The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can see deeper into the Universe than its predecessor, the Hubble. Tuesday, 12 July 2022, will be remembered by many as the date when NASA's JWST released its first full-colour images and spectroscopic data. The images and data from JWST show distant galaxies, the death of stars, and insights into how our Universe began.

The James Webb Space Telescope

The first image shared, called Webb's First Deep Field, shows the SMACS 0723 galaxy cluster. The cluster in the image is as it was 4.6 billion years ago. Astronomer Matt Bothwell excitedly states that "the telescope is quite literally a massive step forward in a quest, thousands of years old, to understand our place in the Universe. A step forward this big only happens a few times per century,

JWST can peer back in time

Pointed towards the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723, the telescope's spectrograph revealed the chemical composition of a galaxy located 13.1 billion light-years away. Scientists found oxygen, hydrogen, and neon in this distant galaxy. According to astronomy author Colin Stuart, the spectra show that hydrogen and oxygen, the key ingredients for life, were already around 700 million years after the Big Bang.

Galaxy cluster image revealed key ingredients for life

The JWST images show how spectacular the telescope is. The NGC 3132, the Southern Ring, shows a level of detail and finesse that is astonishing, especially when compared with what came before. The visual beauty of this image shows the Southern Ring Nebula, where gas and dust are expelled by a dying star.

Southern Ring Nebula demonstrates the stunning beauty of the Universe

The image of five galaxies, called Stephan's Quintet, is the largest of JWST's subjects to date, covering about a fifth of our Moon's diameter. There is much going on in this cluster of colliding galaxies, from individual bright young stars, the blazing light emitted by hydrogen falling onto a black hole in one galaxy to the faint glow of dust between the interacting systems. In the corners of the image are countless other smaller and more distant galaxies.

Stephan's Quintet has let us watch faraway galaxies interact

The telescope is expected to run for the next 20 years. So young astronomers, students and children watching these images will work on JWST data in the future. Future astronomers will need to know a lot about physics and chemistry and become experts in computer simulations. "Back in the 1990s, the glorious images from Hubble captivated the world, and the JWST's images will be higher resolution, look deeper, and will look into regions that Hubble could never see", said Ezzy Pearson, astrophysicist and author.

Bringing people along on the journey

The James Webb Space Telescope can see deeper into the Universe than its predecessor Hubble, opening up a new era of cosmology.

Stashed ideas

What's so special about the James Webb Space Telescope's new images? We asked the experts | BBC Science Focus Magazine

The speed of light in a vacuum is 186,282 miles per second (299,792 kilometers per second), and in theory, nothing can travel faster than light. In miles per hour, light speed is, well, a lot: about 670,616,629 mph. If you could travel at the speed of light, you could go around the Earth 7.5 times in one second.

How fast is light in miles per second?

Facts

How Fast Does Light Travel?

Space, time and gravity get weird when they are studied at a super subatomic scale, where the quantum nature of gravity starts to kick in. Albert Einstein taught us that space and time could warp and bend like a piece of fabric. We experience this warping of the space-time continuum as gravity. Einstein’s theory is mainly concerned with the largest scales of nature, the scale of stars, galaxies and the whole universe. It doesn’t look at space and time at the smallest scales.

The mystery of space, time and gravity

At the smallest level, nature is governed by quantum mechanics.  The quantum theory account for all the forces of nature but not gravity. When physicists try to apply quantum theory to gravity, space and time start to fluctuate wildly, almost as if falling apart. This is incompatible with the outcome of Einstein’s theory. Some physicists conclude that space and time may not be as fundamental as we thought. Instead, they seem more like byproducts of something deeper.

Nature at the smallest level

Both special relativity and general relativity are fundamentally classical theories. Classically, things have positions, and locations - positions and velocities. However, classical mechanics fail at small scales. This is where quantum mechanics becomes useful. Since the discovery of quantum mechanics, we have to take everything we know about nature and fit it into the quantum mechanical framework. Physicists can do that for almost everything they know about nature, except for gravity and curved space-time.

Classical vs quantum mechanics

Technical issuesWhen you’re learning quantum mechanics as a student, you’re taught the classical model for something, then given rules for quantising that classical theory. However, classical theories do not define quantum theories very well. When you straightforwardly apply that quantisation procedure to gravity, it gives infinite crazy answers.Conceptual issuesWith gravity, you’re trying to combine many different possible geometries of space-time, meaning you’re not sure what time is or where things are in space because you don’t know the geometry of space.

Why it’s hard to find a theory that merges quantum theory and gravity

Classically, for a particle, you have a clear idea of where a particle is and how fast it’s moving. And you can measure whatever you want. However, there is less agreement on what quantum mechanics is saying because you have to use words like "measurement" and "observation." You can observe things such as the position or velocity of a particle, but can't measure it. When you extend that to gravity, things like location in space don’t exist. They are some approximations that you get at the classical level in the right circumstances.

Observation and measurement

Consider gas in a box. A box full of some gaseous substance is made of atoms and molecules. When we look at the gas in the box with our eyes, or our thermometers, we don’t see each individual atom or molecule, its position and velocity. We see coarse-grained features of the system. We can invent a predictive theory of what the gas is going to do based on the coarse-grained macroscopic observables. We can model things without knowing what every atom is doing. That’s emergence. You have a set of properties that are approximate and coarse-grained.

The emergence of space-time

The Higgs boson is a real particle but it’s hard to detect because it has a very short lifetime and quickly decays into other particles. It can decay into two particles, an electron and a positron. When you consider quantum mechanics, you can predict roughly how long it will take the Higgs boson to decay, but when it spits out that electron and positron, you can’t predict the direction in which they will move. Entanglement is the fact that you cannot separately predict what the observational outcome will be for the electron and positron.

Entanglement

The particles and forces of the world come from fields that spread all throughout space and time and have a quantum mechanical nature. There’s a quantum mechanical field for the photon, the gluon, the Higgs boson, for gravity, etc. But the important thing to remember about field theory is that even in empty space, there are still fields. They are in their lowest-energy state or zero value.  When you take two different points of space-time at some distance between them there are still things there. The quantum state of the fields at these two points in space is always going to be entangled.

The world is run by what is called quantum field theory

The idea is that all the quantum mechanical information inside a black hole can in certain circumstances be considered as spread out on the boundary of the black hole.  If you think of the interior of the black hole as a three-dimensional region of space, and the boundary as a two-dimensional boundary, one can think of all the information of the black hole as being located on the boundary. That’s holography because there’s a two-dimensional boundary that is filling the three-dimensional inside.

The holographic principle

In theoretical physics, the AdS/CFT correspondence is called Maldacena duality or gauge/gravity duality. <ul><li>Juan Maldacena applied the holographic principle to black holes and anti-de Sitter space. Because there’s no gravity there, you can define quantum field theory on it and have no conceptual issues quantising it.</li><li>Mark Van Raamsdonk, Brian Swingle and others pointed out that if you fiddle with the amount of entanglement between different parts of the quantum field theory on the boundary without gravity, the geometry of the anti-de Sitter space inside changes in response to that.</li></ul>

Some try to derive gravity from quantum field theories that don’t have gravity in them

Strange things happen when you try to combine Einstein’s description of curved space-time with a universe made up of quantum wavefunctions.  This podcast shows how space and time are emergent properties of quantum reality but not fundamental parts of it.

Einstein’s description of curved space-time doesn’t easily mesh with a universe made up of quantum wavefunctions. Theoretical physicist Sean Carroll discusses the quest for quantum gravity with host Steven Strogatz.            The post Where Do Space, Time and Gravity Come From? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Where Do Space, Time and Gravity Come From?

The farthest Human settlement which is constantly under Human interaction, is the International Space Station (ISS)Established in almost 2000 and has been occupied and monitored by humans ever since

The Farthest Human Settlement

The farthest Humans have ever been in this vastness, is not so vast... We have only landed on our own moon since the start of the space ageThe farthest Humans went was during the Apollo missions, specifically the one, in which the astronauts landed on the opposite side of the moon, making it the farthest Humans ever went.

The Farthest Humans Ever Went

The farthest moving ground robot Humans have sent is to our neighbour, Mars... We have sent many rovers on Mars, most popular being Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity, And the latest Perseverance RoversThe perseverance rover also had a companion helicopter called ingenuity that made the first flight on another celestial body

The Farthest Moving Ground Robot

The farthest we have Ever landed on any celestial body is Saturn's moon TitanWhile the Cassini huygens mission, the Cassini probe detached its companion Huygens probe into the atmosphere of Titan, where it slowly descended onto its surface and shows us the pictures and info of Titan... It was immovable though... Sadly

The Farthest Ground Touching Satellite

The farthest object ever visited by a flyby was a peanut shaped asteroid in the Kuiper beltAfter visiting the dwarf planet Venus, the New Horizons satellite went on its journey to the asteroid and sent us it's pictures and data. It is the farthest Humans ever visited.

The Farthest Celestial Body Visited

Launched with great plans is the Voyager 1 in the last centuryIt visited the outer planets and sent us their info, and then, by their gravity also got an astonishing speed that allowed them to reach the escape velocity of the sun. Right now Voyager 1 has left the solar system officially and 150 AU away from EarthIt is still in contact and is expected to lose contact with us in the next 5 or 6 years... It will then keep drifting away in the dark empty space all aloneBut, it has a Golden disc with sounds and images of Earth, with the hope that some aliens will find it one day & know about us :)

The Farthest Any Artificial Object Ever Went 

What are the farthest things humanity has achieved in space... Let's find out

Humanity's farthest Milestones

Dark Energy and Dark Matter are two of the most interesting components of our universe. Although they may sound the same, they have some key differences which separate them from each other. Today, I will be showing and explaining these very important distinctions, as well as explaining a similarity that they share.

What is Dark Energy and Dark Matter?

Dark Energy, in contrast to Dark Matter, makes up 69.5% of all matter and is responsible for the expansion of our universe. For reference, all other visible matter makes up 0.5% of the universe.The interesting component of Dark Energy is that it behaves oppositely to that of Gravity. In other words, it exerts a repulsive force instead of an attractive force. This is the main reason why we can say that the universe is expanding. Without Dark Energy, the universe wouldn’t have the capability to expand at all.

Dark Energy

Dark Matter, although in considerably less abundance than Dark Energy, still makes up 30% of our universe.Dark Matter is an attractive force, similar to that of gravity, which holds matter together.Dark Matter plays a vital role in the formation of galaxies. This is primarily because of the fact that Dark Matter acts as an Invisible Glue that can hold galaxies together.

Dark Matter

Despite the fact that both Dark Energy and Dark Matter are opposite in nature, there is one thing that is common between them: invisibility. Neither Dark Matter nor Dark Energy reflect, emit, or absorb ANY sort of light. This is the main reason why they both are incredibly difficult to detect.What this means is that they are both completely hidden, and the only way that we, as humans, know of their presence is through their effect on the Gravity.

Similarity

Over time, various astronomers have studied supernovae and distant galaxies in order to observe the expansion of the universe. While researching, these scientists still had a set of expectations. One of these expectations was that the universe expanded at a constant rate.Much to their surprise, they noticed that the universe was expanding exponentially. This is very significant because up until now, scientists were under the assumption that the universe was not able to expanding this rapidly.Dark Energy serves as the reason why the universe is expanding exponentially and not linearly.

Research

To conclude:Dark Matter is an attractive force that holds matter together while Dark Energy is a repulsive force that pushes matter outwards.They both are very difficult to detect because they don’t emit, absorb, or reflect light at all. Despite this, they are still very widely researched. Scientists we able to uncover that the universe is expanding exponentially instead of linearly due to the abundance of Dark Energy.Overall, Dark Matter and Dark Energy are some of the most interesting occurrences in our universe, and we still have much to learn about them.

Conclusion

Articles:<ul><li><a href="https://astronomy.com/news/2020/03/whats-the-difference-between-dark-matter-and-dark-energy">https://astronomy.com/news/2020/03/whats-the-difference-between-dark-matter-and-dark-energy</a></li><li><a href="https://phys.org/news/2015-03-dark.html">https://phys.org/news/2015-03-dark.html</a></li></ul>Videos:<ul><li><a href="https://youtu.be/AAhWLN2qHGs">https://youtu.be/AAhWLN2qHGs</a></li><li><a href="https://youtu.be/QAa2O_8wBUQ">https://youtu.be/QAa2O_8wBUQ</a></li></ul>

Additional Resources

Dark Energy and Dark Matter are two of the most interesting phenomena in the universe. Today we will be exploring what they are and how they are fundamentally different from one another.

All the atoms and light in the universe together make up less than five percent of the total contents of the cosmos. The rest is composed of dark matter and dark energy, which are invisible but dominate the structure and evolution of the universe. Dark matter makes up most of the mass of galaxies and galaxy clusters, and is responsible for the way galaxies are organized on grand scales. Dark energy, meanwhile, is the name we give the mysterious influence driving the accelerated expansion of the universe. What these substances are and how they work are some of the major challenges facing modern astronomers.

What's so special about the James Webb Space Telescope's new images? We asked the experts | BBC Science Focus Magazine

How Fast Does Light Travel?

Where Do Space, Time and Gravity Come From?

Humanity's farthest Milestones

Dark Energy and Dark Matter

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