Edmonton astrophysicists and astronomers excited by James Webb Space Telescope

You’ve seen telescopes, but you’ve never seen a telescope like this – NASA released images of the “unseen universe” – infrared images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, the most powerful space telescope to date.

It impressed NASA astrophysicist Jane Rigby after her first day of working with the technological marvel. “Personally, I went and had an ugly cry – because it works. What the engineers have done to build this thing? It’s amazing.”

The result? Colourized pictures showing galaxy clusters, a region some stars are born, and these stars are cloaked in clouds of gas and dust.

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The significance to the advancement of science is far-reaching says TELUS World of Science Director Frank Florian.

“Being able to hopefully solve problems like, is their life on other planets. This telescope will be able to take a look at the atmospheres of exoplanets, and see if there may be oxygen in that atmosphere which tells us, maybe there’s life.”

Because of Canada’s contributions to the project, NASA’s northern neighbour gets five per cent of the telescope’s observation time. At least one Edmonton astronomer is excited to put his share to good use.

“What I’ll be able to do, is to use the telescope to look at a nearby galaxy and study how individual stars and clusters of stars are forming as these clouds of gas gather together in this galaxy,” says Associate Professor Erik Rosolowsky at the University of Alberta.

And what about amateur astrophysicists and those who just like to look up at the night sky? Rosolowsky tells CityNews, “Every day people are really going to understand how the first galaxies in the universe lit up. We go from this dark age at the beginning to where we start forming stars and galaxies, and we’ll see that for the first time.”