‘X-ray specs’: Canadian scientists stare over the James Webb Space Telescope

It is as if they were not only looking into space with a telescope, but also into time.

Canadian scientists are already using spectacular data and images from the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope to look back at some of the oldest stars ever studied and see how new stars and planets are born.

“One of the holy grails of astronomy is finding stars, which are the first stars to form after the Big Bang,” said York University’s Ghassan Sarrouh, co-author of a study on star clusters that had already been done with the help of James Webb data has been published. “These are what we think are the earliest stars.”

At the other end of time, Western University’s Els Peeters looks into the future by studying hot young stars in the constellation of Orion and their impact on the interstellar material around them.

“It’s in this material that the next generation of stars is born,” she said.

Don’t forget the planets. A group at the University of Montreal is studying exoplanets – particularly Earth-sized ones with water and other essential elements in their atmosphere that could host life.

“We already have a first result,” said Nathalie Oullette. “About a month ago was the first detection of carbon dioxide in an exoplanet.”

The James Webb is the result of $13 billion and more than two decades of work. A successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, Webb orbits much deeper in space and is hundreds to millions of times more sensitive.

Two of its main components — a machine that aligns the telescope with amazing precision and another that analyzes light far beyond the visible spectrum — were designed and built in Canada. That gave Canadian researchers the right to claim five percent of the telescope’s observing time.

Scientists are almost giddy about the quality of what they get back.

“Amazing,” said Erik Rosolowsky of the University of Alberta, who is using Webb’s infrared capabilities to study how black holes create cavities in interstellar dust, the spawning grounds for new stars. “It’s like someone gave us x-ray goggles.”

Oullette said before Webb astronomers could spend days sorting through murky data and separating signal from noise.

“It’s quite remarkable how clean (Webb’s) data is.” She said. “With Webb, you don’t have to dig through the data to find the signal.”

Sarrouh juxtaposes images from Webb with those from Hubble.

“All you can see is that a bunch of images are really fuzzy and fuzzy. The other is full of all these really sharp points that just sparkle.”

The results are pouring in. Rosolowsky and his team already have 21 papers in the works.

And already scientists feel how their mental star charts are shifting.

For example, it appears that post-Big Bang things may have started much earlier than previously thought, Oullette said.

“Maybe structure started earlier than we thought and galaxies started forming earlier than we thought.”

Rosolowsky has confirmed the existence of black holes so large that they leave large holes in the centers of galaxies where stars would normally form.

“We can look straight through and say this black hole is tearing apart all these protostars before they go.”

Peeters speaks of a new era in astronomy.

“It’s only been up for three months and we’ve learned so much already.”

Sarrouh said it’s a good time to be a Canadian astronomer.

“It will allow us to see into a time we have never seen before. You can almost think of the James Webb as a time machine.”

This report from The Canadian Press was first published on October 10, 2022.

— Follow Bob Weber on Twitter at @row1960