to form had nothing but hydrogen and helium. And we don't really know what
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those objects with those very first stars would have looked like, we know that they would have ultimately
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created, you know, things like nitrogen and oxygen, and they would have exploded into supernovas.
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And all the subsequent generations of stars would have had those things like our own sun.
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And one of the things that's really interesting about these stars and the technical name for them
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is they're called population three stars, is that some people predict that they can be hundreds and
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hundreds of times more massive than our sun, which is many times bigger than the most massive stars that
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we've ever seen anywhere in the universe. And some theories predict that no, they won't be that
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they won't be, you know, so much different than, you know, the kind of stars that we see in our own
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Milky Way. And we really don't know because we've never seen one before. And that's really a lofty goal
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for the James Webb telescope is to find a galaxy so far in the past, that it actually contains the very
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first generation of stars, which will really help us understand, you know, are these things the
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massive monsters that some theories predict, or are they more normal like stars that we see now?
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And that's something I really love to know the answer to.
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What is the life cycle of this telescope? How long is it going to be up there
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providing this information? And is there already a sibling or a child of this telescope being created
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that I know you talked about how the previous one was much smaller in the mirror, you know, going
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further and further? Yeah, it's a great question. So, you know, the nominal mission for James Webb,
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as specified by NASA, is a five-year mission. And if it achieves that goal, it will be deemed a great
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success. You know, the way NASA defines missions is to have a nominal goal, but often things surpass
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the nominal goal. And so the hope is that the telescope would be doing this for up to 10 years without any problems.
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However, the launch of the telescope was so successful that a lot of the, you know,
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fuel needed to move the telescope around was actually conserved, putting it in orbit. So,
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there is, in principle, the possibility of operating, at least at the moment, James Webb for up to 20 years,
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which would be a massive surpassing of the nominal lifetime of five years. But, you know,
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we have to wait and see. And, you know, one of the things that you have to always be careful about is,
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you know, things go wrong in space and they can't be fixed. And so, you know, although we're hoping for,
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you know, five, 10 or 20 years of James Webb, we know that it can also end tomorrow. And so,
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we, you know, are very thankful with every precious moment we get with the telescope.
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Yeah, this is not a thing that you can just go up and fix. It's not like it's just a little
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little spacewalk outside of the International Space Station or anything like that.
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Absolutely. It's well past the moon. In terms of successors, I mean, of course,
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us astronomers are always looking to build the next great thing. There's nothing that is super far
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long, but people are discussing the possibility of a telescope that has a primary mirror that is
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up to, sorry, I think it's 15 meters in diameter. So it would be triple the size of James Webb,
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which James Webb itself was about triple the size of Hubble. And that would open up all sorts of
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possibilities. This telescope is called Louvoir, at least at the moment, although telescopes, you know,
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these early stages of planning things, often the names of things can change. So we are considering
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this, but it's in very, very early stages of planning. Professor, I want to talk to you a little
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bit about how the planning for all of this and the budget and the execution, they're inherently,
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I guess, government decisions, which I guess inherently are some way political decisions. And,
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you know, whenever we have these conversations, like primarily on this podcast, we end up talking about
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news issues that are very, well, very small compared to talking about how is a galaxy formed.
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And I always find it again, so, so humbling, as I said in the introduction,
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to talk about these issues. And we spend our day just like looking at our Twitter or, you know,
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doing our, our very sort of small insular things. And wow, you know, this is such a,
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the most broad topic of all, how should we conceptualize these issues? Because of course we
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hear, well, there's funding cuts, so we can't do this thing. We push this back.
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This is not a priority for us because sure, this isn't about putting food on the table,
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but then when we talk about the questions that, that we're, we're seeking here, the
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questions we're seeking to answer, it's also in some sense, the, the most important project.
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How should we align our priorities with these ventures?
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Yeah, it's a great question. And it's something I get asked a lot, right? Is,
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you know, the, the, the price tag of the telescope is very famous. It's $11 billion with a B.
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That's very, very expensive. And, and, you know, how do you justify spending that much money on
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something like this? When, as you point out, you know, people have trouble eating, people have trouble
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paying for their house. And it is difficult, but, you know, science is, is really a key part,
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I think of, of being human and, you know, studying these things is a lofty goal. We train many, many
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students using what we learned from this. And on top of that, you know, we develop a lot of
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technology that is used in, in all sorts of items that end up in your everyday life, right? So much of
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NASA technology has ended up in, in various things, you know, from the telescope, all sorts of the,
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the, the optics stuff has ended up in optimizing optical things for, for medical processes,
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et cetera. And so, you know, it kind of, although it all, you know, it is a lot of money, you realize
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that something like the telescope touches so many different aspects of society, it touches society
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from a technical standpoint. It touches society from an educational standpoint, right? So many students
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study astronomy as part of their university or, you know, or, or, or elementary school studies.
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And then ultimately, you know, it, it, it feeds our imagination, as you say, you know, beyond Twitter,
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is it, it, it opens us up as, as humans to, you know, much loftier ideas. And so, although it's very
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expensive, it, it contributes, I think, so much to society that it is money well spent.
00:21:57.560
On a similar note, when it comes to the spacefaring projects that we
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embark on, I know whenever there's an anniversary of, of say the moon landing or similar missions,
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these days people go, oh, I kind of thought we'd have a greater frequency of that, but that's just,
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you know, kind of come to a stop. So we have this telescope where, wow, we're seeing more than we've
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ever seen before. It's so amazing. But then, as you pointed out, we can't even go up and fix the
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thing if it, if it gets broken. And I remember movies, you know, in the nineties or year 2000,
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a mission to Mars movie would come out and I think a regular person would think, yeah, we're going to land
00:22:28.120
on Mars in, I don't know, 20 years, 25 years. Okay. Well, we're 20 years later and we ain't,
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we ain't putting a person on Mars anytime soon. There's, there's an interesting,
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there's progress on some fronts, but then not on others.
00:22:40.120
Yeah. I mean, it's a great question. And, and, you know, one of the things that
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prompted me to become an astronomer is just excitement. You know, I grew up in the seventies
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and eighties when, you know, the shuttle was at its prime and we had so many missions out there.
00:22:53.000
Um, you know, ultimately I think it is a, it is a budgetary issue and, um, you know,
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it is expensive to, for example, send people to Mars. Um, and so, um, it has been hard. Um,
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and a lot of the money, you know, for NASA in recent years has gone into the international space
00:23:11.240
station, but I think you will see that, you know, things are changing because one, and I'm sure if you
00:23:16.760
talk about current events on your podcast, you've talked about, um, you know, uh, things like, uh,
00:23:23.080
Blue Origin and, uh, you know, Virgin Galactic, as well as of course, the incredible amount of
00:23:29.240
satellites that are being launched by, um, SpaceX. And so there has been a bit of a commercialization
00:23:34.600
of space now, and, you know, that is, you know, putting more money into this and, you know, you know,
00:23:40.520
we are actually, um, if you follow it, NASA is planning on going back to the moon and ultimately
00:23:46.440
Mars. Um, and this is a mission called Artemis, uh, ultimately to go to the moon in the next year
00:23:52.680
or two, which, um, has not always gotten the most amount of attention. Um, but there is plans for,
00:23:57.960
it's been scrubbed a few times, but there is plans for a launch in the next few months of the first
00:24:01.880
Artemis mission, which will send an unmanned capsule past the moon and then have it land again on earth
00:24:07.320
in preparation for sending astronauts back to the moon, which I believe the expectation is
00:24:11.800
the next year or two that will happen. So, um, things are really picking up back again in space.
00:24:16.200
There was a bit of a lull there, but I think over the next 10 or 20 years, you're going to see a lot
00:24:20.840
more of, you know, uh, manned missions in space. Yeah. It's interesting to your point that, okay,
00:24:26.760
NASA is getting back to it, which is very exciting, but then maybe the greatest excitement comes from
00:24:31.160
these billionaires who are doing it for whatever reason, there's obviously a personal, uh, you know,
00:24:36.680
personal victory in it, but then also, well, you know, I've already got these billions and
00:24:40.760
what else crazy thing can I do or just genuine, I appreciate that Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are very
00:24:46.280
entrepreneurial, you know, doing really incredible things people. So they're, I think they're thinking
00:24:51.720
to this for earnest reasons as well. Are, are you, are you optimistic that this competitive
00:24:56.920
environment among these mega billionaires is, is going to yield more positive things for space exploration?
00:25:02.040
Yes. I mean, I think it is. And I, and I think it is a positive thing, um, you know, to have the,
00:25:09.400
the private sector in there, um, you know, to go a bit sideways. I think the real, the real challenge
00:25:16.200
we have is that right now, um, you know, the, the laws that cover, uh, space are not very, um,
00:25:26.280
well, there aren't many and, and they're not enforced in any way. And so I think, you know,
00:25:31.640
one of the things that's, you know, if, if people are interested in, in, you know, missions in orbit
00:25:36.280
around earth is we know there's a ton of space garbage out there. Um, and there's really nothing
00:25:40.360
that stops you from, from, uh, you know, dropping space garbage. I think, you know, in fact, a piece
00:25:45.640
of a SpaceX rocket landed somewhere on earth, uh, even last week. Um, and so I think it is great and it
00:25:52.040
is going to yield great things. Um, but we do need to, you know, regulate space. And that's something that
00:25:57.160
if we don't do, I think starting soon, um, there may be negative consequences of just too much of a
00:26:02.680
rush to space without making wise governing decisions. What is the international body that,
00:26:08.680
that is currently tasked with doing that or would be, or is there not one? Um, there is one and I
00:26:13.960
forget the name of it, but the problem is, is that, um, you know, like so many international agreements,
00:26:19.000
like with the United Nations, you know, international criminal court, nothing is binding, of course.
00:26:23.880
And so, um, you know, I forget the name of the organization now, but they do set best practices,
00:26:29.480
but nothing enforces you to, uh, employ those best practices, unfortunately.
00:26:34.040
Well, I remember reading that the Elon Musk launch was actually against the law by some
00:26:40.040
us law. I can't remember which one it was in some department said, you know, you can't go ahead
00:26:43.640
with this. I guess his response was, well, I don't know what are you gonna stop me? And it went ahead
00:26:47.240
anyway. So I guess there's a bit of, uh, these guys pushing the boundaries.
00:26:51.000
You know, absolutely. Absolutely. Um, you know, and, and, um, I, you know, I can tell you as an
00:26:58.440
astronomer, I'm, I'm a fan of Elon Musk's in some ways, but I'm also, uh, you know, concerned
00:27:04.440
because one of the things, uh, that is going on is, uh, the massive Starlink project to, to put
00:27:10.680
thousands of satellites, to give internet to everybody on earth, which sounds like a great
00:27:14.840
idea. Um, it's actually really negative for astronomers because these satellites, um,
00:27:20.920
traverse the night sky in these gigantic constellations and, um, cause, you know, major
00:27:26.440
problems to all of our images. The night sky is going to be filled with thousands and thousands
00:27:30.600
of these satellites. And, um, you know, astronomers are very concerned about this and there is nothing
00:27:34.920
we can do, uh, to stop, to stop him. Right. There's no law. There's no way of doing this other than,
00:27:39.960
you know, many people in the astronomical community have written Elon Musk letters saying,
00:27:44.520
please don't do this. Um, and then this is why I think, you know, better regulation of space,
00:27:49.720
um, is a good thing so that, you know, everybody's voice can be heard in terms of doing the best thing
00:27:54.760
for. Does he write back to those letters? Has he said anything? Um, you know, they have,
00:27:59.640
and they've, they've taken notice. One of the things they've agreed to do is, um, change some of the
00:28:04.520
orbits and some of the reflectivity. Um, some of the earlier versions were very reflective of sunlight,
00:28:09.880
which makes them very bright. Um, you can paint them black, which makes them reflect less sunlight,
00:28:16.360
um, which helps us. Um, and so he has listened, um, but he certainly hasn't said, no, I'm not going
00:28:21.000
to do it. And I think, you know, for us in the astronomical community, um, you know, that's
00:28:25.320
something we would, the many of us would prefer. Um, but you know, there's no real way of doing this,
00:28:29.560
right? There's no formal way. And I think, um, that would be a real positive. So I think
00:28:33.320
commercialization of space is great. I think it adds a lot, but I think just like commercial, you know,
00:28:38.120
just as we're learning about all sorts of things like Facebook, you know, social media is great,
00:28:43.000
but, you know, completely unregulated, um, it can have problems. Right. Professor Musen,
00:28:49.320
I've learned so much about the James Webb space telescope, of course, but also about all these
00:28:53.560
other issues that we've covered here. This has been a really exciting conversation and
00:28:58.120
I thank you so much for your time today. Yeah. It's been a pleasure to talk to you.
00:29:01.480
All the best. Full comment is a post-media podcast. I'm Anthony Fury. This episode was
00:29:06.440
produced by Andre Proulx with theme music by Bryce Hall. Kevin Libin is the executive producer.
00:29:12.040
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