Two years ago, JWST beamed images back to Earth for the first time – here, NASA astrophysicist Dr Amber Straughn tells Dazed what it’s been up to since then
From the moment the James Webb Space Telescope was successfully launched into space, many people (including us) declared it a big deal for space exploration. The powerful telescope, AKA JWST or just Webb, didn’t just promise stunning images of space-based phenomena like the Hand of God and the “cosmic cliffs” of the Carina Nebula. It also aimed to untangle some of universe’s biggest mysteries, from the existence of habitable alien planets to what happened in the direct aftermath of the Big Bang, and maybe even rewrite our understanding of humanity’s place among the stars.
July 12, 2024 marks exactly two years since the JWST beamed its very first images back to Earth. The question is: has it lived up to its bold promises in the 48 months it’s been active? Has it earned its $10 billion price tag?
“Absolutely, emphatically, yes,” says Dr Amber Straughn, an astrophysicist at NASA, who’s been working on the JWST mission for a little over 15 years. “There were huge expectations on the telescope,” she tells Dazed. “And yes, it is living up to those expectations. Actually, the telescope is performing better than we expected, better than we had planned or hoped for.”
From the ground-level, however, it’s not always clear exactly how the JWST is going above and beyond in humankind’s quest to reveal the secrets of the universe. With a “deluge of results” published every single day, it can be hard to keep up with the latest developments even if you do manage to get past the technical jargon and swathes of scientific data. And the research isn’t set to slow down any time soon, with almost 2,000 research groups competing for all-important time with the telescope this year alone.
Luckily, we have Straughn on hand to break down Webb’s biggest moments over the past two years, and how they might help unlock much bigger discoveries – from deep space to our own “cosmic backyard” – in the future.
WE LOOKED FURTHER BACK IN TIME THAN EVER BEFORE
“We built this telescope specifically to look back in time,” says Straughn, “to see the first galaxies being born.”
If ‘looking back in time’ is hard to wrap your head around, think of it this way: the light from our Sun takes about eight minutes to reach Earth, which means that we always see the Sun as it existed eight minutes ago. Meanwhile, the light from the brightest star in our night sky, Sirius, takes 8.6 years to reach our eyes, so we see Sirius as it existed 8.6 years ago. To describe this in terms of distance, you’d say that Sirius is 8.6 light-years away.
As the most powerful telescope ever launched into space, Webb can pick out extremely faint, extremely distant objects that aren’t visible to the human eye. Some of these are billions of light-years away. In 2022, the JWST found one dubbed HD1, which clocked in at some 13.5 billion light-years from Earth, before beating its own record in 2024 with the discovery of the catchily-named JADES-GS-z14-0. Based on current estimates, the universe is ‘only’ about 13.8 billion years old. This means that when we look at these ancient galaxies, we’re really seeing the universe in its infancy, a couple of hundred million years after the Big Bang.
THE BABY UNIVERSE HOLDS LOTS OF SURPRISES
Before we could look so far back in time, we had theories and computer simulations that told us what to expect from the few million years after the Big Bang – how the earliest galaxies might have formed, and how many. As it turns out, though, we vastly underestimated how quickly the universe started to develop. “We found thousands of galaxies in the early universe, right off the bat,” says Straughn. “There are a lot more than we expected.”
Plus, early galaxies observed by Webb are much bigger and brighter than models predicted, and structured differently too. The ones that scientists have studied in detail must also have started forming stars much earlier than we previously thought: about 100 million years after the Big Bang. And then, there’s the surprising appearance of enormous black holes.
Why does this matter? Well, it might mean that we need to update some theories about how galaxies come into existence in the first place. Some have theorised that they interacted differently with the rest of space in the early universe, for example, while Straughn says that it might have something to do with the physics of star formation itself. “We don’t really know yet. We’re still in the middle of this mystery.” And this is where science is at its most exciting: when it produces more questions than answers.
FINDING A HOME OUTSIDE OUR SOLAR SYSTEM
One of space exploration’s biggest and boldest goals is to get humanity off Earth and spread intelligent life to another planet. Of course, there’s a fierce debate about whether that’s actually a good idea, but let’s just assume that Elon Musk is right and humans need to become multiplanetary in order to survive. If that’s the case, then the JWST has laid some very important groundwork.
Webb was purpose-built to look at the early universe, “but because it’s so big and capable, we’ve also been able to learn incredible things about exoplanets,” says Straughn. Exoplanets are planets that orbit a star outside our solar system, and there could be millions of them in the Milky Way with the appropriate conditions to sustain life. Over the last couple of years, Webb has helped pinpoint some particularly likely candidates by analysing starlight as it passes through their atmospheres, a process called spectroscopy. This can tell us what elements make up the distant planet’s atmosphere, offering clues to conditions on the surface, or the presence of chemicals – like water – that we consider vital for life to thrive.
Thanks to Webb, says Straughn: “We are absolutely in a new era of discovering how these exoplanets work.” Some highlights from the last two years? How about a Jupiter-like planet where the clouds are made of quartz crystals. Or the groundbreaking discovery of an atmosphere on 55 Cancri e, the ‘super-Earth’ covered in diamonds and volcanoes. Or, most recently, a massive ‘eyeball’ planet that’s one of humanity’s most promising prospects to date. What more do you want?!
THE HUNT FOR ALIENS
“I think we will discover life – microbial life – in our solar system, definitely within our lifetime,” says Straughn. “And I’m very hopeful that we’ll see these signs of life on other planets in our lifetime as well.” These are big claims, but they’ve not come from nowhere. Scientists using Webb have uncovered a few promising signs of alien life over the last couple of years, including all-important carbon-bearing molecules on the ‘habitable-zone’ exoplanet K2-18 b (although other researchers have cast doubt on the initial study).
“It’s still pretty early on,” Straughn admits of the hunt for extraterrestrial life – even two years after Webb activated. As the NASA exoplanet expert Dr Knicole Colon told Dazed back in 2022, though, the end goal for Webb isn’t even to make contact with little green men (sorry to disappoint) but to identify some potentially-life-harbouring planets worth zooming in on. In that sense, Webb has taken some big strides, making it much easier to earmark candidates for future alien-hunting missions, like the highly-anticipated Habitable Worlds Observatory.
NASA has just started working on the HWO, so it’s a few years before we’ll actually get to see it in action, but Straughn explains that it will be the “very first telescope that is specifically designed to find life outside our solar system” and will represent another “giant leap forward” in capabilities. That said, JWST will have played an important role in laying the groundwork.
THE PICTURES ARE REALLY, REALLY PRETTY
A lovely view of a distant nebula might not seem too important compared to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, glimpses of fallout from the Big Bang, or data that sheds new light on our very existence. The images that Webb continues to send back to Earth shouldn’t be underestimated, though.
Like the rest of the team at NASA, Straughn was “completely blown away” by the beauty of the first images that came through in 2022, and continues to enjoy new images as they come through week after week. It’s not just space geeks who get to enjoy them, though (the telescope couldn’t have reached 3.6 million Instagram followers on astrophysicists alone). The rest of the world has also been charmed by these photos of galaxies far, far away, including a new generation of enthusiasts who might go on to design the space exploration tools of the future.
Our obsession with the photos raises some more philosophical questions as well, Straughn suggests. “It’s weird that we find them so beautiful,” she says. “You think of images of mountains or a sunset, and it’s kind of natural that we find those things beautiful because they’re part of our lived experience. But images of nebulae... we’ve never seen anything like that, so it’s a little bit strange. It’s mysterious. Part of me wonders if it’s not some sort of recognition that we’re seeing where we came from. When we look up at the cosmos, and we see these beautiful images, maybe there’s some innate recognition, [a] reminder that we are part of that whole story. We’re part of the cosmos, and it’s part of us.”