Edinburgh's role in groundbreaking new images of the distant universe

New images showing the Universe as it was over 13 billion years ago have been released by NASA.

This first image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe to date.

The Webb is the most powerful telescope ever launched into space, its greatly improved infrared resolution and sensitivity will allow it to view objects too old, distant, or faint for the Hubble Space Telescope.

As James Dunlop, a Professor of Extra-Galactic Astronomy, and Head of the School of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh, tells us: "The Hubble Space Telescope, which many listeners will have heard of, or seen pretty pictures from, has improved our knowledge a lot.

"But there's one thing that it can't do. Well, there's several things they can do from but from my point of view, the key thing they can't do is see far enough back in time to see when the first 1000 galaxies formed, which is about the first billion years of the universe."

The pure size of the Webb telescope, and the temperature it operates at, allows it to see things that we simply couldn't have captured before.

But where does the Scottish Capital come into this?

One of the key instruments which allows these images to be captured and sent back to earth was designed in Edinburgh.

Professor Dunlop said:

"Edinburgh, at the Royal Observatory, has long been the world pioneer in infrared astronomy. In fact, the first ever kind of infrared imaging for a telescope was constructed back when I was a PhD student at Edinburgh, it was constructed at the Royal Observatory in the late 1980s.

"One of the three instruments in the James Webb Space Telescope has been partly built at Edinburgh, certainly co-led by Gillian Wright, who's head of the UK astronomy Technology Center.

"There's the engineers and astronomy technology center that build things. And then there's the scientists like myself on the university side who want to use these things to do science."

We asked Professor Dunlop just how exciting this is, and he told us:

"It's exciting, and it's a relief.

"At various points, the James Webb Space Telescope nearly got canceled, partly because of financial overruns. But the finances were partly because it was getting delayed.

"A lot of the instruments were ready a while ago, including the one built from Edinburgh.

"It's all going to be a bit frantic, though, because a lot of the data goes public very quickly and work sort of in a race with other groups around the world to get some of the first signs results.

"So there's no summer holidays for anyone working in this area I can tell you that."

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