James Webb Telescope's just SHOCKED by Hubble's new images...but Webb's even CRAZIER

Hi, and welcome back to Great SpaceX. You know, I really enjoy reading your comments. It means a lot to us, and it's really helping us grow. James Webb continues to strongly dazzle as it completed stage six of its seven-step setup process ahead of schedule. Well, only one step left, and we will see the first sharp images of millions of years-old galaxies in space. And I've gotta tell ya, it's really worth waiting for. Besides that, Webb's predecessor, the Hubble, is still making record-setting discoveries. The aging space telescope captured an exceedingly old star, the oldest, in fact, that's ever been detected. It seems we were right to invest billions of dollars in these machines. Now, what more can we expect from them? Let's find out in today's episode of Great SpaceX. The commissioning stages of the James Webb Space Telescope just ticked off yet another phase. According to a NASA report on April 1st, engineers have successfully aligned all but one of the instruments on the $10 billion space telescope for the first time as Webb continues to cool to deep space temperatures after launching on December 25th of 2021. The agency also revealed in this post that the operations team here on Earth is calling it a day as far as the sixth stage of Webb's commissioning process goes. Now, they are ready to move on to the seventh and final step of getting the telescope ready for science. Once the instruments cool to their operating temperatures, that is. The announcement puts Webb slightly ahead of schedule. Ball aerospace scientist and Webb team member Shonda Walker said in a statement that the efficiency came as a pleasant surprise. As a general rule, the commissioning process starts with coarse corrections and then moves into fine corrections. The early secondary mirror coarse corrections, however, were so successful that the fine corrections in the first iteration of phase six were unnecessary. This accomplishment was due to many years of planning and great teamwork among the wavefront sensing team, she adds. To get to this point, the Webb telescope team went through a weeks-long painstaking process of slowly adjusting the telescope's primary mirrors, 18 gold and beryllium segments, to bring them into alignment, or in focus, across several different instruments, including the near-infrared camera, the fine guidance sensor, the near-infrared slitless spectrograph, and the near-infrared spectrometer. According to NASA, this process went so well for both the primary and the secondary mirror that the team concluded no additional adjustments are necessary for Webb's secondary mirror until the seventh stage. Huge thanks to the Webb team for their hard work. Now, what else are we waiting on? Well, that would be the mid-infrared instrument, or MIRI, the final instrument to be aligned. MIRI needs to cool to a chilling minus 447 degrees Fahrenheit, or seven Kelvin, for normal operations. That process will take weeks, even in the cold darkness of space. When MIRI cools down, the telescope will enter its seventh commissioning stage, the final milestone before the instruments come fully online. The Webb team will make the final mirror alignment adjustments to ensure all four instruments are aligned. Once the telescope can focus its light successfully in each instrument, the agency plans a key decision meeting to confirm that the aligning process is complete. The team will then transition from alignment efforts to commissioning each instrument for scientific operations. A program of early science, or Cycle 1, is expected to start around June, with Cycle 2 operational science expected to begin in mid-2023. While Webb is slowly moving towards the goal of capturing the first sharp images, its predecessor, the aging Hubble Space Telescope, is still making record-setting discoveries. More than 30 years after launch, Hubble finally spotted the most distant single star ever seen. As NASA announced, this newfound star dubbed Arendelle, from an old English word meaning morning star or rising light, is so far away that its light has taken 12.9 billion years to reach Earth, appearing to us as it was when the universe was about 900 million years old, just 7% of its current age. The previous record holder, discovered by Hubble in 2018, existed when the universe was about 4 billion years old, or 30% of its current age. Notably, study lead author Brian Welch, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, along with his colleagues, have determined that Arendelle was about 50 times the mass of our sun and millions of times as bright. It also would have been made up exclusively of hydrogen and helium, lacking any of the heavy metals that exist in the more modern universe. As such, Arendelle is what NASA calls the first evidence of the legendary population three stars, which are the first stars to have lit their nuclear furnaces after the Big Bang. And as a worthy note, Arendelle might not have been detected at all if it weren't for a trick of physics and optics known as gravitational lensing, originally posited by Albert Einstein. Normally, even a star as brilliant as Arendelle would be impossible to see from Earth, given the vast divide between the two. But scientists detected Arendelle with the help of a huge galaxy cluster, WHL 0137-08, sitting between Earth and the newfound star. The gravitational pull of this enormous galaxy cluster warped the fabric of space and time, resulting in a powerful natural magnifying glass that greatly amplified the light from distant objects behind the galaxy, such as Arendelle. This gravitational lensing has distorted the light from the galaxy hosting Arendelle into a long crescent the researchers named the Sunrise Arc. The rare way in which Arendelle aligned with WHL 0137-08 meant that the star appeared directly on or extremely close to a curve in space-time that provided maximum brightening, causing Arendelle to stand out from the general glow of its home galaxy. This effect is analogous to the rippled surface of a swimming pool, creating patterns of bright light on the bottom of the pool on a sunny day. The ripples on the surface act as lenses and focus sunlight to maximum brightness on the pool floor. Welch also emphasized that this is not the most distant object scientists have ever discovered. Hubble has observed galaxies at greater distances. However, we see the light from their millions of stars all blended together. This is the most distant object where we can identify light from an individual star. He also noted this star was distant, but not old. We see the star as it was 12.8 billion years ago, but that does not mean the star is 12.8 billion years old. Instead, it's probably just a few million years old and never reached old age, because given its mass, it almost certainly has not survived to today, as more massive stars tend to burn through their fuel faster and thus explode or collapse into black holes sooner. And although Arendelle may have been Hubble's to find, the aging telescope will now pass the work of studying the object in greater detail onto the brand new James Webb Space Telescope, which was purpose-built to observe in the infrared spectrum in which the ancient star principally shines. With Webb, we will see stars even farther than Arendelle. And that's it for today's episode. If you enjoy what my team and I are doing, you can become a patron through our Patreon link in the description below. And as a quick note, if you have advertising needs, you can contact us directly via email. Otherwise, as always, this is Kevin with GreatSpaceX, and my team and I will see you next time. That's all for today, but we'll see you in the next episode. Thanks again for tuning in, and have a great day.