Searching the cosmos for distant objects is made a little tougher when what you’re looking for is beyond the scope of human experience.
Victoria astronomer Tyrone Woods said that is just what’s in store for him and others using the James Webb Space Telescope, a $10-billion international project that has been more than 20 years in development.
Faraway stars, billions of light years away, are a key part of what will be studied, he said.
“One of the things I’m involved in is trying to find some of the first stars ever born in the universe — really massive objects,” he said. “Of course, since we’ve never seen them before, one of the biggest issues is what do they actually look like?
“Mainly I’ve been working on the theoretical side, so I do numerical simulations and computer simulations to try to understand what these things are that we’re going to be looking at.”
That way, once things get started, “we know how to find those needles in a haystack,” Woods said.
Victoria has established a strong connection to the James Webb Space Telescope through people like Woods and fellow astronomer Chris Willott, who both work at the Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Centre on Little Saanich Mountain, off West Saanich Road.
The six-metre long piece telescope was launched on Christmas Day from French Guiana and is now in operation about 1.6 million kilometres from Earth — four times the distance from Earth to the moon. A five-layer shield the size of a tennis court protects it from the heat of the sun.
A combined effort of the Canadian Space Agency, the European Space Agency and NASA, the Webb is intended to be the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. Webb, however, will orbit much deeper in space and be anywhere from a hundred to a million times more sensitive.
“You would be able to point at a human hair from a couple kilometres away,” said Jean Dupuis, a senior mission scientist with the Canadian Space Agency. “It’s pretty much pushing the limit of what can be done.”
It’s designed to study the nature of planets beyond our solar system and what the oldest galaxies around can tell us about the birth of the universe.
Willott spends much of his time with the project at the Herzberg centre, but has also made many trips to the mission’s operations centre in Baltimore.
sa国际传媒 has played a role since the project’s early stages, he said — it has contributed almost $200 million since the project began in 1996.
“We were involved very early on, in the late 1990s, in actually having sa国际传媒 become a partner in the project,” he said. “We did some work on thinking about some of the science instruments that are required on the telescope, and did some preliminary designs.”
He said sa国际传媒 ended up providing one of the four specialized instruments being used, along with a fine-guidance sensor. The sensor is “a very important component” that will be used with every observation the telescope makes and be part of aligning its 18 hexagonal mirrors, Willott said.
“Those 18 segments have to get lined up to act as one single mirror,” he said.
It will take a number of weeks — possibly until the summer.
The sensor is so far performing well and has been able to zero in on a target star.
“It’s extremely satisfactory seeing everything coming into place,” Dupuis said. “It’s a sense of amazement and happiness.”
sa国际传媒’s contributions have guaranteed it five per cent of the telescope’s observation time. Willott is helping to set up what that will entail.
One Canadian instrument being used, known as NIRISS — Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph — helps analyze light the telescope observes, and will be deployed to observe a range of objects, including distant galaxies.
It has been referred to as sa国际传媒’s “cosmic time machine,” and Willott said it will be used to look back to “the earliest phases of the universe.”
“We’re going to be looking 95 per cent of the way back toward the Big Bang.”
The idea is based on the fact that there is a finite travel speed of light, Willott said. Light takes eight minutes to get to Earth from the sun, but it takes exponentially longer if it leaves a galaxy billions of years ago.
“It’s an interesting concept, but it is actually remarkably simple,” he said. “Because it takes time for light to travel, it takes that long for that light to get there. So the further away we can find galaxies, basically the further back in time we’re looking.”
Willott said he took over his current position with the project in 2012 from John Hutchings, who retired after several years with the research team.
He is one of two Canadians on the project’s main oversight committee.
“We’re basically looking at how the whole development of the telescope happened at every stage, trying to determine whether the design is appropriate for getting the science out.”
The steep price tag for the telescope comes from how long it took to create, Willott said. “Many thousands of people have worked on it during that time.”
Woods said the initial estimate for the telescope’s longevity was five to 10 years, but it could last as long as 20 years.
“It’s an extraordinary time to be alive as an astronomer,” he said. “I just feel really, really lucky.”
Chris Gainor, a local historian of astronomy, said he has been following the project with great interest.
“This is a big, big deal for Canadian astronomy,” he said. “It’s exciting that we’re right in the middle of it.
“Victoria really punches above its weight in the world of astronomy.”
That includes not only those on Little Saanich Mountain but staff at the University of Victoria, Gainor said.
Also happening at the Herzberg centre is an initiative to create a 30-metre long telescope — for use on the ground — with advanced capacity for super high-resolution images.
— With files from The Canadian Press
