by When I sat down with Jane Rigby last month, in an upstairs conference room at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis – a quiet retreat from the families watching cosmic exhibits and dinosaur bones below – her eyes were warm and measured. . She was also wearing a menagerie of gravitational lenses.
His T-shirt was decorated with realms of light struck by massive structures in their vicinity, stretched and crushed by gravitational tides that twisted the fabric of space-time as if it were an audible sea of four-dimensional rubber. This image was actually among the first pictures taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, a gold-plated, multibillion-dollar instrument located a million miles from World — a machine on which Rigby is acting as chief scientist, and of which she is a scientist just earned the 2024 White House Presidential Medal of Freedom.
It’s scenes like this quarry of manipulated galaxies that Rigby manages to help bring the rest of the JWST team down to Earth, metaphorically and literally. Images taken with this telescope allowed scientists to deepen their new research, encouraged journalists to think endlessly about their stories and indeed inspired designers to create thought pieces that included concepts that were once limited to fiction. They have changed the way we see the universe, and the way we place ourselves within it mentally.
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“I work on a telescope that does the impossible,” said Rigby after she took the medal. “We are measuring distant planets and the universe in ways that were simply impossible.”
Since its exquisite launch sequence into space in the early morning of Christmas 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope it was a vision. With a toolkit of highly sensitive infrared spectrometers and cameras, it is able to detect wavelengths of light from deep space that have become stretched over time like deflated rubber bands.
They are wavelengths that appear to be shifted from our perspective, having gone from the blue end of the electromagnetic spectrum to the red end. They seem to have been drawn because the universe has been expanding continuously for the past several billion years, and indeed continues to do so. Ultimately, such transferred wavelengths pass into infrared waters, invisible not only to the human eye, but to almost all human telescopes – but importantly, these signals represent things that have physically transferred away from us. along with their color classification. Redshifted wavelengths hold information about mysterious pieces of it the universe it was when the cosmos was a kind of infinity smaller than the one we live in today. And the James Webb Space Telescope can understand that data.
It can create portraits with enough power to revolutionize science and inspire reminders of the amazing world we live in. That’s how scientists were able to image a old record-breaker galaxy named for the discoverer’s daughter, Maisie, access new cracks of coffee-hued nebulastudy an explant system that ours looks terrible and debates like one about how fast Our universe is really a balloon out.
“We go through our lives all the time, in the midst of wonder, but we don’t know it,” said Rigby Space.com. “We are disappearing between the world and the whole world.”
Rigby recalls seeing the first of the telescope’s deep space images. “I was one of the first people to see that data,” she said. “We were all in a room, it looked like a conference room like this, and we all got to look at it at the same time.”
However, the team eventually decided that they needed to go even deeper into the cosmos with JWST’s infrared powers. They wanted to punch further back in time. So they got some procedures going. That ran overnight. The next day, Rigby’s parents were visiting, and she was worried about things like making sure her guest room was ready to go.
“I have to make breakfast and there have to be waffles,” she said of her thought process. “Then I went upstairs, still in my pajamas, and downloaded …. and there it is.”
Not only was what she saw beautiful, but for a while, it felt like those details were specifically for her eyes. “That was a great feeling,” explained Rigby. “That, ‘oh my gosh, we built this thing and it works. It works really well. ‘” But then, it was time to share the excitement.
“As a chief scientist, one of the things that has given me the greatest joy is watching that joy in the scientific community,” she said. “I want to show everyone that it’s so beautiful, and also, ‘Yes! We focused on the right thing!'”
Throughout her careerRigby worked with many highly influential telescopes including the Hubble Space TelescopeSpitzer, the Keck Telescopes and the Chandra X-ray Telescope, the latter of which is really making headlines in the astronomy communities at the moment due to the current state of budget uncertainty. She has published over 150 papers on her discoveries, holds master’s and doctorate degrees in astronomy from the University of Arizona, and is passionate about social activism. And now, she has earned the White House’s highest civilian honor along with 18 other distinguished recipients.
“The President’s Medal of Freedom,” according to the White House website“the Nation’s highest civilian honor, presented to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the prosperity, values, or security of the United States, world peace, or other significant societal, public, or private endeavors.”
It can probably also be argued that the impact of the James Webb Space Telescope transcends the seemingly non-emerging differences that affect people. This telescope can be imagined as a symbol of peace, in its own way.
In his speech following the award, Rigby highlighted previous Medal of Freedom Award winners, including an astronaut Sally Ridepolitician Harvey Milk, and social activist Bayard Rustin, one of whom was the first American woman in space and two of whom were proud of subjects such as gay rights, civil rights and non-violence: “I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for them. .”
And it is remarkable that their enthusiasm for science goes beyond their achievement of high academic honors. Much of her scientific work revolves around her working diligently to broaden scientific discussion so that anyone can comment, or at least, marvel at the beauty of space for a moment or two. Just before our interview, in fact, she had finished a long presentation at the museum. It was for a collection of dream-eyed children sitting like pretzels on the floor with significant questions about the mechanisms of stellar death and dark dark distribution.
Science is not just about the numbers, she emphasizes – but, as a self-proclaimed empiricist primarily, she admits to a love of numbers. It is also about the irrepressible reality that, because of human nature, we cannot escape our humanity.
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“All the time we go back and forth between depths of about millions of solar masses black holes since the Earth was only a few 100 million years old,” she said. “And then we’re talking about personality conflicts; about how these two can’t agree on who will be the first author.”
“We can get better, we can have more interest, we can have better practices,” she said. “But science is a human endeavor made by people.”
Of course, behind the success of JWST is an amazing group of people: engineers, scientists, press officers, program coordinators, factory workers and much more that you will find along the path of the supply chain. “I’m a very collaborative scientist,” Rigby said. “The most fun time I have is when I go to my science collaboration every Tuesday, and we get on the Zoom and we have some data. It’s like an unboxing on YouTube.
“It’s like a vacation.”
