New telescope data will help B.C. scientists search for extraterrestrial life

The first images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope delighted the scientific community -- and perhaps nobody in B.C. was as excited as a team of scientists that will soon get to use data from the $10-billion dollar instrument for their own research.

Dr. Harvey Richer, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of British Columbia,  told CTV News his team will be looking at an ancient cluster of stars within our own Milky Way galaxy and searching for evidence of life.

“We’re looking for planets, but not planets that are still there now, planets that have been broken up as the star evolved,” he said. “And we’re looking for evidence of dust glowing in the infrared, which is exactly where James Webb is most sensitive.”

NASA released the first five images taken by the JWST this week and they provide an extraordinary glimpse into the universe that humans have never seen before.

One of the pictures is known as a deep field image, and contains thousands of galaxies located billions of light years from Earth.

Each speck of light in the photo represents billions of individual stars as they were nearly 14-billion years ago, shortly after the universe formed.

“We’re able to look further back in time and further into space than we ever have before,” said Michael Unger, program co-ordinator at Vancouver’s H.R. MacMillan Space Centre. “Our universe is 14.5-billion years old and we are now able to stretch out and look at the first galaxies that were ever formed at the beginning of the universe.”

According to NASA, the image is approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length and represents just a tiny fraction of the universe.

Unger says the image demonstrates just how short the timespan of human civilization has been in comparison to the cosmos.

“It took a long time for us to get here and there’s going to be a long time afterward,” he said. “So, I think it gives humans a much grander perspective of their place in the universe.”

Richer’s team at UBC will receive their data from the JWST sometime in August and will then spend a period of weeks or months analyzing it before making their findings public.

“Stay tuned. We’ll talk again in a few months after we get the data,” Richer said, about the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.