Colm O'Regan: Using a telescope to go back in time 'freaks my nut out'
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The JWST. Sounds like the travel agent that sponsored the prize to the Canaries on Theresa Lowe’s . It’s actually a swanky new space telescope. Called after James Webb, a previous director of NASA who has been alleged to be part of the anti-LGBTQI+ movement in the 1950s. So let’s focus on the ST rather than the JW for now.
The telescope is six metres across, weighs six tonnes, the clear aperture of the primary Mirror is 25m² (the size of a good Dublin apartment) the mirror bit is 700kg alone. To get a sense of that, it’s the weight of a mirror your father bought second-hand at an auction in Mallow in 1988.
Unlike the Mallow mirror which was made from glass and regret, JWST’s mirror is beryllium and coated in gold which is so thin, the whole coating of 25 square metres weighs less than a golf ball. Imagine how cheap it would be to get these lads to paint your sheds. The telescope is a million miles away in space. Last week the telescope started sending us photos of the rest of space. Very good ones.
I get a thrill watching scientists get emotional when there is a breakthrough. Usually, it’s footage of Mission Control in Houston and there’s a load of people waiting for a Martian Rover to replace its clutch. There’s a bit of spontaneous backslapping but they don’t absolutely lose their minds, perhaps not wanting to disturb the three or four nerds who are still checking numbers. This seemed different.
I saw ‘react videos’ on social media of physicists seeing galaxies light years away in better definition than they had ever seen before. They were in tears. They were seeing things in detail that had been foggy. Or something they’d never seen before.
Using a telescope to see back in time is the thing that, to quote Danny Dyer, ‘still freaks my nut out to this day’. Light particles leave the scene of a supernova or some other starry, starry night and travel for squillions of miles across space and hit our eyes or telescopes. So many miles that the light takes years. Which means when we see the light, it’s light from the past.
At the moment we are getting images of bits of the universe from as much as 200 million years ago. It’s like being at a bus stop and not only can you see the bus a few stops up the road, you can also see images of the driver of yesterday’s bus having their breakfast. Actually, when you look in the mirror you’re seeing yourself a tiny bit in the past. (Or in the case of a changing room mirror, it’s you in an alternative evil universe.)
As we look further into the past — possibly right back to the Big Bang — it also begs the question is someone looking at us with an even better telescope? Every bit of light that ever hit the earth has reflected back up in some shape or form so technically if you were far away enough from us with a good enough bit of beryllium and gold foil you could make a telescope to see what happened to the dinosaurs. Or other stuff before social media recorded everything.
It’s the Hubble telescope I feel sorry for. It keeps on being compared to the new telescope. Hubble’s images are all blurry and shite like old photos from your first phone you discovered after you found the lead.
Maybe in future, Hubble images will become cool. Hipsters will print out its images on little Dot Matrix printers outside coffee shops. "no it's not as clear as the JWST but I just love the 'feel of it'. It's just more authentic than the JWST."
Whatever happens in the future though, the past is another galaxy.
