Review
Regarding astronomical telescopes, many of us have heard more about the famous Hubble Astronomical Telescope, but in fact, with the continuous development of astronomical observation technology, some more powerful instruments and equipment have been developed, such as the Webb telescope that we want to introduce to you today.
As a member of its designer team, James himself is very satisfied with this result, he mentioned in the interview that the Webb telescope helped humans take the first-resolution image in history, when you see a Webb telescope results, you may see some areas on the map as pixels, but in fact, its resolution is even much higher than this.
The members of the design team were also very surprised that it could do this, which greatly exceeded the original expectations, according to him, the image seen before is not the final result, but only the initial draft of the debugging, if the subsequent image processing process can be completed, the effect will definitely be better than now.
Webb telescope
According to the widely circulated outside world, whether in terms of performance or performance, the Webb telescope is more than 100 times stronger than the previous Hubble telescope, in fact, the cost of manufacturing alone has reached more than 10 billion US dollars, so where is it strong? Is it worth the high cost?
In mid-March, the design and commissioning team carried out phased debugging of some functions and structures of the telescope, including a total of two phases.
The reason why it is done together is because this kind of thickness and fine phase calibration is divided into three stages, and each stage is divided into two parts, first do the rough orientation and then do the fine orientation, so in order to improve efficiency, some teams will choose to carry out the two parts together.
According to the feedback given by the debuggers, the debugging results of the Webb telescope are very good, almost all the optical parameters are abnormal, fully meet the use standards, and even many performance exceed expectations, and there is no pollution problem on the optical path.
So what is the actual finish? A recent stellar photography completed by the Webb telescope surprised us.
The star is about 2,000 light-years away from Earth, and it is necessary to align and calibrate its position, and then do a comprehensive assessment, at this time, the Webb telescope has actually only completed phased debugging, and there is still some work before the final commissioning.
But surprisingly, it has done very well in this photography, and the observation performance has reached the best, even if the distant star is very bright, but it is very clear after the final calibration, and after adding a red filter in post-processing, it is in line with human visual habits.
Powerful advantage
In addition to photographing stars, the Webb telescope also captured many other celestial objects near it, including a variety of shapes and brightness, each of which is very clear, such an effect that was previously only possible in Hubble ultra-deep space, but its work efficiency is relatively low, to complete the work of the Webb telescope, it takes more than three months of long-term continuous exposure, and then later data processing.
In fact, this efficiency is already very ideal, because for a small observation field, although the human eye looks like such a large area from the equipment, it is actually very large in area and contains a considerable amount of content.
For example, there is only a space the size of a nail in our line of sight, in fact, tens of thousands of galaxies are hidden, not to mention the number of stars included, and it takes several minutes for ordinary telescopes to obtain photons from the faintest celestial objects.
Hubble also has an extremely deep space series, which captures a space in the constellation of Fornax, the farthest universe that humans can observe so far, and it took more than two million seconds to expose the imaging here, because a significant number of galaxies here are very low brightness.
If you look at it with the human eye, it is completely indistinguishable, and it must take a long enough time to capture these brightnesses, so the effect achieved by ultra-deep space and extremely deep space at that time can be regarded as a record in the history of astronomical observation, and the Webb telescope also made the same attempt this time, and the final results fully proved the capabilities of this device.
From the perspective of sensitivity, the Webb telescope can be said to have achieved a great leap, comprehensive has exceeded the Hubble telescope more than 100 times, under the same observation conditions, the effect of this equipment exposure for several hours can be comparable to or even exceed the results of the Hubble telescope for more than three months, so in the same observation cycle can complete more work content.
In order to ensure that its observation performance is 100% guaranteed, the team will continue to complete the follow-up calibration work, until all the commissioning will not enter the new work project, it is expected that the next shooting can start in more than two months, interested friends should be able to see new results in the summer.
epilogue
From the perspective of the depth of space photographed, Hubble's extremely deep space series can take the human eye to about 400 million to 500 million years after the birth of the universe at most, but it is difficult to continue to push forward.
We all know that the age of the universe is about 13.8 billion years, and theoretically earlier wavelengths are already invisible, and if we want to find the first light, we may have to pin our hopes on the Webb telescope.
The depth of space it can reach may extend further 2 to 300 million years after the birth of the universe, where we can discover more primordial galaxies and even find the truth about the birth and development of the universe.
This is a huge leap forward for astronomers and even all of humanity, and civilization may enter a whole new phase from now on.