EXPERT REACTION: James Webb Telescope's first image released

These images from JWST show the farthest galaxies in their earliest days never seen before. They provide so much information and it is not only for cosmology, but also so important for understanding how our local Milky Way galaxy formed and evolved into the present day.

They are like images from the past showing how a city was built up over time. The events and evolution of bushlands, roads, landscapes, buildings, and skylines.

Paradoxically and in contrast with ordinary photography, where fancy new phone cameras capture present-day selfies and old technology snapped the lives of our great grandparents, the photos taken by JWSTs newest technologies are looking back to older times of the universe 13 billion years ago; the older telescopes such as the Anglo Australian Telescope are looking at the present situation.

The newly released James Webb Space Telescope images are beautiful and exciting in their own right, and in terms of the fantastic prospects they highlight for the future.

The combination of a larger mirror relative to Hubble allowing for greater resolution, large collecting area, and broad infrared sensitivity allows for exceptional observations. 

For example, one of the releases is a beautiful image of the Southern Ring Nebula, showing the gas ejected from, and illuminated by, a star on its way to collapsing into a white dwarf; another highlights star formation in the Carina Nebula, with spectacular high-resolution observations of the gas, dust, and the interface with ionising radiation from young massive stars.  In addition to the images, there is also the spectrum of the extrasolar planet WASP-96, which shows not just evidence of water (already known from previous observations) but also evidence of clouds (not expected before).

Of course, there is much more to come — and I am looking forward with great excitement to seeing the capabilities of the James Webb Space Telescope trained on other astrophysical puzzles, including cosmic transients such as the mergers of two neutron stars, which may be responsible for the production of much of the gold in the Universe.

Wow wow wow!!! The Webb telescope continues to absolutely amaze and delight with these first images!

Stephan’s Quintet is a fabulous system of close galaxies, you can almost feel the shockwaves as these galaxies collide and tumble in their cosmic dance. Bound together by gravity, these galaxies are important for understanding the future of galaxies like our Milky Way.

The Carinae nebula is also just superb. It’s a stellar nursery full of baby stars where we’re seeing incredible levels of detail for the first time.

It’s like before we could see just the trees in the forest, but now we can see down to the branches and even the leaves of individual trees. Some of these baby stars are super-charged giants that are radiating huge amounts of energy, imagine a UV index of a gazillion!

It has been fantastic to see the range of different targets being showcased in this first release, from dying stars to distant galaxies out at the edge of the visible Universe. These spectacular images highlight the diversity of areas in which the James Webb Space Telescope will make major contributions to knowledge, and how much we have to look forward to over the coming years! I’m excited by how well the instruments seem to be performing. In particular, the spectrum of the extrasolar gas giant planet highlights some of the new discovery space that the telescope is opening up, allowing us to see longer wavelengths of light that had not previously been accessible to us. The fingerprints of the different physical processes that are encoded in these spectra hold so much information. Given the sensitivity and the quality of the data, I can’t wait to see more!

JWST is bring mind-boggling near and distant galaxies into sharp focus. We are seeing stellar nurseries, star clusters, and dust lighting up the Webb images. We are witnessing the birth of the first stars and galaxies in the early Universe as well as planets forming around individual stars in our own Milky Way Galaxy. This sheds light on the physics that governs how galaxies transform and evolve by tracing how oxygen atoms we breathe and the carbon we are made of formed across cosmic time.

The layerings and shapes revealed in the JWST image of the Southern Ring nebula are like rings in a tree trunk: they tell you the history of the star and its companions over the last few thousand years. 

It is quite humbling to see the sharpest images of our birth clouds in our cosmic neighbourhood. With the help of different instruments in JWST we can now cut through many layers of dust to see what is really going on in these regions.

They demonstrate to us the cosmic recycling processes; remnants of a dead star resulting in 1000s of newer generation young stars, many of which we have never seen before. 

As a person who has spent many nights using the largest telescopes on Earth to detect the faintest signatures of the early cosmos, I feel the transformation to JWST will be game-changing. The released spectra show that we don’t just detect one faint line, we can get the full suite of chemical elements in these galaxies.

This, for the first time, gives us unique human DNA-like signatures of the first galaxies in the Universe to build up the origin story of life and everything around us. And to think of that the most exciting times from this telescope are yet to come!

It was really great that President Biden took the time to present these first images and show how proud he was of his nation's science and engineering. We shouldn’t forget that Europe played a huge role too in JWST and I hope in the future Australia can be a significant partner in future space telescopes. We download data for JWST with our dishes, but I want to see us building and launching 2 space telescopes. We have a lot of work to do!

The first image was amazing in the details it revealed compared to Hubble. The background galaxies are hugely magnified but also highly distorted into long arcs due to the mass of the cluster. It is quite complex to interpret. The galaxies are much sharper now and show vastly more detail than in the Hubble images and you see many more new arcs that Hubble could not detect. What I particularly notice is that many of them are 'strings of pearls', with the pearls - likely star clusters in a tiny galaxy - being different colours! This is telling us I think that there is a much more diverse range of stars in the early universe than we see with Hubble.

My team will be receiving our first data on Friday. We can’t wait!

The lensing cluster unveiled today at the briefing with President Biden gave a glimpse into how exciting JWST will be. We will improve greatly on what has already been achieved with Hubble and all other ground-based observing facilities.

While the increased sharpness compared to Hubble can easily be spotted by eye, a detailed look shows things we have never seen with Hubble. For example, we see bright red sources popping up in the JWST images. These are galaxies that are detected in the very early Universe. They are so far away that Hubble’s wavelength coverage is not sufficient to detect the light coming from them.

We can also see a lot of white blobs popping up everywhere. While we need to wait until NASA releases the science images to look into these in detail, the sheer amount of them suggests that in this single composite image, there are so many things to be discovered. We can see many more gravitational lensing arcs stretching the light from background galaxies. Most of them are due to the foreground galaxy cluster in the image, but you can see some individual galaxies are also doing their own magnification of background sources.

If you look closely enough, you will see diffraction spikes (similar to the x-like features we see in stars) coming from the central regions of galaxies as well. This increased sharpness of JWST is welcome, but will provide astronomers more unique challenges to deal with when analysing the super sharp images from JWST. 

 

Overall expectation with JWST:

 In the last decade, we have pushed Hubble to the very depths of the Universe but we simply haven’t been able to go deep enough to find these first systems. With JWST, the playing field will change. With a larger mirror and coverage of the infra-red wavelengths, JWST can push through to the end of the dark ages of the Universe to find the distant ancestors of our sun and the Milky Way. These stars would piece up our origin story to tell us how a Universe filled with only hydrogen and helium transformed to the diversity of elements around us at present. From oxygen in our atmosphere to Calcium in our bones, the journey of everything life depends on started in these first stars. I hope we will find our early ancestors with Webb.

The unveiling of the first images and spectra from the James Webb Space Telescope is the culmination of decades’ worth of work by scientists and engineers to develop the technology needed for a great observatory in space.

This is truly an inspiring achievement that has unfolded over the length of entire scientific careers. The tremendous success in obtaining images of such high sensitivity and quality is a testament to the huge amount of work that was done.

The image revealed today shows just a taste of the capability that astronomers now have to explore the universe to hitherto unknown depths, and already shows details and highlights of astronomical objects both nearby and all the way across the universe that previously were only roughly known, or guessed at.

One of the most inspiring things about the JWST mission is that it was only possible due to strong international cooperation, and that the telescope is accessible to astronomers anywhere in the world on equal competitive footing. This will enable synergies with a diverse range of telescopes with different capabilities, opening a new multi-wavelength window on the Universe and providing a crystal clear example of the benefits to science from an “open skies” approach.

Casting aside the momentous human achievement involved in peering back to some of the earliest galaxies in the Universe, this image is itself is so visually striking to me that it perhaps blurs the lines between science and art.

The intricate features caused by the gravitational bending of light and flurry of colours produced by these galaxies quite possibly makes this the closest thing we as astronomers will get to a Christmas in July.

Wow! Astronomers have been anticipating the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope, with today’s image offering us an amazing glimpse deep into our Universe’s past, through the gravitational lens of cluster SMACS 0723.

These first results are exciting because of the opportunities they unlock for understanding our Universe in richer detail than ever before. Webb is taking photos of the sky at infrared wavelengths, light we can’t see with our eyes. By combining these Webb images with data from other instruments, such as radio, optical and X-ray telescopes, we’ll get an even deeper insight into the birth and death of stars, the formation of planets and the evolution of galaxies.

Here in Australia, CSIRO’s new ASKAP telescope and the future SKA-Low telescope will contribute to building this multi-frequency map of the Universe, by adding data of the whole southern sky at radio wavelengths.

The new Webb Deep Field is absolutely stunning in both sharpness and color. Compared to Hubble images of the same area, it is as if we were nearsighted before but now wear glasses for the first time and see incredible detail.

The deep field is taken in the direction of a gravitational lensing cluster, which acts as a magnifying glass for the galaxies behind it, allowing Webb to see further. This is by far the sharpest and deepest image ever taken of the Universe and a goldmine for studying the first stars and galaxies that formed after the Big Bang.

The quest for exploration is written in our DNA. This is why we climb mountains, we dive, we fly and we go into space. This image has put our feet into a new higher ground: we can see further than ever, we can see more than ever, we can be closer to our own Universe cradle.”

“I feel we still living in caves when it comes to technology. Yes, we can explore the Moon, Mars and beyond within our Solar System and we can see further than ever. Yet, we are unable to reach our closest star within a lifetime. Proxima Centauri at 4.25 light years from here.”

“Everything we see in that image was set nearly 4.6 billion years ago. Right now, we could well have nothing left there. To know what was there now, we would need to look back there again in 4.6 billion years' time. This image is a snapshot of a distant past.

This image represents decades of work from thousands of scientists and engineers who worked tirelessly to make sure JWST worked flawlessly. It's an engineering marvel, unlike any telescope we've launched into space before.

The detail in this image shows that the telescope is working even better than predicted before launch, and it is now ready to begin its decade-long life as Earth's premier infrared observatory. Over the next few days more early scientific results will be released, including its first spectrum of an exoplanet, which will enable us to understand the composition of that planet's atmosphere.

This is the beginning of the excitement, not the culmination, and I can't wait to see what JWST data will teach us about planetary atmospheres and stellar physics.

We’ve got used to seeing Hubble Telescope images of distant galaxy clusters embellished with the distorted forms of even more galaxies beyond, magnified by the gravity of the foreground cluster. But the first released image from the Webb telescope takes us into a breathtaking new regime of detail and depth, with galaxies at unprecedented distances now revealed. It’s a stunning taster of what is to come from this superb instrument.

The Webb telescope’s capabilities are tuned to address some of the most profound questions in our exploration of the Universe. When did the first stars and galaxies form? How did they evolve? And what can we learn about the exoplanets orbiting stars in the Sun’s neighbourhood – including their potential for harbouring life? This extraordinary instrument has enormous potential for Nobel-Prize-winning discovery, and today’s image is just the first step on that scientific journey.

The Christmas present we’ve all been waiting for - the first image from the James Webb Space Telescope! It is like going from 1080p to 8k views of the Universe!  

The cluster is a perfect first image, being able to see bright nearby stars to a cluster of galaxies a few billion light years away. The combined mass of these galaxies acts like a giant magnifying lens, allowing us to see background galaxies over 10 billion years old.

Being able to see faint objects, as well as old objects in new light, is amazing!

Not just an image, it's the realm of the unthinkable. Each single point in this image represents how big the universe is: just think, in each of these galaxies there have to be millions of planets just like in The Milky Way, millions of possibilities to have habitable worlds.

The light collected by the most amazing telescope ever built by humanity is transporting us to those worlds, it's making us a part of the Universe. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) took this picture using only 12.5 hours of exposure time, in the past the Hubble Telescope took a similar Ultra Deep Field image but 11.3 days were necessary to achieve it.

What the JWST will show us in the future will change the course of astronomy, but most importantly, it's going to change the way we understand the Universe and everything it contains, from the interstellar medium to the intergalactic space and beyond.

I'm blown away by the very early universe galaxies gravitationally redshifted all over the image. We've seen this kind of physics before, but not in this level of detail.

Scientifically, I'm looking at the spiky bright spots caused by the foreground stars - they are beautifully sharp, and my science goals are all about being able to predict exactly what a star should look like, subtract it out, and look for faint planets and the disks from which they are born. From what I can see, this should be pretty doable!

The James Webb Space Telescope is important because this exploration is unprecedented. Our human curiosity will always push us to learn more about ourselves and the universe, and in this context the JWST is a time machine. We’ll be looking back to the point in time where the periodic table began, where carbon emerged. It will tell the story of when we, as human beings, were still stardust.
 
The International Space Centre’s Astronomy from Space Node is involved in the Prime Extragalactic Area for Reionization and Lensing Science (PEARLS) team that has been working with the JWST since 1996. We have the first hours of guaranteed time on the JWST*. There has been a ‘frenzy of activity’ to prepare codes and strategies for processing the first data from this place in space. UWA will contribute to the background analysis, source detection, and the measurement of the extragalactic background light for these first images.
 
Australia has a special place in this historic event. Not only are NASA crossing to the International Space Centre during the global press release, but the tracking station in play during the First Light release is the ground station at Tidbinbilla near Canberra. Anytime it is dark in Australia, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory station at Tidbinbilla will be downloading data to transfer to the US and uploading commands to and from the telescope.
 
These human moments are what provide inspiration to all of us to achieve and drive us forward- not just in the space frontier, but also as an impetus for many new innovations, technology development and our relationship with the universe around us.
 
* PEARLS plan to view a combination of high ecliptic latitude blank fields including known high redshift galaxies, protoclusters, quasars and radio galaxies. PEARLS will also image several well-studied rich galaxy clusters that will act as photon amplifiers by boosting the signal of the most distant objects via strong gravitational lensing. A final field studies two nearby overlapping galaxies, as a benchmark for the study of high redshift dusty environments.

What you hope to discover with the Webb?

"Webb gives us a depth and the resolution that we did not have before. I hope to discover something that we didn’t know before. 

The predictable science will be to better understanding how galaxies re-ionize the universe in the early days (million years) of the universe. First, we will for the first time observe many ‘mediocre’ galaxies at that time.

Previously we have only seen the brightest ones, while in fact there are a lot more low-mass galaxies than massive and bright ones. The distribution of mass (or light) among galaxies is like the wealth distribution. If one wants to study human behaviour, one can’t just observe the richest ones. Moreover, we will see them in many wavelengths or even obtain their spectra. These are crucial information to infer their physical properties: how many stars, what kind of stars they have, and how gas-rich they are.

The James Webb Space Telescope matters to me because with the first light of JWST, we will have an unparalleled opportunity to view the birth of stars within the hearts of the densest, dust-enshrouded cores of molecular clouds. The technological advancements of JWST will build a revolutionary data set to the astronomical community, spur major scientific advances, and build on recent legacy programs of the Hubble Space Telescope that revolutionised our knowledge of the cosmos. The "unknown unknowns" are the most exciting prospect over the next 5-10 years; we will be discovering unexpected surprises and answering problems we haven't even imagined yet. The breathtaking views of the Universe are guaranteed to ignite the excitement and imagination of the public and inspire the next generation of astronomers.

I study stars. I am particularly interested in stars that, being born in pairs, influence each other over their lives, a bit like married couples. 

One of the stunning effects of these interactions are planetary nebulae, whose incredible shapes are blueprints of these interaction. The only way to read the blueprint, however, is to paste together multi-wavelength imaging and spectroscopic information from every single little bit of the nebula. Only so can we reconstruct the 3D shapes and, eventually, its past history.

One of the images that will be released on Wednesday at 12:30AM is that of NGC3132, a planetary nebula with uncanny complexity. 

This image harnesses the combined power of the James Webb Space Telescope and Einstein's General Relativity, boosting and warping the weak light from these early galaxies through the focusing caused by the cluster of galaxies between us and the early Universe. Almost every object is a distant galaxy.

The cluster of galaxies acts like the lens in your glasses, focusing the light from the earliest galaxies in the Universe. The lens distorts and magnifies their light, allowing us to see fine details of these infant galaxies where they would normally be too faint.

For the first time, we can see the details of these earliest galaxies, harbouring the first generations of stars to have ever formed in the Universe. These galaxies formed in a mostly dark universe, filled with neutral hydrogen gas, and very different to the cosmos we see today.

This image captures the starlight from the earliest objects to have formed in the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang. This starlight is more than 13 billion years old, focussed toward JWST by the incredible bending power of a massive cluster of younger galaxies.

Combined with the future power of the Square Kilometre Array, the world's largest radiotelescope, being built in Western Australia, which traces the hydrogen gas that fills the space between these infant galaxies, we can fully understand this critical time of the very young universe.

This is absolutely stunning!  This galaxy cluster is a gravitational lens that bends light from galaxies that are even farther away, possibly among the very earliest galaxies that formed in the universe."


Here are some handy resources about gravitational lensing including videos:   https://sites.google.com/view/agelsurvey/about/gravitational-lensing

It's so exciting to finally see what the JWST can deliver - though sitting on hold listening to NASA's hold music for an hour waiting for the live stream to finally start was something of a painful experience! When the image finally came out, though, it was well worth the wait. I'm not a cosmologist, so I'm not an expert on the most distant reaches of the universe - but the image still blew me away. It also showed something really amazing known as 'angular diameter turnaround'. The redder galaxies in the image are much farther from us than the bluer ones - so you would expect them to look smaller than the blue ones. Instead, they looked huge! That's an effect I'd seen discussed before (most recently on the webcomic XKCD), but I've never seen it as clearly displayed as here. Essentially, you have this quirky situation where, for most of the universe, the more distant something is, the smaller it will appear - just like common sense would tell us. But for the most distant things, back near the dawn of time, they actually start looking bigger again. The reason is apparently because, when they emitted the light that has travelled so long to reach us, the universe was much smaller, and so they were actually (relatively) close by, just moving away ridiculously quickly. And, yes, that makes my head hurt too!"

The XKCD cartoon link is here, if you need it: https://xkcd.com/2622/ , and I believe their images are creative commons licenced (i.e. can be reproduced for noncommercial use https://xkcd.com/license.html ).

JWST will absolutely revolutionise the field overnight, seeing to larger distances, earlier times, and fainter limits than any other observatory before it. It took nearly 25 years of complex technological hurdles to crease this sophisticated unfolding observatory platform that is located 1.5 million km from Earth. The 'unknown unknowns' are the most exciting prospect: we will be discovering unexpected surprises and answering problems we haven't even imagined yet. The JWST will give us unparalleled opportunity to explore our own Universe and I'm extremely excited for the mysteries we will uncover owing to the advancement in sensitivity, wavelength coverage, and spectral sensitivity provided by this unrivalled observing facility.

The first preview of an image from JWST is as spectacular as we all hoped. A tiny part of the universe has been imaged more sharply than ever before, showing a myriad of galaxies whose light comes to us across billions of light years from the deep past. The most distant galaxies have their images magnified by a ‘gravitational lens’ produced by a massive cluster of galaxies in the foreground, in accord with Einstein’s theory of gravity. This is just a taste of what’s to come from this extraordinary telescope, the most powerful tool humanity has yet devised for peering into the universe. As we look further out and in finer detail than ever before, I’m really excited to see what else JWST will find. I hope that, as in the past, the universe surprises us with beauty and novelty.

The first public science image released by the James Webb team completely blew me away.

Looking back to the very infancy of the universe, the image was much sharper and quite a bit more detailed than I had ever expected. At first glance, its impact rivals that of Hubble Space Telescope images. Yet the James Webb is optimised for much longer wavelengths where it's so much harder to obtain such sharp images.

I spent part of my early years as a scientist analysing infrared images. They were state of the art at the time, yet the size of the James Webb image is 100 times larger in terms of the number of pixels (which are much smaller in size in Webb's case), and truly groundbreaking.

This is the most sensitive infrared image of distant galaxies ever taken, and its awesome quality promises so much for an amazing future of space-based infrared astronomy. I am more excited about the tantalising prospects of the James Webb than I had anticipated. 'Wow' just doesn't cover it this time!

It’s amazing to see JWST’s first image - with such a large mirror in space (6.5 metres!!) it is able to capture much more light than Hubble Space Telescope, and, as it looks at redder light than Hubble, it can see galaxies so far away that they are at the beginning of our Universe! Nearer to us in both our Milky Way and nearby galaxies, as an ‘infrared’ telescope, we will be able to see through all the space dust, seeing buried stars properly for the first time, and in work I am associated with, even capture the emission from this dust at finer scales than ever achieved.

I was impressed with the President's and Vice President's position on science. They clearly see the benefit of astronomy and advanced technologies, and the awesome privilege of seeing into deep space in this way. The project has taken 3 decades.
 
The statements were accurate and not exaggerated. They also emphasized international collaboration which was good to do. ESA and CSA have made crucial contributions also.
 
The image showed galaxies with different colours, where the redder and smaller galaxies are far more distant in the Universe. It was a gravitationally lensed field meaning that they were using a foreground cluster of galaxies as a 'dark matter' lens or magnifying glass. A weird concept but very standard now in astrophysics, an effect predicted by Einstein 100 years ago.

All of the most distant detections need the effect of lensing because the galaxies are so small and faint. We will see
faint objects directly as well without lensing but they will typically be rare, intrinsically more massive objects.
 
Lensing boosts the background faint signal from deep space BUT distorts the images badly into arcuate streaks. We need computers to reconstruct the original pattern and shape of galaxies where the light originated.

JWST’s first image of the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 is very impressive, and a vast improvement on previous images of this galaxy cluster by Hubble Space Telescope. The richness of the data is immediately clear. One can see images of very distant red galaxies that have been distorted by the gravity of the stars, gas and dark matter within the galaxy cluster. I was also struck by the faint diffuse 'intracluster light' produced by billions of stars that have been torn from their original galaxies. Of course, this is just the beginning and JWST will be producing more impressive detailed views of the Universe over the coming years.

Why did it take nearly 30 years, and more than US$10 billion (roughly A$14 billion), to get Webb off the ground?

First, it’s the largest telescope ever put into space, with a gold-coated mirror 6.5m in diameter (compared with Hubble’s 2.4m mirror). With size comes complexity, as the entire structure needed to be folded to fit inside the nose cone of an Ariane rocket.

Second, there were two major engineering marvels to accomplish with Webb. For a large telescope to produce the sharpest images possible, the mirror’s surface needs to be aligned along a curve with extreme precision. For Webb this means unfolding and positioning the 18 hexagonal segments of the primary mirror, plus a secondary mirror, to a precision of 25 billionths of a metre.

Also, Webb will be observing infrared light, so it must be kept incredibly cold (roughly -233℃) to maximise its sensitivity. This means it must be kept far away from Earth, which is a source of heat and light. It must also be completely protected from the Sun – achieved by a 20m multilayered reflective sunshield.

All of Webb’s major spacecraft deployments, including the unfurling of the primary mirror and sunshield, were completed on January 8. The entire process involved more than 300 single points of failure (mechanisms that had only one chance to work). The remaining tiny motions will take place over the next few months.

The main mission

Webb’s primary mission will be to witness the birth of the first stars and galaxies in the early Universe. As the light from these very faint galaxies travels across the vast gulf of space, and 13.8 billion years of time, it gets stretched by the overall expansion of the Universe in a process we call “cosmological redshift.”

This stretching means what started out as extremely energetic ultraviolet radiation from young, hot and massive stars will be received by Webb as infrared light. This is why its mirrors are coated in gold: compared with silver or aluminium, gold is a better reflector of infrared light and red light.

Webb will see much farther into the infrared than Hubble could. It’s also up to a million times more sensitive than ground-based telescopes, where the light from distant galaxies is drowned out by the infrared emission of Earth’s own hot atmosphere.

Because of these previous technological limitations, the first billion years of cosmic history has barely been explored. We don’t know when or how the first stars formed. This is a complex question as stars produce heavy elements when they die. These elements pollute the interstellar gas in galaxies and change how this gas behaves and collapses to form later generations of stars.

All current star formation we can observe, such as in the Milky Way, is from enriched interstellar gas. We haven’t yet seen how stars form in pristine gas, which is without any heavy elements – as such a state hasn’t existed for more than 13 billion years.

But we think formation from pristine gas likely had a large effect on the properties of the first stellar populations.

Links: 

• NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has reached its destination, 1.5 million km from Earth. Here’s what happens next
• How Webb took its first picture: https://theconversation.com/the-james-webb-space-telescope-has-taken-its-first-aligned-image-of-a-star-heres-how-it-was-done-178315 
• The search for the first galaxies: https://theconversation.com/hubble-webb-and-the-search-for-first-light-galaxies-5116 

Why the Webb matters to you
"I’ve known about JWST since I started as a graduate student decades ago. My PhD supervisor was Prof. Garth Illingworth who has arguably been one of JWST’s biggest advocates.  I’ve been able to see the long arc of how a project starts from ideas to delivering a transformative observatory.

Beyond the scientific discoveries, JWST is a testament to the incredible teams of scientists and engineers from all over our global community to push science into a new frontier. It shows that by working together, we can tackle the biggest challenges as long as we’re able to dream it."

What you hope to discover with the Webb
"Of course answering all the many many questions we have about the origins of our Universe, but also to discover the surprising, the unknown, and the simply bizarre!"

The impact of Hubble on you and/or science and/or culture.
"The Hubble Space Telescope transformed our ability to use gravitational lensing to peer into the very distant Universe. Only with sharp eyes from above the Earth’s atmosphere can we see the incredibly faint cosmic mirages that form when light rays are bent by massive objects.  I fully expect JWST to transform astrophysics in equally profound, and at this point completely unknown, ways."

The first images
"Among the first images will be of the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723, one of the most massive objects in the Universe.  This galaxy cluster bends light from objects at the edge of our observable horizon and may reveal how the very first galaxies form. 

Gravitational lensing is a topic near & dear to my heart.  My team still holds the record for one of the most distant gravitational lens, and I am currently co-leading an ambitious AGEL survey to find hundreds of new lenses.  My hope is that we’ll be able to study some of these new systems with JWST.

Hubble has had an enormous impact in my field of science, extragalactic astronomy, and in culture in general. Hubble took my favourite astronomical image of all time: the Hubble Ultra Deep Field.

This image was taken by pointing Hubble to a dark patch of sky (i.e., with no stars or nearby galaxies), and just collecting photons for about 10 days. The final image is breathtaking: if you observe for long enough, that tiny dark patch of sky reveals over ten thousand distant galaxies. This completely revolutionized our view of the Universe: there are many more galaxies than we thought there were, and they extend out to larger distances (i.e., earlier times in the Universe) than originally thought. 

We have observed as far as we can possibly observe with Hubble, and that’s where the Webb comes in. Thanks to its huge mirror and infrared detectors, we will be able to observe even more distant galaxies than with the Hubble — in fact, we expect to observe the very first galaxies that lit up the Universe! 

It’s extremely exciting! 

We will also be able to study distant galaxies in more detail than ever before: we will measure the chemical elements they have in their interstellar medium, and we will see through clouds of cosmic dust that are currently blocking our view of stars in distant galaxies.

Piercing through cosmic dust to reveal the stars is the main goal of the JWST Cycle 1 project I am co-principal investigator of. We will be studying some of the most extreme galaxies known, dusty starburst galaxies. These galaxies are known to be forming stars at extreme rates — up to a thousand times the rate of star formation in the Milky Way — yet we still don’t know why and how they can sustain these rates, and how they evolved to be like this. 

The problem is that most (if not all) we can see of these galaxies right now is the glowing interstellar dust that is being heated by star formation, but we can’t see their stars directly. Webb is the first-ever telescope that will be able to piece through their copious amounts of dust to obtain direct images of the stars in these galaxies.

Just like Hubble surprised us with its new observations, I expect Webb to also show us new things that we can’t even predict yet — that unexpected element is what is most exciting! Every time we access a new way to observe the Universe (a bigger telescope, a different wavelength range, etc), it reveals new surprises to us. I just can’t wait to see what Webb will teach us about the Universe, and ultimately, our place in it!

With colleagues from Montreal and Baltimore, Professor Tuthill designed a key component of one of the four scientific instruments onboard the James Webb Space Telescope. His work has led to the development of one of the operational modes of the telescope’s Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS)."

a.    Why the Webb matters to you

"As the only Australian scientist who has built a piece of hardware now flying on the Webb, this is a day I have been looking forward to for a big part of my career.

Because everything about the Webb is so over-the-top audacious - from the titanic articulated mirror down to its orbit out in the cold voids of interplanetary space - somehow the entire thing always seemed beyond the boundaries of the possible. So the most amazing part of the journey so far for me was the news I did not hear.

This entire huge, complicated machine flew out and everything seems to have unfolded and deployed like clockwork: this was definitely a time when routine news was good news.

Now that it is out in its science orbit and my experiment has been checked out and passed by NASA engineers, I am super excited to see the first data downlinked."

b.    What you hope to discover with the Webb

"My particular experiment is designed to home in on very subtle signals - faint whispers and motes of light that betray the presence of material nestled up against the overwhelming glare of the host star in the system. If you think about trying to see our solar system looking back from a vantage point out at a distant star, it turns out to be a truly forbidding technical challenge. Even large planets like Jupiter are incredibly faint compared to the Sun, and all of them would appear to nestle incredibly close when viewed across the interstellar gulf. Webb just might be the first technology humans have built that can really crack that problem, opening the door onto distant worlds we can only guess at today."

c.    The impact of Hubble on you and/or science and/or culture.

"I was still a student when Hubble was first launched, and it is quite remarkable to see the old warhorse still delivering outstanding science today. 

It is hard to overstate the impact of this one observatory. Although it has been an overwhelming scientific triumph just about any way you might care to measure it, even more than that it has given us a vision of the cosmos with crystal clarity and exquisite detail that speaks to all of us. All the spinning galaxies and titanic shocks and explosions that Astronomers like me study with our instruments - they are just popping out of the images, sometimes hardly seeming to need a caption to convey the essence of what we are witness to.

Why the Webb matters to you

"As with any new instrument, the revolutionary new capabilities provided by the Webb will lead to amazing progress in our understanding of the Universe. It will undoubtedly make major advances in the many high-profile science areas for which it was specifically designed.

However, I am most excited by the unforeseen breakthroughs that will be made by the Webb. The new areas of parameter space opened up by this powerful new telescope, when coupled with the creativity of the scientists who use it, will lead to new discoveries that we had not even imagined. Hubble was a perfect example of this, and I am looking forward to what the Webb will achieve."

The impact of Hubble on you and/or science and/or culture. 

"My team is hoping to use the Webb to find out how feeding black holes launch powerful beams of outflowing matter and energy known as jets. These jets play an important role in transporting energy from the black hole out to enormous distances. Jets from the most massive black holes can affect the evolution of entire galaxies. However, by studying small black holes (just a few times the mass of our Sun), we can watch their jets change in real time, in response to variations in the inflowing gas that feeds them. 

Our team will use the Webb to look at how both the brightness and the colours of light from the jets change on timescales as short as a fraction of a second. This will tell us how close to the black hole the jets are first accelerated, how fast they are travelling, and how much energy they carry away with them. The sensitivity of the Webb in a hitherto poorly-probed region of the infrared part of the spectrum is critical in enabling these studies of black hole jets. Coupled with sophisticated computer simulations of processes close to a black hole, this will help us unravel the mystery of how black holes launch these powerful jets.

The amazing images from Hubble helped inspire me to get involved in astronomy. 

As a teenager, I remember being awed by its powerful images of the cosmos, and wanted to learn more. I was lucky enough to be able to pursue that passion for science, and moved into astrophysics research. The day I received the first Hubble data for one of my own science programs was extremely exciting, given the part that iconic telescope had played in stimulating my own interest in science when I was growing up. I hope that the Webb will similarly inspire the next generation of scientists in Australia and around the world.

The James Webb telescope will be critical for our science because it will open high spatial resolution imaging in the mid-infrared wavelength regime. 

Are baby planets born hot?

We hope that JWST will help us to find forming planets. Planets are forming in a disc of gas and dust that surrounds young stars. The disc is opaque in the visible and near-infrared, hiding any potential planets. But in the wavelength range that JWST observes at (which is not accessible from the ground or with HST), the disc becomes transparent, so our goal is to try to get images of these newly born planets. This will tell us if these baby planets are born hot (a few thousand degrees) or cold (less than 1000 degrees), which is the main parameter to pinpoint the main physical processes that lead to the formation of planet. 
This should give us critical answers to understand the origin of our solar system. 

Hubble has been instrumental in getting the first images of the discs surrounding young stars, as well as placing in the more general context of star formation within molecular clouds. 

I grew up as a teenager with HST images. Many of them motivated me to study astronomy. The famous image of the pillars of creation in the Orion nebula is probably the most iconic image for me as it is directly linked to the research I do now. I also used HST images of discs during my PhD, so it has been a key telescope for my own science.

Larissa Wiese of the International Space Centre is organising our activities along with UWA media folk.

Tuesday evening we have a live NASA cross-over during the NASA telecast and possibly an interview. Thursday evening we’re holding a NASA-sanctioned Public Lecture https://www.icrar.org/events/jwst-july-22/

Why the Webb matters to you

"I’ve been involved in Webb since its inception as part of one of the six interdisciplinary scientists teams. We have 112 hours of guaranteed time, three observations now in the bag (although NASA are waiting until the 12th to release them), and will use these data to try to study cosmic ignition."

What you hope to discover with the Webb

"The very first galaxies and cosmic ignition. Refine our measurements and models of the cosmic radiation incident on Earth from deep space. Compare our models of early galaxy formation and growth to statistical samples built from JWST data. Basically we want to know how stellar mass has formed and evolved, and the energy that is produced during these process from the very first billion years of the timeline of the Universe."

The impact of Hubble on you and/or science and/or culture.

"Well we’ve been waiting >25years so lots of anticipation. We’ve built teams, codes, models, and now we just want to be let loose on the data (which will happen from right after the First Light images). We also quietly hope for surprises and unexpected serendipitous discovery’s.

Much of the data from JWST flows to back to Earth via Tidbinbilla. 

A 34 metre dish named DSS-34 is currently tracking JWST every day for periods ranging from between about 6 to 12 hours depending on the day. 

The role that Australia played for Apollo, Voyager and many deep space missions is living on with JWST.