there’s a web to weave

The result was a ringside view – as far as 60 million light years away what could be described as one of the earliest moments after the star’s death. HST was on the job within hours of this person’s death. This meant that the telescope could examine what the star left behind in the last months of its life. As you can imagine, this is not a frequent occurrence. While stars are dying all the time, it is rare that we can see a supernova. It is still rare that we have a powerful telescope to see it.

But this is what happened with SN 2020fqv and HST. The result is that we know more about the final moments of stars, perhaps even enough to detect signs that someone is about to die and go supernova. In fact, astronomers have called SN 2020fqv the “Rosetta Stone” of the supernova. Recall that the original Rosetta Stone, in 1799, caused the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs. In the same way, SN 2020fqv has taught us a lot that we didn’t know about supernovae.

There is much more to be told in this story. But my point here is really about the “last moments” of HST. It has been a workhorse of astronomy for over three decades now. It shows no sign of abandoning that pace of astronomical discoveries – the Rosetta Stone is just one example. But as that activist of astronomy its days are now numbered.

While it’s not as if the HST is going to explode or become unusable—not at all—but as I mentioned in my last column here, there’s a new kid on the block: The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will fly into space on December 24. It will be placed in an orbit about 1.6 million km from the Moon. This is a location in space known as the Lagrange point. Where exactly it is is defined by the presence of the Earth and the Sun. This is the point at which the force required to keep an object in orbit is equal to the gravitational pull from the Earth and the Sun. Because of this, the object can essentially stay in place without needing more fuel.

From that vantage point, using its mirror that is three times larger than HST, JWST promises an even greater celestial triumph than the HST it brought us. Astronomers hope to use JWST to learn more about the universe than it was immediately after the Big Bang – a time we know more through speculation and conjecture than through actual data. How will they do that? Seeing very distant objects, so far away that we see them now as they existed in those early years.

The HST showed us galaxies about 13 billion light-years away, which means that light from there has taken that long to reach the HST, which means we’re seeing them exist 13 billion years ago. JWST will take us even further back in time. It should be able to show us stars and galaxies as they were forming in those babies in the first few hundred million years of the universe’s existence.

But with JWST, astronomers also want to move forward toward answering that ancient question—are we alone? This is because JWST will allow far closer examinations of exoplanets, planets orbiting other stars. So far, we know of thousands of exoplanets. The challenge is to examine them for signs of life or signs that support life. It’s not so much that astronomers hope to find out that life exists or may even exist outside our planet. Instead, they are buoyed by the unexpected findings such a discovery would throw up. Astronomer and SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) veteran Jill Tarter spoke about this sentiment in an interview Washington Post few months ago. He hopes JWST will “continue to” [the] legacy” that mankind has ever created, in the sense: that it would “show us something that none of us had in mind when the telescope was proposed.”

In a real sense, this is the great value of JWST.

Yet all that peeps into the void, on distant planets, in the past, is in the future—not billions of years, but about six months. This is because the JWST will take so long to set up in orbit and start operating. The HST was assembled by the astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle. In contrast, JWST will collect itself. Opening his giant mirror, blowing up his equipment, applying a plastic “sunscreen” – all these maneuvers would happen automatically, of course without any human assistance. The entire months-long process, in what scientists refer to as the “single point.” failure” – typical operations that will ruin JWST if they don’t go according to plan. If any of them fail, there’s no way to send a repair team to fix things.

There are 344 such single points.

So you can imagine why scientists around the world will be biting their nails over the next several months. Not that this kind of chew hasn’t happened over the years: The project has been through delays and budget overruns, a pandemic, and even the threat of cancellation.

Above all for the sheer drama, there was a particular concern where it would be launched. This is the European Space Agency’s launch facility in French Guiana. Now the JWST is too big to fit in a plane. So it went to South America by ship via the Panama Canal. The exact date of this voyage was kept secret by, yes, pirates—modern pirates, who can salivate at the prospect of hijacking this incredibly valuable machinery. Starting with its gold-plated mirror and moving to its intricate, detailed instrumentation, it’s a commodity that is worth more than $10 billion. Rarely, you might think, but what if there was such a gang of pirates? Thus the simple precaution of keeping the journey a secret. JWST has a lot riding on it, and $10 billion is, arguably, the lowest.

Yet the stakes are huge, and scientists around the world know about it too. At Yale University, astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan told new York Times This week: “The remarkable enduring achievements of the human hand and mind, whether it is the temples of Mahabalipuram, the Pyramids of Giza, the Great Wall or the Sistine Chapel, have all taken time and expense. I really want JWST to be one such monument of our time.” as I see it.”

Dilip D’Souza, once a computer scientist, now lives in Mumbai and writes for his dinner. His Twitter handle is @DeathEndsFun. Is