♪ ♪
NARRATOR: The James Webb Space Telescope is on a mission to unlock
the secrets of the cosmos.
AARON EVANS: Think about it as a telescope
that enables us to see the hidden universe.
NARRATOR: Searching for the chemical building blocks of life
beyond Earth.
HEIDI HAMMEL: Is there life on an Earth-like planet around a sun-like star?
Is there an Earth 2.0 out there?
NARRATOR: Hunting for clues to unravel the mystery
of black holes.
LEE ARMUS: Where do they start growing?
How bright do they get?
NARRATOR: And probing deeper
into our cosmic history than ever before.
AMBER STRAUGHN: We are reaching back to what we think
is the first epoch of galaxies.
And we've only just started.
That's the craziest thing, right?
NARRATOR: "New Eye on the Universe," right now, on "NOVA."
♪ ♪
STRAUGHN: This telescope was designed to answer
some of the biggest questions in astronomy today.
Everything from detecting the very first galaxies
that were born after the Big Bang...
...to looking at objects within our own solar system,
and everything in space and time in between.
MATT MOUNTAIN: We're trying to tell the whole human story,
from the beginning of the Big Bang right up to,
did life emerge on another Earth-like planet
around another star like our sun?
And that's a massive story.
♪ ♪
But I'm also, you know, got my ears pricked up
for, what are we going to learn
that we didn't even know we were supposed to be looking for?
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: The James Webb Space Telescope,
also known as JWST,
is the largest, most complex space telescope
ever built.
Plagued with mishaps
and cost overruns, it was decades in the making.
HAKEEM OLUSEYI: We got to the point
where we started thinking, is this thing ever going to fly?
Right? Is it too complicated?
NARRATOR: It was finally launched
on December 25, 2021.
ANNOUNCER: This will be humanity's last view
of the James Webb Space Telescope
as it moves to its workplace
about a million miles away from Earth.
HAMMEL: JWST is an example of what
people can do on a large scale.
20,000 people around the world
contributed to making this telescope exist.
NARRATOR: Now researchers are taking
their new telescope on a test drive.
I mean, methane's always been a mystery, right?
TIFFANY KATARIA: This is, like, our new souped-up convertible
that we want to take out for many spins,
multiple spins. (laughs)
And, and really test its limits.
Just look at that...
ARMUS: There's a period where you have to feel it out.
You've got to learn how to use it.
And that's what we're doing.
We had some idea of what we might,
uh, be going to see in this galaxy.
JANE RIGBY: So we're really trying to get up to speed
so that we're not just driving the car,
but we're really learning,
how do you take the corners the best?
How do we, how do we optimize
what we're doing here?
(exclaiming)
NARRATOR: This is a story of the ups...
(all toasting)
NARRATOR: ...and downs...
Uh-oh, I think I found an error.
NARRATOR: ...of exploring the cosmos
with a brand-new telescope...
We're kind of the guinea pigs,
uh, to, to show how this all works.
It took me a while to figure it out...
NARRATOR: ...pushing it to its limits.
So this is on the surface.
NARRATOR: In its very first chapter of exploration,
researchers are finding out
what their "New Eye on the Universe" can reveal.
On July 12, 2022,
the world finally got a look
at JWST's first images.
OLUSEYI: I was
flabbergasted, right?
It was better than I could have imagined.
I knew they were going to be good,
but I didn't think they were going to be that good.
The thing that struck me was the amount of detail
we were seeing in these images.
MARTHA BOYER: It's sort of like putting glasses on
for the first time, you know?
Everything is just, like, crystal-clear,
and there's just so much to see.
LEE FEINBERG: I guess my reaction was just
a total sense of wonderment.
You know, it's, like, sort of that feeling
when you were a kid and you look up at the night sky,
and you just look out into the universe
and you see all these stars and you wonder,
like, how big is the universe and when did it all start?
I felt that looking at those images.
I just felt that sense of wonderment.
NARRATOR: As the first batches of data and images pour in,
scientists are hunting for new clues
to some of our most profound questions.
STRAUGHN: I study galaxies in my own research.
And so I am really excited to see
what that first epoch of galaxies
to form after the Big Bang,
to see what those galaxies are like.
But if I'm being honest,
I think the most important question
we have in astronomy,
or maybe even as a species is,
is there life out there?
♪ ♪
NÉSTOR ESPINOZA: "Are we alone?"
is definitely one of the key questions
that I would love to answer.
THOMAS ZURBUCHEN: For me, that is such
an Earth-shattering idea that...
That by itself would be worth
the entire telescope.
KATARIA: There are over 5,000 exoplanets
that have been discovered so far.
The actual number changes every day, so even I can't keep track.
NARRATOR: Exoplanets are alien worlds
that exist beyond our solar system.
KATARIA: But it really does blow the mind when you think about
Carl Sagan saying there were billions of galaxies.
And so that begs the question,
you know, are there trillions of exoplanets in the universe?
I think there are.
NARRATOR: To put this in perspective, our galaxy, the Milky Way,
contains at least 100 billion stars,
and astronomers estimate it may be home
to thousands of solar systems
with planets a lot like our own.
The big question is, do any of them contain life?
DAVID SING: The odds that one of these planets
has the ingredients for life are very high.
OLUSEYI: Are we alone in the universe, right?
All common sense of looking at how biology,
chemistry, geology, and physics work
would say, no, we're not alone.
NARRATOR: Over the last few decades,
our most powerful telescopes have been on the hunt
for life as we know it.
But just finding these distant worlds
is a monumental task.
As we're looking at planets within our galaxy,
but outside of the solar system,
the first thing we need to remember is,
they're really, really small.
NARRATOR: They're also light-years away
and hidden by the glare of the star they orbit.
CHRISTINE CHEN: You can imagine,
it's really hard to find something faint
in the glare of that really bright star.
KATARIA: I've often heard detecting exoplanets
is like looking for a firefly in front of a lighthouse.
But I might argue
that it's actually more challenging.
ANTONELLA NOTA: So astronomers have been very creative
and they have come up with techniques
that basically look at the planet
when they pass in front of the star.
ESPINOZA: So we're just waiting patiently, looking at the stars,
such that you see a little dimming in the light,
because the planet blocks a little bit of that light.
NARRATOR: The tiniest dip in light
can reveal the presence of a planet,
and as starlight passes through the planet's atmosphere,
JWST's instruments search for chemical clues
to what this alien world is made of.
There are two types of science instruments
in general, cameras that produce images
and spectroscopes that produce spectra-- rainbows.
And the public is always fascinated and awed
by the images that come.
And the images hold a wealth of scientific data.
But arguably, the workhorse of scientific instruments
is the spectroscope.
NARRATOR: To demonstrate what a spectroscope reveals,
Matthew Diaz built a tabletop version
while he was a JWST intern.
He uses a flashlight to simulate the light of a celestial object.
The light passes through a lens,
a lot like the lens of an old-fashioned camera.
And it focuses all the light to one point.
There's this little slit here
that allows the light to pass through.
NARRATOR: Next, the light passes through another lens, and then
through a prism.
DIAZ: What the prism's doing is,
it's splitting the light into colors.
And that is how you get your spectrum.
STEFANIE MILAM: It's the same as if you see a rainbow:
the light is actually being broken apart
in such a way that you can see distinct colors.
NARRATOR: And this spectrum of light
is chock full of information.
Each molecule has their own fingerprint,
just like you have a fingerprint,
like I have a fingerprint,
that's distinguishable.
So we're looking for these key fingerprints
of different molecules.
NARRATOR: What distinguishes one spectrum from another
are gaps where atoms and molecules
reveal their identities by absorbing light.
Molecules in space-- on stars,
in planets-- can absorb certain colors of light.
They just take that light out of the rainbow.
So you look for the pattern of lines to say,
"Ah, that's the barcode of calcium.
That's the barcode of sodium."
They're, they're fingerprints,
they're like little signs with a little placard
saying, "Hello, I'm hydrogen."
"Hi, I'm oxygen."
NARRATOR: JWST'S spectroscopes are specially designed
to detect these fingerprints
in the infrared part of the spectrum.
So this is where we have signatures of key molecules
that we want to look at in space.
Like water,
carbon monoxide,
carbon dioxide, methane.
These are really key ingredients
essential for a habitable world, or, you know,
what we would associate with life.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: Exoplanet researchers start their search
for these key ingredients
by exploring the atmosphere of a gas giant
700 light-years away.
WASP-39 b is bigger than Jupiter
and vastly bigger than Earth.
SING: It's larger than Jupiter,
but it's still a lot less dense than Jupiter.
NARRATOR: That makes its atmosphere bigger, puffier,
and easier to detect.
KEVIN STEVENSON: We had studied WASP-39 with the Hubble Space Telescope.
We had detected water vapor in its atmosphere already.
And so we wanted to study this planet at
new wavelengths, using new instruments
with a new telescope to see if we could get a bigger,
broader picture of the planet.
NARRATOR: Their goal: to find out if Webb's spectroscopes
can detect a molecule that's never been detected
in an exoplanet's atmosphere;
one that is critical for life as we know it--
CO2, carbon dioxide.
Here on Earth,
it can be produced by geological processes
and it's a crucial fuel for plant life.
When the results finally come in...
WOMAN: So that big peak right there,
that's all carbon dioxide?
WOMAN 2: Yes.
WOMAN 1: Yeah, that's beautiful.
We saw this giant, giant carbon dioxide feature
that just popped out right away in the data.
This carbon dioxide detection is just amazing.
We all had high fives.
It was a big moment, like, wow,
we can look at the carbon chemistry
of these planets in detail.
And it just brought a big smile to my face.
I was, like, "Yes, we did it!"
There are definitely some other bumps in there, right?
That we don't quite...
NARRATOR: The spectrum also revealed a surprise:
the first detection of sulfur dioxide on a planet
outside our solar system.
Sulfur dioxide is found in Earth's ozone layer,
a crucial part of our atmosphere
that shields us from the sun's harmful ultraviolet radiation.
Finding these molecules in the atmosphere of WASP-39 b
is a landmark discovery.
HAMMEL: What we've learned with JWST so far
is that the data it's providing are exquisite for
exoplanet atmospheres,
and that has everybody salivating for more:
more spectra, more transits.
NARRATOR: The next big question,
can JWST detect an atmosphere
on a much smaller, rocky, Earth-size planet?
One thing's for sure: it won't be easy.
SING: We've never even detected
an atmosphere around a rocky planet before.
So now, with JWST,
we have our very, very first chance
to do that on a very select few planets.
NARRATOR: In a few months, they'll get their first look
at a rocky world and see if they can detect an atmosphere.
Being able to perhaps make the first detections
of an atmosphere on planets as small as the Earth
is something that you only have dreamed of so far.
NARRATOR: JWST is also looking
for the chemical building blocks of life
much closer to home, in our cosmic backyard.
NAOMI ROWE-GURNEY: The one big question I want this telescope to answer
is if there is life in our own solar system.
If we found it in our own solar system,
it would really hit home that it's not so rare
that life can happen.
JONATHAN LUNINE: There are three places
in our solar system,
beyond the Earth and beyond Mars,
which are good candidates to go look for life,
and those are Europa, around Jupiter,
and the moons of Saturn, Enceladus and Titan.
ROWE-GURNEY: Titan is a really exciting moon
because it has an atmosphere and rivers
and streams and lakes and oceans.
But instead of being made of water, like they are on Earth,
they're made of methane, like, liquid methane.
And so it has, like, a water cycle, like we have on Earth,
but it's a methane cycle.
And that's really exciting for scientists, because
if we find life on Titan,
it's not going to be life like it is on Earth.
It's going to be totally different life.
So that's a really exciting thing to be looking for.
But also, how do you look for life that you don't understand?
So it's also a massive challenge.
LUNINE: So the question comes up,
can life evolve from chemistry in
a liquid medium that's not water,
that doesn't have the polar properties of water?
And the answer is, we don't know.
NARRATOR: Researchers are also on the hunt for the ingredients
for life as we know it on Enceladus,
a moon of Saturn, and Europa, a moon of Jupiter.
LUNINE: Those are what are called
ocean worlds, which means that they have
liquid water in their interiors.
GERONIMO VILLANUEVA: Imagine that there is a big body of water
below the surface, protected from the environment...
ROWE-GURNEY: Where there could be this subsurface ocean,
where there could be hydrothermal vents,
just like the ones that we have on Earth,
which have life, like plants and animals.
VILLANUEVA: ...full of organics,
maybe some energy, internal energy, heat energy,
and you have the soup of life.
We don't know what could be happening there,
but it's definitely a place that has
all the right conditions for us to explore.
LUNINE: Some biochemists have suggested
that it's in environments like this
where life might've got going
billions of years ago on the Earth.
ROWE-GURNEY: And that would be amazing to find.
Even if we just found bacteria, that would be amazing.
NARRATOR: Back in 2015, the Cassini mission studied Saturn,
its rings, and moons,
and captured this image of plumes bursting out of the ice
at Enceladus's southern pole.
CAROLYN PORCO: We saw dozens of fine jets
shooting off the south pole of Enceladus.
When these pictures hit the web, the web exploded.
OLUSEYI: And so we see with Enceladus, there are places where the ocean
actually escapes from the surface,
and it just flows out of these cracks
and bursts out into outer space.
PORCO: So this is, in effect, our best
opportunity to study an extraterrestrial habitable zone.
NARRATOR: The same may be true for Jupiter's moon Europa,
covered with cracks and ridges that could be caused
by the heat of an ocean beneath its icy surface.
ROWE-GURNEY: So we'll be looking for water
signatures, so H2O, the same water
that we have on Earth, and we'll also be looking for
things like methane, which can be a chemical tracer
that gives us an inclination
that there might be something alive.
Bacteria on Earth produces methane.
We probably won't directly image life,
because you can't really image bacteria from a telescope,
but you can look at what the bacteria creates.
NARRATOR: While the team must wait
several months for their observations to come in...
...JWST continues to send home stunning images,
like this one of Jupiter.
VILLANUEVA: You can see the rings, you can see the moons.
I mean, this is, this is amazing.
And not only that you can see those images,
but you know you can actually explore
those elements with incredible precision.
You can see what they're made of.
The composition, the ices, the molecules in them.
ROWE-GURNEY: When I first saw the image,
I didn't even think I was looking at Neptune.
I thought I was looking at a totally different planet.
Seeing the rings in that much detail was just mind-blowing.
HAMMEL: The last time
we had seen that complete ring system
was more than 30 years ago,
when the Voyager 2 spacecraft had flown over Neptune.
So what we are going to be doing is looking
very carefully at the ring system today.
Looking at how that ring system may have evolved
with time over those intervening decades,
and trying to understand what that tells us
about ring systems in general.
How long do they last?
What's driving them?
EVANS: When you have a new telescope
and you're just getting new data,
it is very much like being, you know, a child
around the holidays, and you,
and you come downstairs,
and you're, like, "Oh," you know,
"what presents are going to be there?"
Every time you get this new image,
it's just like unwrapping a present
to basically see what there is to see.
So it's a pretty exciting experience.
NARRATOR: But before we get the chance to appreciate
these mesmerizing images,
they need to be tweaked.
STRAUGHN: The human eyes
can only see a very narrow part of the spectrum.
You know, your blue to red.
But there's light on either of the other sides
of that spectrum.
And of course, JWST is infrared,
so it's on the red side of light.
Right, so Webb is an infrared telescope,
so it's, it's sensitive to light
that is beyond what our eyes can see.
So that's two layers of adjustments.
NARRATOR: It's the job of the data image developer--
part science geek,
part artist-- to take this
invisible infrared light and translate it into colors
our eyes can see.
JWST takes multiple images of the same celestial object
with different infrared filters,
represented here in black and white.
DEPASQUALE: We've taken light of different infrared
wavelengths and split it up.
And so there's long-wavelength infrared,
medium wavelengths, but a little
bit shorter, and then shorter wavelengths.
NARRATOR: Now those infrared waves are translated
into the colors of the rainbow.
We try to adhere to a philosophy of colorizing the data
that we call chromatic ordering.
So we're capturing these wavelengths
in infrared light,
and we're shifting them into the visible part
of the spectrum,
and we are assigning colors that represent
shorter to longer wavelengths,
just like we would see them.
(Mozart sonata playing)
NARRATOR: Think of it like a song played on a piano
transposed, so we're hearing it in a different key,
but it's still the same song.
So the longest wavelength is going to be red, so I will
make that red.
The next-longest wavelength, I'll assign that green.
And then the shortest wavelength, and that'll be blue.
In this case, we actually have four filters.
One of them is a narrow-band filter
that is really isolating a very specific kind of light.
And that one, we color orange.
So after pulling everything together, I see the,
the initial color composite
image here, and it's really interesting--
there's a lot of potential here--
but I also see that it's very flat,
and it needs some, some compositional work.
ALYSSA PAGAN: And then this where it
kind of goes into the subjective
and more into the artistic.
DEPASQUALE: The stars can look very different.
The quality of the nebula can look very different.
There isn't really, like, a hard point where it becomes,
you know, going from science to art.
It's sort of the whole process.
The science is always there.
We're always respecting the data.
We're not trying to introduce things
that weren't there in the data to begin with,
and we're not trying to remove things that are there.
So the whole goal of this is to create
an aesthetically pleasing image that will capture
someone's attention and hopefully inspire them
to want to learn more about this region in space.
NARRATOR: This image of the Tarantula Nebula is not only beautiful,
JWST'S infrared eye
reveals thousands of baby stars once hidden from view,
providing researchers new clues
to decode the life cycle of stars.
NOTA: You look at a newborn and you get
a feeling for what that person will be
when they are grown up,
and the same thing for stars.
You just measure them at the very beginning, and you can,
you can imagine and you can infer
how they will be and what they, they will become.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: At the California Institute of Technology,
an international team of scientists
has gotten its data from JWST.
We're just going to launch right into it.
NARRATOR: They come together
to discuss and debate what
their test drive of the telescope has delivered.
ARMUS: We have a great team, we have people in the U.S.,
we have people in Japan, we have people in Europe.
We have young people and old people.
And yeah, and then I was gonna talk about...
U: So this group
of astronomers I've known for many years,
since my graduate school days,
and I would call them my family.
(all laughing)
Team, Team 7460...
EVANS: So for the last two years or so, it's been
primarily meetings through Zoom, but there's no substitution
for, like, just the energy
you get having people in a room together.
It's, it's fantastic.
MAN: And then this is the zoom-in...
NARRATOR: The team has gathered to figure out what JWST
is telling them about one of
the most mysterious objects in the cosmos:
supermassive black holes.
All massive galaxies in the universe
have a huge black hole at their center.
NORA LÜTZGENDORF: What do I love about black holes?
So black holes are just
the most amazing consequence of gravity.
NARRATOR: The gravity of a black hole is so extreme
that whatever goes in will never come out.
Not even light itself can escape from it.
MOUNTAIN: Material is falling into it the whole time,
and they have these big disks of dust
and gas and everything
which is swirling around the outside,
all trying to fall into the black hole.
SABRINA STIERWALT: But we don't know how they got there.
We don't know how you make
a supermassive black hole.
We don't know how they formed.
STRAUGHN: So when we're thinking about these massive black holes
at the centers of galaxies,
a big question is sort of, "Who's in charge?"
You know, is the host galaxy
in control of the galaxy's evolution?
Or is that big black hole at the center,
is it having a really strong impact
on how the galaxy changes over time?
NARRATOR: In fact, there appears to be an uncanny connection
between a supermassive black hole
and the galaxy surrounding it.
EVANS: It seems like the ratio for the black hole mass
to the star mass is about one to a thousand.
So that seems to imply that somehow the galaxy itself
knows how massive the black hole is in it.
It doesn't make that much sense, because the black hole,
its sphere of influence is so small,
it cannot really know what's around it.
So how would those things be correlated?
Why, why are they so correlated?
EVANS: Keep in mind that we're talking about stars
that are so far away from the black hole itself
that the stars don't actually feel directly
the gravitational influence of the black hole.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: One of the best ways to investigate
this strange relationship is to study merging galaxies.
STIERWALT: When you throw two galaxies together,
you can potentially grow a supermassive black hole
because you're now feeding it.
You're giving it all this material, 'cause it's
crashed into this other galaxy.
And by studying merging galaxies,
we can potentially understand better
how these supermassive black holes grow,
what sort of interaction does the supermassive black hole
have with its surroundings.
You have both black holes that are feeding
and star formation happening in these galaxies.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: All that activity stirs up so much dust,
it's nearly impossible to see the action unfold.
It's very hard to actually look and see a black hole
because all this dust and gas is in the way.
NARRATOR: And here's where JWST's infrared eye comes into play.
STRAUGHN: So I went to grad school in Arizona,
and every now and then, a dust storm would blow through.
And anyone who's ever been in a dust storm knows
you can't see through dust.
But infrared light
has this amazing property that allows us to peer through dust.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: This is an image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope
in optical light of two galaxies in the process of merging.
And this is what it looks like in infrared light
with the Spitzer Space Telescope.
ARMUS: When you looked at it with Spitzer in infrared light,
all of the energy was coming from that one region,
behind this shroud,
and we knew we wanted to look at that.
NARRATOR: They think somewhere inside this region
is a feeding black hole.
But while Spitzer was one of the most advanced
infrared telescopes of its day,
its mirror was only about three feet in diameter,
compared to Hubble's eight-foot mirror
and JWST's massive 21-foot mirror.
And so clearly, Spitzer, you know,
resolution is fairly low.
But if you go now to what we see
with the new James Webb images...
(all chuckling, exclaiming) EVANS: ...this is what we see when we have
a six-meter telescope in space.
NARRATOR: JWST's spectroscopes see through the dust,
revealing these three distinct dots.
Two are clusters of star formation
and one of them is likely a feeding black hole.
So the, the final scenario is that now you could see exactly
what is on the,
that giant blob.
STIERWALT: We previously just knew
that something was lighting up the dust,
but we didn't know what it was.
We're now able to see,
oh, there's a supermassive black hole in there.
And not only that,
but it's destroying the dust in its immediate vicinity.
ARMUS: It gives us a very close-up view
of what's happening inside the galaxies,
how the gas is getting into the supermassive black hole,
what the supermassive black hole
is doing to the surrounding area.
♪ ♪
U: And so the fact that we can see it
at that level of detail is what amazed me.
NARRATOR: Hopes are high that in the coming years,
this unprecedented level of detail will provide new clues
to how this relationship between supermassive black holes
and their galaxies took shape.
♪ ♪
It's early morning at the University of Texas at Austin,
and this team has just received its data and images from JWST.
Okay, it's recording.
NARRATOR: Principal investigator Steven Finkelstein
keeps a video diary of their work.
Good? Good.
We've definitely had some highs,
we've had some lows.
Really exciting to see the data when it first came in.
So this one looks really good. Ooh!
What's in the... You've got something weird going on here.
NARRATOR: The team is testing the telescope's ability
to detect galaxies billions and billions
of light-years away,
to answer a question that has puzzled astronomers for decades:
how did the universe first turn on its lights?
When you think about the universe,
it's sort of like we have this 13.8-billion-year story,
and we've put together a lot of the pieces of that story,
we know a lot about it, but there are still these holes,
there's these gaps in the story that we don't
quite know the answers to.
And one of the critical gaps is sort of the very first chapter
of this story of the universe.
We don't know how galaxies got started.
NARRATOR: If the universe had a scrapbook,
this is its earliest baby picture,
the cosmic microwave background,
the afterglow of the Big Bang,
when the universe is a mere 378,000 years old.
JOHN MATHER: It has little dimples all over it
that are really important to our history.
Our calculation says that the little dimples
correspond to variations of density.
And that matters because in our idea,
the denser areas turn into
objects like galaxies, and stars,
and eventually planets and people.
So we're here because there were dimples in the Big Bang.
NARRATOR: But then...
RIGBY: There's this missing piece.
There's this... (hums "I don't know")
...that is hundreds of millions of years long.
NARRATOR: A mysterious time known as the Cosmic Dark Ages.
The Dark Ages was a period
of the universe's history
for several hundred million years
when stars themselves didn't exist.
STRAUGHN: You can sort of think of it as a hydrogen fog,
mostly hydrogen.
And when you have just hydrogen atoms floating around,
the intervening light would sort of bounce off the hydrogen.
And so you can't "see" through it.
So we sort of refer to it as a fog.
NARRATOR: In our next picture,
the universe is already in its adolescent years,
and pretty grown up.
In fact, it's filled with galaxies.
We have, you know, if you want, teenage pictures and beyond.
We, we're missing the toddler images.
NARRATOR: We're missing that picture of how the Dark Ages ended
and the first stars and galaxies took shape.
A blank page in our understanding
of our cosmic history,
one that many researchers across the globe,
like the Austin team, hope to fill.
They spend a week scrutinizing their data
in search of ancient galaxies.
So there were a group of us working here together
looking at these very distant galaxies.
We'd all gather around the computer,
and look at them and say,
"Yes, that's a good one, yes, that's a good one.
No, not that one."
NARRATOR: In the process, they discover this faint reddish blob.
When I first saw it, I was, ah, I don't believe it.
It said a redshift of 14.
Redshift of 14 is about 290 million years
after the Big Bang.
NARRATOR: If correct, this date would mean that JWST's infrared eye
is seeing further back in time than any telescope ever has.
STRAUGHN: One of the amazing things about telescopes
is that they are literally time machines.
They allow us to see the universe as it was
in the distant past.
NARRATOR: As light travels from ancient galaxies
to our telescopes,
it goes through a stunning transformation,
from optical light, the light we can see,
to infrared light.
What's happening in the universe is,
it's expanding
and pulling space apart as it goes,
and it's stretching the light in the same way.
NARRATOR: This strange stretching is called redshift.
The higher the redshift, the older the galaxy.
RIGBY: That's why the telescope was built,
to find those distant, faint red galaxies,
some of which are the first galaxies
that formed after the Big Bang.
That looks pretty deep.
I mean, obviously, right?
NARRATOR: Based on their preliminary findings,
the team thinks it might have found one of the oldest galaxies
humans have ever set eyes on.
We've spent the last 24 hours trying to throw
everything we can at this galaxy to convince ourselves
that it is not an extremely distant galaxy.
And we failed.
(all toasting)
FINKELSTEIN: So with that,
it's my daughter's birthday,
I'm going to go take her to dinner,
and then spend all day tomorrow
trying to write up this paper draft,
and hopefully get it out there pretty soon.
NARRATOR: The team names the galaxy Maisie,
after Steven's nine-year-old daughter.
But finding Maisie isn't the biggest surprise.
FINKELSTEIN: We were able to see right away, there were lots of
really distant galaxies to find,
and every time we made the data better,
they just got more believable.
Oh, there's still more!
Yeah, there's so many!
We were giddy, we were little, little schoolchildren.
(chuckling): You know, looking at all these, all these galaxies
and all of these images.
NARRATOR: In fact, Maisie is just one of many ancient galaxies
that can be found in this stunning mosaic of JWST images.
Galaxies, galaxies, galaxies.
The full image has about 100,000 galaxies.
KARTALTEPE: You hardly find any empty spaces in the images.
Every tiny little speck, every, every space, is a galaxy.
And you zoom in and you see more.
And so this was Maisie's galaxy,
this red blob right here.
Beautiful red blob right here. (Kartaltepe laughs)
RIGBY: There's a lot of excitement, there's a lot of early
preliminary results.
That's the scientific process where people are
finding candidates to be some of these very distant galaxies
and then studying their properties.
NARRATOR: For now, Maisie is considered a candidate
because its age remains uncertain while the telescope
is still being calibrated.
BOYER: It is really important to get the calibration
of your telescope right,
because when you take an image
of a galaxy or a star,
basically the, the only thing
that you're measuring,
the fundamental measurement, is the brightness
of that object at different wavelengths.
And so you need to get that brightness right.
NARRATOR: Which is exactly what a team
at the Space Telescope Science Institute is attempting to do.
What they find will be crucial for the future of JWST
and the reliability of all the findings produced from its data,
including the age of ancient galaxies like Maisie.
We can do it better...
(people talking in background)
NARRATOR: The team is observing a cluster of stars known as Messier 92,
one of the brightest
and oldest collections of stars in the Milky Way.
BOYER: These are stars that have been studied
for decades by lots of telescopes everywhere,
and, and we know a lot about them.
NARRATOR: But when they get their data back from JWST...
WOMAN: Uh-oh.
I think I found an error.
NARRATOR: ...something's not adding up.
BOYER: When we were looking at the data for the first time,
what we were seeing was that the brightness of stars
measured on the different detectors
was a little bit different on each detector.
So one detector was measuring the star a little bit brighter,
the other one was measuring it a little bit fainter.
WOMAN 2: Is this the M92 image that's weird?
WOMAN 1: Yeah.
NARRATOR: Astrophysicist Hakeem Oluseyi
demonstrates the discrepancy they found
using some light meters and this 100-watt light bulb.
OLUSEYI: Assume that this light bulb is my star that has been measured
over and over and over again for decades.
And I know how bright it is, really.
And now I have a detector
that I'm going to point at it,
and it's going to give me a reading
for how bright this light is.
So, I point this at my star,
and then I lock in the measured value.
Now I'm going to take a different detector
and I'm going to do the same thing.
♪ ♪
And I do that with another detector.
Hold it for a standard distance,
and lock in the value.
Well, guess what?
They don't all have
the same reading.
They are slightly different, one from the other,
and that's normal.
If I took the light
from a single star and shined it on different detectors,
they may each give us a different reading.
NARRATOR: It's a common problem instrument scientist
Mike Ressler knows all too well.
He helped to develop the detectors
for one of the instruments onboard JWST, called MIRI.
RESSLER: The detectors we use
in MIRI are silicon detectors,
and they are very similar to the detectors
that you might find
in a digital camera.
NARRATOR: In fact, if you take off the lens,
you'll find a detector behind the shutter,
this greenish-gray rectangular silicon chip.
RESSLER: The light comes through the lens and gets focused
on that rectangle, and that is the detector.
Each detector has its own personality,
so one detector might be
a little more sensitive than another.
They don't all respond to light in the same way.
NARRATOR: MIRI has three detectors like this one.
Onboard JWST there are 18,
each with its own personality.
We're trying to ensure that the personality of the detector
doesn't show up in our data.
We want the data to represent
what's actually out in the universe.
NARRATOR: Using the known brightness of the stars in Messier 92
as their guide,
the team adjusts how it processes the data,
updating the calibration of the telescope.
OLUSEYI: Once we've calibrated our instrument,
we can go and point it at things that we have no idea
how bright they are intrinsically,
and by measuring its brightness,
we can now get a very accurate measurement of its distance.
And those are the numbers that go into our calculations
of the evolution of the universe.
NARRATOR: Back in Austin, the team is also improving
how they process their data.
This, along with tweaks in the calibration of the instruments,
modifies the estimate of Maisie's age.
FINKELSTEIN: The distance did change over time
in the first few weeks, as we understood the data.
That revised the distance estimate from a time
about 300 million years after the Big Bang
to about 370 million years after the Big Bang.
NARRATOR: Maisie is probably out of the running
for most ancient galaxy ever seen.
There's sort of a game in the field of trying to find
the record holder, right?
Because it's exciting, and everybody wants
the most distant one, and that's fun.
But I think the real science is going to come from
studying their properties in more detail,
what their colors are, what their shapes are,
what the properties of their stars are,
and that's scientifically a lot more interesting
than, than just the record holder.
NARRATOR: The telescope has been exploring the cosmos 24/7.
Exoplanet researchers Kevin Stevenson
and David Sing are about to receive data for
what may be one of the telescope's
most challenging observations so far:
attempting to detect the atmosphere of a rocky exoplanet,
something that has never been done by any other telescope.
They focus on an exoplanet named GJ 486 b.
Researchers estimate it's about 30% larger than Earth,
but in comparison to Jupiter and a gas giant like WASP-39b,
it's downright puny,
making its atmosphere much harder to detect.
So, of all the rocky planets out there, why pick this one?
It's only about 26 light-years away.
So it's very close just in our own neighborhood.
NARRATOR: When it comes to the size of the universe,
that's practically next door.
This planet also orbits close to a red dwarf,
a star that's smaller and dimmer than our sun.
STEVENSON: When we want to study rocky planets that are Earth-sized,
we cannot change the size of the planet.
So our goal is to go after those rocky planets
that are around the smallest stars.
So it's one of the few select planets
you have a chance to see an atmosphere
around a rocky planet.
All righty, let's get this party started,
and look at the second transit.
NARRATOR: JWST has documented a transit.
Now the search for an atmosphere begins.
They spend days analyzing their observations,
each using slightly different methods
to process the data.
Kevin's results look promising.
There's a lot to look into to make sure
that the result is robust.
But, at this point,
maybe.
That would be cool.
NARRATOR: Their next step:
to meet with fellow team members to compare their findings.
Everyone excited? WOMAN: Oh, yeah.
Okay, well, let's take a look at the transmission spectrum.
NARRATOR: It turns out
that when David processed the data,
he didn't find
the chemical signature of an atmosphere.
SING: So one possibility is, it doesn't have
any atmosphere, and the spectra will look
basically just like a flat line.
So there's a lot of talk about, is it a flat line?
Is it not a flat line?
NARRATOR: A flat line, because the chemical signature
of the star's light did not seem to change
when the planet passed in front of it.
MAN: Okay, now let's look at Kevin's.
We've got it looking
inconsistent with a flat line, first blush.
NARRATOR: Kevin did detect a tiny shift.
This one is pretty consistent
with water. MAN: Water!
(man chuckling)
MAN 3: Wow. MAN 1: Yeah.
NARRATOR: Water could mean
that this rocky world has an atmosphere.
Well, I think an atmosphere is still on the table.
I mean, if I bet right now,
I think it would probably be a flat line.
But it's close.
NARRATOR: It will take months
and more observations to determine if GJ 486 b
has an atmosphere.
♪ ♪
We are on the bloody edge of, of, like,
what this telescope can do.
We are on the very edge
of what the instrument capabilities are,
the telescope precision, and we are hoping
that we can tease out signals that are on the order
of tens of parts per million.
We don't know the answer yet,
but we also can't say
that the transmission spectrum is flat.
And so there's optimism.
I would say cautiously optimistic.
NARRATOR: When it comes to the search for the chemical building blocks
of life in our own solar system,
JWST's observations of Enceladus and Europa
are finally in.
I was wondering about this, by the way.
NARRATOR: And researchers have begun to analyze their data
pixel by pixel, creating these chemical maps
of two mysterious worlds.
When it comes to the plumes of Enceladus,
they see something downright bizarre.
We saw this huge plume which extends,
like, 40 times the size of the moon.
NARRATOR: To put this in perspective,
this red pixel is about the size of Enceladus.
The moon is within a pixel.
A pixel is actually bigger than the moon.
NARRATOR: The blue pixels around it:
water pouring out of the plumes.
VILLANUEVA: This cannot be right.
This too big compared to the moon.
NARRATOR: And this massive plume may be chock full of clues
to the chemical building blocks of life
in its underground ocean.
VILLANUEVA: We can look for carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide.
For every single pixel that we have,
we actually had a full spectrum behind it.
NARRATOR: Europa also delivers a surprise.
It turns out that its surface is far more complex
than the team expected.
So this is on the surface.
This is on the surface.
We're seeing all this surface composition, you know,
speaking to us, I mean,
and we have a spectra for every single of these pixels,
so we can actually see what it's made of.
So I think this data is going to be super-cool.
We're seeing things on the surface
I've never seen before.
We can see the ices changing,
and new ices, signatures that we were not expecting.
You just have to go and mine it and search for it.
If you don't search for it, you don't know.
So our exploration has been just slowly going
molecule by molecule,
but there are hundreds of other molecules or ices
that may be hidden below, behind every pixel.
NARRATOR: Geronimo Villanueva and his team
will spend the next few months poring over those pixels,
hunting for the chemical building blocks of life
on Europa and Enceladus.
♪ ♪
Back in Austin, the team has received more data,
this time from JWST's spectroscopes.
The spectra tell us about the chemistry.
It tells us about the physics.
It tells us how many heavy elements have built up.
It can tell us what the age is, it can tell us what the rate
at which the galaxy is forming stars.
And so all of the really important physical information
really comes from the spectra.
NARRATOR: And the spectra are filled with the unexpected.
KARTALTEPE: One of the things that really strikes me
about looking at the spectra of these high redshift galaxies
is how much detail we see.
In these data that we're just getting,
we're seeing signatures of heavier elements,
even for very high redshift galaxies.
So you're seeing oxygen emission here.
We're also finding hydrogen lines.
We're finding neon.
So this is all kinds of detailed information
about galaxies in the first,
you know, 500 million years
that we've never, ever had before.
And so we're not just finding these galaxies and images,
we're actually characterizing them for the first time.
And so this is really exciting and revolutionary.
NARRATOR: But it also poses more questions than answers.
Detecting these heavy elements in such ancient galaxies
means the universe may have turned on its lights
much faster than predicted.
KARTALTEPE: So both the fact
that we're seeing a lot of high redshift, massive galaxies,
and the fact that we're seeing
chemically enriched galaxies at this time period,
gives us a bit of a mystery.
So why is it that stars would have either formed
earlier in the universe than we thought
or formed more rapidly, right?
Something about that process of star formation
is more efficient, is happening, you know,
more rapidly than we initially might have guessed.
OLUSEYI: We had models of how the first galaxies form,
how long it takes, what they look like,
and James Webb Space Telescope
completely blew these models apart, right?
We found that our models...
They were a little slow
in comparison to nature.
(murmuring)
KARTALTEPE: The fact that we're finding more than what most models predict
means there's something about those models that's incorrect.
And so I think the models of how these galaxies form
in the early universe
are going to have to change
to actually match the observations now.
NARRATOR: With each new telescope,
our picture of the universe is sharpened.
When you have new eyes, you discover new things.
And that's exactly what's happening here.
It's almost like discovering a new land,
discovering a new planet.
With Webb, we're discovering a new universe.
NARRATOR: JWST's first chapter of exploration
has demonstrated just how revolutionary it can be.
ROWE-GURNEY: It's surprising, every single time
we point the telescope at something new.
It hasn't really failed us yet.
JWST is doing exactly what we thought it would and more.
RIGBY: I know that we've built a telescope that is still
more capable, and we're just tapping into those abilities.
And so I think the next couple of years
are going to be tremendous,
and that we really haven't seen anything yet.
♪ ♪