6/18/2023 0 Comments New telescopeAnd it's extremely hard to look at things in our own neighborhood because they're so bright. So we wanted James Webb Space Telescope to offer the same sort of capabilities. But we also study things like distant stars and galaxies and planets around other stars. We wanted this to be an all-purpose general observatory that the entire astronomy community could use the way that we've used the Hubble telescope to look at things like Mars or Jupiter or Saturn. So that was my role on this project actually, was to make sure that not only this extremely sensitive telescope that's studying you know, the farthest reaches of the universe can study first stars and galaxies and planets around other stars, but we can look at things much closer to home. And it is going to be looking for the first stars and galaxies across the universe.ĬURWOOD: So it's gonna take a look at deep space and way back in time, but also I understand it can look in the local neighborhood at some things. So this is NASA's next big astrophysics space telescope that we launched on Christmas Day. MILAM: So the space based telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, is called the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. Stefanie, welcome to Living on Earth!ĬURWOOD: So Stefanie, before we begin talking in detail about this, explain to somebody who really maybe hasn't heard much about this, what kind of telescope we're talking about here. Here to tell us more about the extraordinary Webb telescope, is Stefanie Milam, the Deputy Project Scientist for Planetary Science at NASA. And because it looks at infrared light it will also help in the search for signs related to life on other planets, both near and far. Not only will the Webb Telescope see stars born much closer to the so-called Big Bang beginning of our universe, its higher resolution images of super novas and galaxy motion might provide more insight into the phenomena of dark matter and gravity. The Webb Telescope can look far deeper into space and further back in time than its predecessor, the Hubble Telescope. Meanwhile on last Christmas Day the massive James Webb Space Telescope was launched into an orbit a million miles above Earth and will start sending back pictures by this summer. A subatomic particle called the W Boson was discovered back in 1983 but earlier this month scientists reported new measurements of its mass that upend the conventional rules of physics, rules by the way, that have failed to explain gravity and dark matter. Well, two recent amazing developments may help bring some answers. Is it a force? Is it a curvature in space time, as Albert Einstein suggested? And along with the mystery of gravity there is also so-called dark matter, which seems to occupy more than 80 per cent of the universe, but we still can’t see it or explain it. But science has yet to explain just how gravity works. For scientists: More details can be found on the telescope page.CURWOOD: We all experience gravity anytime we drop an object.ESO Faint Object Spectrograph and Camera version 2 (EFOSC). Star formation, protoplanetary systems, Galactic center, spectroscopy. The telescope dome is relatively small, and is ventilated by a system of flaps that makes air flow smoothly across the mirror, reducing turbulence and leading to sharper images. The design of the octagonal enclosure housing the NTT is another technological breakthrough. This technology, developed by ESO, known as active optics, is now applied to all major modern telescopes, such as the Very Large Telescope at Cerro Paranal and the future Extremely Large Telescope. The secondary mirror position is also actively controlled in three directions. The main mirror is flexible and its shape is actively adjusted by actuators during observations, using a reference star, to preserve the optimal image quality. The 3.58-metre New Technology Telescope (NTT) was inaugurated in 1989, and it broke new ground for telescope engineering and design.
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