What the James Webb Telescope Will Help Us to See: The Meaning of Existence

Our eyes are getting opened wide by space telescopes. Spitzer showed that in just a tiny fraction of the visible sky there are thousands of planets circling their parent stars. Hubble has given us pictures of galaxies and nebula in all their glory. And now we have the James Webb Telescope, the biggest imaging technology to ever leave Earth and soon ready to unlock even more of the mysteries of the Universe.

Putting this huge telescope into space and having it operate with a level of sensitivity that will allow us to observe the Universe in infrared is making astronomers and other scientists excited about what we will discover. It’s not just the size of the telescope that matters. It’s the fact it will operate at super cold temperatures to ensure that its infrared imaging will not be contaminated by its heat sources or any nearby objects, like the Earth, Sun, and the Moon.

The telescope launched on Christmas day last year. In recent weeks it arrived at its destination, a LaGrange point 1.5 million kilometres (just under 1 million miles) from Earth where it will orbit the Sun and remain directly aligned with Earth. NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency are all now putting the telescope’s instruments and systems into operation with the first test images sent in the last couple of weeks. Everything is a go for the real work for the telescope to begin by summer. Then it will add to the space knowledge we have already gained from Spitzer and Hubble (the latter still is in operation after 31 years) and will begin to meet its specific mission goals which include:

1. Looking back in time to the moment just after the Big Bang some 13.8 billion years ago and then help scientists in recalculating the rate of expansion of the Universe.
2. Studying how galaxies form and evolve. Does every galaxy begin with a black hole at its core, or do the black holes form later?
3. Studying how stars and exosolar systems form and evolve. Is our idea that planets and stars form together out of a revolving disk of gas and dust, or is there some other mechanism?
4. Looking for the chemistry within exoplanet atmospheres within the Goldilocks Zone of their respective stars and searching search for bio-signatures that would provide an answer to the thought posed by Carl Sagan in his science fiction classic, Contact, when he wrote, “The universe is a pretty big place. If it’s just us, seems like an awful waste of space.”

When I was a child I had three telescopes (don’t ask me why). Looking at the night sky was something of an adventure for me. And like Carl Sagan I kept wondering how we could be alone in the vastness of a Universe filled with so many stars. Some of them were like our Sun. Others were binary systems. And what I didn’t know as a teenager was that planets were circling these stars just like Earth circled the Sun.

When I was a teenager, we didn’t know that the building blocks of life were floating in the near-vacuum of space. Panspermia was science fiction. The notion that life may have come from space dust and organic molecules seeding planets.

In the last few weeks, a study that looked at data coming from one of two NASA rovers on Mars has suggested organic chemistry is very much in process on Mars and that there very well may have been life on that planet sometime in its past and possibly even today.

That’s what makes the fourth objective of the James Webb mission so exciting to me. If we measure the composition of exoplanet atmospheres we may have the answer to the question, “Are we alone in the Universe?”

The numbers favour we are not. A quick calculation supports this conclusion.

1. The Sun is one of 100 billion stars in the Milky Way.
2. The Milky Way is one of approximately 200 billion galaxies in our Universe.
3. Spitzer found thousands of exoplanets in just a small arc of the visible sky. It showed us that planets are common around stars. Many existed at a distance from their parent star that would make them possible candidates for harbouring life.
4. Let’s say every star on average hosts a solar system of 8 or 9 planets.
5. That means the number of planets in the Milky Way could approach 900 billion.
6. And if the Milky Way was an average galaxy, with 200 billion of the latter, that would mean approximately 180 trillion planets.
7. In our Solar System, Earth has life. Mars may have or had life in the past.
8. That’s 2 of 9 harbouring life in one Solar System.
9. Project that to 180 trillion planets.
10. That means 20 to 40 trillion planets that may harbour life.

If you are studying astrophysics, astronomy, or exobiology, these are exciting times to look at the night sky. With James Webb,

• We will have 100 times the capability of Hubble.
• We will see through nebulae to watch the birth of stars and planets.
• We will learn more about the dynamics of star formation and why so many tend to pair up rather than fly solo like the Sun.
• We’ll see back in time to watch galaxies in their earliest stages of formation.
• We’ll be able to study black holes and begin to understand why they are found in the centre of almost every galaxy we observe.
• We’ll be able to measure the Universe and its extent as never before.
• All that and bio-signatures from exoplanets to end our quest for answers to the meaning of existence through the finding of evidence of life elsewhere in the Universe.

With James Webb this summer we’ll just be getting started. It should make the coming decades of the 21st century very exciting as we look to the stars.