James Webb telescope: Canadians played a crucial role

As the James Webb Telescope prepares for launch, Canadians have played a critical role in its development and in processing the information scientists receive from it.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), known in layman’s terms to replace the Hubble Space Telescope, is 100 times more powerful than its predecessor and uses infrared technology for its images, which means it is able to discover parts of the universe that scientists have never seen before.

The telescope is scheduled to launch on December 25 from French Guiana.

As part of the telescope’s development, Canadian researchers made two important contributions: a sensor designed to help it stay on target and an instrument called the Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS), which helps study objects. astronomical.

“It’s an incredible [piece of] machines which are going to be sent 1.5 million kilometers from the Earth, essentially trying to protect themselves from the sunlight and also from the heat of the Earth “, Martin Bergeron, manager of the planetary exploration and astronomy at the Canadian Space Agency, said in a recent virtual interview.

Bergeron compared the stability of the sensor to its ability to focus on a penny from four kilometers away, without shaking.

Bergeron said that once the data is available, his job is to ensure that Canadian scientists get the most out of the information. Canada’s contribution to James Webb means that the country’s researchers receive about five percent of the telescope’s observation time.

“That doesn’t mean we’ll get exactly that, but it does mean that on average we’re looking to get that percentage of the observation time,” Bergeron said.

“It’s an important part,” added Bergeron. “It might sound small, but it’s actually a lot of observation time.”

Els Peeters, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Western Ontario, is part of the team leading the Early Release Science Program, which is designed to disseminate some of JWST’s information to the community as soon as possible. astronomical, to show its capabilities.

“In order to show what all instruments could do, the project basically decided to come up with a special category of programs whose data would be immediately public to the whole astronomical community and present what the instruments could do”, a- she declared.

For this role, Peeters will be among the first people to see what images JWST can produce.

“The good thing about these specials is that they will be scheduled very early in James Webb’s life so that will be one of the first observations that will be taken,” she said. “I’m very excited about this because for the research I’m doing… the instruments are just fantastic. “

Peeters compared the images from JWST to an image with millions of pixels, compared to that from Hubble.

“You can really disentangle all the different processes and all the different regions that are happening with the distance of these young stars,” she said. “The observations themselves will only provide groundbreaking results because of the tremendous progress made with these instruments. “

Speaking to the CTV News Channel on Friday, Peeters said that with JWST, she and others will be able to observe parts of the universe that were previously inaccessible.

“It will range from baby galaxies, looking at the first galaxies, the first stars formed, closer to current star formations… our exoplanets that we have discovered in recent years and the atmospheres around exoplanets,” he said. she declared.

“My main interest in Webb is in star formation. I’m going to be looking at how young stars influence their surroundings and how they evolve, so I’m really, really looking forward to seeing the first images and observations.

Among Canadian researchers looking to use the new telescope is Loic Albert, a researcher at the University of Montreal and scientific instrument expert for Webb, whose study focuses on failed stars known as brown dwarfs.

“In my case, James Webb opens up the possibility of studying some specific types of brown dwarfs, the cooler, less massive brown dwarfs,” Albert told The Canadian Press last month. “They’re so weak you can’t see them from the ground. “

For those who study planets outside of our solar system, the Webb will be able to show images that Hubble simply couldn’t, Albert said.

“For the exoplanet community, this will be a game-changer,” he said. “This will make it possible to measure the atmospheres of exoplanets for a large number of planets and in exquisite detail.”

In addition to researching exoplanets, the James Webb will also be useful for taking an in-depth look at planets and moons in our own solar system and will be able to see how stars change over time, Bergeron said.

“The James Webb Space Telescope is essentially a time machine. It allows you to go back to very distant and therefore very old systems, whether they are stars or galaxies and these are things that you will be able to look at with this very powerful system, ”he added.

Peeters said it would take about six months before the first sightings arrive on Earth, which means images of JWST’s initials are expected in mid-June.

With files from The Canadian Press and Michael Lee