Wichita physicists reflect on new, revolutionary deep space images from NASA

This week, NASA released the first images from its James Webb Space Telescope, which captured light that was 13 billion years old and had traveled trillions of miles. The debut image captures a snippet of deep space, with thousands of brightly colored dots surrounding one central galaxy cluster light years away.

Much closer to home, Dr. Nickolas Solomey, a physics professor and NASA Innovative Advanced Concept Fellow at Wichita State gathered with five of his lab’s graduate students to watch the image release announcement. He said they were in awe of the stunning progress and the promise of this new work.

Solomey said that in the longer term, the telescope potentially could provide one of two equally revolutionary outcomes. It could first see much farther than the 13 billion years shown in the first image release or it could reveal nothing in an image exploring farther away galaxies and nebulas, meaning “the first stars and galaxy created by the Big Bang will finally be seen.”

Each of Solomey’s students found different parts of the announcements impressive and inspiring.

Jonathan Folkerts said he was thrilled when he saw the full resolution images on his phone during NASA’s briefing Tuesday morning: “the screen in the conference room couldn’t do justice to these images… [they’re] just enormous and beautiful.” To Folkerts and fellow student Brian Doty, the telescope will revolutionize astronomical science beyond the five pictures shared Tuesday.

Trent English, who first toured the Kennedy Space Center as a middle schooler, was fascinated by the detail of the galaxy cluster at the center of the first image, which improved on images from NASA’s previous Hubble space telescope.

Ayshea Banks, the lab’s youngest member, expressed her own amazement at seeing the images this morning: “once I actually saw it, I realized that I didn’t know we could see how big the Big Bang actually was and how far it actually reached.” Thinking about her future plans, she expressed renewed excitement as a result of these discoveries.

Jarred Novak said his interest was in the engineering processes that allowed this technical feat to occur, and how JWST’s advances are helping us better understand our universe and its intricacies.

These technical processes also inform the Solomey lab’s partnership with NASA on a project aimed at sending a spacecraft close to the sun to study the structure of its core. “In a lot of ways, what we’re doing is very different, but in a lot of ways, it’s also the same,” Solomey said about the project’s potential.

“If we can look at the center of the sun, we can see the largest fusion reactor we have access to,” Folkerts said. That could inform whether and how developing that technology on Earth is possible at larger scales than current preliminary research.

Solomey said the new physics and complex engineering of the project — conducted in partnership with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and other universities, including South Dakota State University and the University of Minnesota — makes it a strong candidate for furthering basic science and eventually leading to new technologies.

“Hopefully we’ll be able to do some things for the very first time.”