As the finger-like celestial objects seem to grasp into the heavens, the
Pillars of Creation are almost impossible to adequately describe with human language. Located in Eagle Nebula in the Serpens constellation, the clusters of cool interstellar gas and dust appear splotchy in the Hubble Space Telescope's images, but thanks to the
James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the Pillars truly appear like solid columns.
With a normal earthbound telescope, one can only see the Serpens constellation in the northern part of the celestial hemisphere. The breathtaking beauty of the Pillars, which humanity can now appreciate in even finer detail, only became evident to those whose eyes turned toward the heavens within the last few years.
This is just one of many gifts the JWST has bestowed on humanity. One of the biggest fans of the next gen telescop is Ethan Siegel, a theoretical astrophysicist who used to teach at the academic level, but today most people know him for his work outside of the classroom as a science writer, especially his writing about space. Siegel's new book,
"Infinite Cosmos: Visions From the James Webb Space Telescope," was released on Oct. 8th.
Good science writing is a fine balancing act between not speaking over the heads of laypeople and not insulting the intelligence of experts. Siegel achieves that whether explaining
inflation prior to the Big Bang or
penning a book on humanity's lifelong quest to understand the universe beyond our solar system, Siegel is adept at breaking down complex concepts in compelling yet accessible prose. In the past he has spoken with Salon about everything from
debunking UFO hoaxes to
understanding Dyson spheres.
Salon spoke with Siegel about how the JWST has challenged dominant theories about cosmology, consistently presenting
mind-boggling images that defy explanation, as well as why space is for everyone, regardless of political affiliation or creed.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Which images from this book are your personal favorites?
From a visual point of view, there are a number of stunning ones. I absolutely love the JWST [James Webb Space Telescope] images of the
Pillars of Creation. We have pictures of the telescope while it was under construction as well. There is a picture of the ISIM module, which is the Integrated Science Instrument Module. This is a part of the telescope you don't normally see. It is gold in color, so it isn't just the JWST team mirror that's gold, but the instrument module itself is also gold. And I was really excited to get to see that, because that was a surprising one to me...............
This then goes back to the question of, "What are the major achievements of this particular telescope? Can you explain how James Webb is a breakthrough compared to other telescopes that have been developed?"
For one thing, it is the largest, most sensitive space observatory ever built, and because of that, it has required new technologies that never existed before. It was designed and built — such as the folding segmented mirror, such as the five-layer sunshield and such as the science instruments that are onboarded — all of those represent newly-developed technologies. And because of that, because we have a new telescope with larger aperture, high-precision sensitive wavelengths and new instruments, we were able to discover a whole slew of new things about the universe that we never knew before.
These include the most distant galaxy cluster; it includes classes of objects like what we call
JuMBOs, which stands for "Jupiter Mass Binary Objects." We saw star forming regions where you will have stars that form and planets form around them. We did not know we would find giant planets forming without parents stars at all, much less that we would see giant stars forming in pairs or binary systems with no stars at all. One of the most fascinating things that JWST has shown us, that I'm excited we do get to talk about in the book, is that around a nearby young star, a star called Fomalhaut, we don't see just an analogy of the solar system where you have planets and an asteroid belt and more planets and a hyper belt. We found in that system that there is a third belt, there is an intermediate belt in there. We never saw an intermediate belt before. We did not know that such things could exist.
And now we have to rethink our story about how planets and planetary systems form is our solar system typical or is the Fomalhaut system typical? We don't even know anymore, what is the most common configuration for planetary systems in the universe?..............
https://www.salon.com/2024/10/08/why-the-james-webb-space-telescope-has-been-a-gift-to-humanity/