When I sat down with Jane Rigby last month, in an upper-floor conference room at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis — a quiet reprieve from the throngs of families perusing cosmic exhibits and dinosaur bones below — her eyes were warm and measured. She was also wearing a menagerie of gravitationally lensed galaxies.Her T-shirt was decorated with illuminated realms warped by massive structures in their vicinity, stretched and squashed like taffy thanks to gravitational tides that twist the very fabric of spacetime as though it were a bendable sea of four-dimensional rubber. This image was actually among the first stills captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, a gold-plated, multibillion-dollar instrument located a million miles from Earth — a machine for which Rigby serves as the chief scientist, and for which she just earned the White House’s 2024 Presidential Medal of Freedom.It is scenes such as this quarry of manipulated galaxies that Rigby manages to help bring down to Earth with the rest of the JWST team, both metaphorically and literally speaking. Images constructed with this telescope have allowed scientists to deepen their nuanced research, encouraged journalists to muse endlessly in their stories and indeed inspired designers to craft thought-provoking pieces that encapsulate concepts once confined to fiction. They’ve changed how we see the universe, and how we mentally place ourselves within.Related: NASA selects new head of science for the James Webb Space Telescope”I work on a telescope that does the impossible,” Rigby said following her acceptance of the medal. “We are measuring planets and the distant universe in ways that were just impossible.”Ever since its exquisite launch sequence to space early on Christmas morning in 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope has been a vision. With a toolkit of highly sensitive infrared spectrometers and cameras, it’s able to detect wavelengths of light from deep space that have elongated ove …
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[mwai_chat context=”Let’s have a discussion about this article:nnWhen I sat down with Jane Rigby last month, in an upper-floor conference room at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis — a quiet reprieve from the throngs of families perusing cosmic exhibits and dinosaur bones below — her eyes were warm and measured. She was also wearing a menagerie of gravitationally lensed galaxies.Her T-shirt was decorated with illuminated realms warped by massive structures in their vicinity, stretched and squashed like taffy thanks to gravitational tides that twist the very fabric of spacetime as though it were a bendable sea of four-dimensional rubber. This image was actually among the first stills captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, a gold-plated, multibillion-dollar instrument located a million miles from Earth — a machine for which Rigby serves as the chief scientist, and for which she just earned the White House’s 2024 Presidential Medal of Freedom.It is scenes such as this quarry of manipulated galaxies that Rigby manages to help bring down to Earth with the rest of the JWST team, both metaphorically and literally speaking. Images constructed with this telescope have allowed scientists to deepen their nuanced research, encouraged journalists to muse endlessly in their stories and indeed inspired designers to craft thought-provoking pieces that encapsulate concepts once confined to fiction. They’ve changed how we see the universe, and how we mentally place ourselves within.Related: NASA selects new head of science for the James Webb Space Telescope”I work on a telescope that does the impossible,” Rigby said following her acceptance of the medal. “We are measuring planets and the distant universe in ways that were just impossible.”Ever since its exquisite launch sequence to space early on Christmas morning in 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope has been a vision. With a toolkit of highly sensitive infrared spectrometers and cameras, it’s able to detect wavelengths of light from deep space that have elongated ove …nnDiscussion:nn” ai_name=”RocketNews AI: ” start_sentence=”Can I tell you more about this article?” text_input_placeholder=”Type ‘Yes'”]
