There’s an image of space that they call “Pillars of Creation.” It looks like the hand of a god. Your eye traces the forearm of gas coagulating into amorphous peaks of cotton candy space dust. Spectral, gargantuan, ghostly, divine. Solid as rock, but with the opacity of dissipating fog. It stands in your mind’s eye, perpetually reaching, fingers poised with a cold disposition and ready to wrap themselves around an unseen victim. What is it creating? Fear? Awe?
This entity is formally known as the Eagle nebula, so by definition, it’s creating stars, though it’s hard to imagine how any additional stars could possibly fit into the already-supersaturated sky. Like veins under skin, the nebula can’t obscure the light of thousands upon thousands of glowing bulbs from pinpricks to spotlights, specks of glitter to chunks of diamond. They call it outer space, but the population of stars in this view looking out from Earth makes the space between feel full. Surely the sheer mass of more would collapse into a black hole.
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When I was in fourth grade, I went to a park to watch Venus upstage the sun.
A local astronomy club had set up telescopes at the top of a dune on the coast of Lake Michigan to watch the transit of Venus, an event that happens twice, eight years apart, and then waits about 121 years to cycle again. The transit of a planet occurs when its orbit falls between the Earth and the Sun. If, during a transit, we dare to gaze up from our mossy rock at the star we’re told never to make eye contact with, this celestial event lets us see the journey of a dark speck against a backdrop of blazing fire. From where I was peering through the telescope, it looked like a lame shadow puppet but, in that moment, my 11-year-old self felt like it was the coolest thing I would ever see.
My fascination with celestial events began on the top of this little midwestern hill. My formative years were speckled with meteor showers on beaches, shooting stars in the dead of night and the smudge of comets lighting up the vast upper peninsula sky.
Meteor showers, shooting stars, solar eclipses, constellations, nebulas, planets, stars, general cosmic anomalies. Why look up at these things?
Thinking back on all my memories forces me, once again, into the mystique of the night sky that once swept me off my feet. Space has a way of captivating us in a way that feels irresistible. And I barely even know what it looks like. Our imaginations have to work overtime to make the idea of the spectacle match the reality of what can be seen.
In fact, if it weren’t for the Hubble Space Telescope, I’d be left with only imagination to visualize the exceptional images hidden within the darkness of space. When Hubble launched in the ’90s, it became a household name as the first optical telescope of such caliber in space and collected images fully unobscured by the Earth’s atmosphere.
Hubble was only expected to have a lifespan of 15 years but, with the help of some upgrades, the telescope is still collecting data today. While it’s been truly invaluable to our understanding of the universe, what if I told you that a new telescope was launched into operation in the past year — the successor to Hubble and a device even more capable than this revolutionary spyglass?
“Liftoff. From a tropical rainforest to the edge of time itself, James Webb begins a voyage back to the birth of the universe.” These are the words that were spoken by Rob Navias, Spokesman for the Johnson Space Center, as the James Webb Space Telescope was hurled into the largest void known to humankind to rest about one million miles away from Earth. Within the last year, the JWST has allowed us to peer into the universe in a way that hasn’t been possible before. And let me tell you, when he says the edge of time itself, he really means it.
The speed at which light travels is not a concept we really think about in our everyday lives. The light we perceive on the regular is so instantaneous, we don’t imagine it as something that moves. Light reaches, say, an apple. Some of the light is absorbed by that apple, and some of the light is reflected off of that apple. The reflected light of the red apple is what reaches our eyes. We look at the fruit, and we essentially see it as an apple in the present moment.
Conversely, the light of stars that we observe in the sky is reaching us from thousands of light years away. When we look up, we don’t see stars as they are right now, we see them as they were thousands of years ago. There could be stars that have died out, that no longer shine in the present moment, but their light takes so long to get to Earth that we can still see it as if nothing has happened. The stars I saw in middle school from atop an eroding dune — millions of them could have been dead. The farther away an object is from Earth, and the further the light of the object is required to travel, the further back in time we are able to see. The JWST was designed in part to detect the farthest and faintest of light and allow us to see as far into the past as we dare to go.
One of the first images taken in 2022 by the JWST, shown below, was a deep field image pointed at a galaxy cluster. Every speck of light in this image that lacks a six-point lens flare is a galaxy, experts say. While the sheer amount of galaxies observable from one angle is certainly jaw dropping, the most exciting part of this image is where the light appears to be warping in the middle. That’s a particular galaxy cluster that the JWST is concerned with focusing on with this image, and this cluster is bending the light of galaxies behind them in a naturally occurring phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. These galaxies in the cluster have a gravitational field that’s powerful enough to basically act as celestial binoculars. Webb is a human-made telescope pointed at a universe-made telescope pointed at the earliest known visible galaxies, existing in a time when the universe was at its beginnings.
Photo courtesy of NASA, taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, 2022
While I hate to devalue the awe-factor of these photos, I have a duty to clarify some things: Not everything about the telescope pictures are real. Even the NASA photos are an exercise in imagination. While it’s most definitely not an amateur art project, the photos we receive from the telescopes are black and white. Then, they’re systematically color-coded by scientists in a way that is entirely based on the data in the photo. The color-filled wonderland that we think of when we imagine space, popularized by Hubble and now being enhanced by the JWST, is just an interpretation of very real scientific information. Until we can leave the planet and travel light years away in our own sci-fi spacecraft to see galaxies with our own eyes, humanity may never know the truth of what sights there are to behold.
As I sit in a crowded coffee shop here on Earth, scrolling through the Webb’s images, the figures of sparkling nebulas and galaxies are so beautiful I think to myself, this can’t be real. I’m struck by a feeling I can’t quite put into words, as I try to put it into words anyway. Awe, maybe. My breath feels thoroughly taken. An image from this telescope is like an uppercut to the brain. It makes me feel small, but in a good way, if that makes sense. We are the bacteria culture on an agar plate sitting on the universe’s counter.
While these images demonstrate the significance and beauty of space exploration, I wonder if looking up is a privilege humanity can’t afford right now. NASA has made promises to get humans to Mars by 2033, nearly 10 years from the time I write this. Billionaires spend chump change on space missions and talk about their plans to reach Mars like it’s their summer vacation idea. Elon Musk thinks he’s getting a crew to Mars in 2029. It’s a cool idea, but our Earth is dying. Should we be looking at another planet before we really take a long and hard look at our own? Sometimes looking at outer space feels like escapism — a way to cope when looking directly at Earth and humanity feels a bit unbearable.
I want to look up at space and be filled with hope, awe, wonder and mystery. The JWST is giving that feeling to the world. It’s already providing incredible data for astronomers to help figure out the extraterrestrial piece of life’s greatest puzzle: Why are we here? I just hope we continue to look at our own planet with the same reverence. I hope we don’t get so swept up in the world beyond that we forget where our own two feet are planted.
But maybe I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. No one is traveling to Mars yet. Light travel still isn’t possible. For now, I sit at the edge of my seat as history unfolds with every spectacular new image released from the greatest telescope humanity has ever seen.
Statement Correspondent Dani Canan can be reached at dcanan@umich.edu.