“We want to understand from start to finish what’s going on at the center of these supermassive black holes,” said Packham, wearing a Webb telescope pin. “Why are they so bright? What is the process of falling material into the black hole? The effect of the black hole on the host galaxy?

The $ 10 billion space telescope is slated for launch on Saturday.

The telescope would have to look 26,000 light years from Earth to observe the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole named Sagittarius A * (the asterisk is an astronomical short for stars), which has the mass of 400 million suns.

Packham, 50, said the smallest known black hole is eight miles wide and could fit in Loop 410.

He and a team of UTSA graduate students will eventually study data from the telescope on another black hole, about 1 million kilometers from Earth.

“We have never been able to study black holes with the quality of observation that the James Webb would allow,” Packham said. “His sensitivity is at least a thousand times better than ever before. “

Bringing black holes to UTSA

After a series of delays, NASA and European and Canadian space agencies say they are ready for take-off. The telescope is to be launched on Christmas morning on an Ariane 5 rocket from a spaceport in French Guiana, a territory on the northeast coast of South America.

The telescope is the most powerful to date. Its main mirror has 18 foldable parts and spans 21.6 feet from end to end. Its reflective surface is made of beryllium, a light, silvery-white metal that is used to make cogs and gears for airplanes.

The Webb also has a shield the size of a tennis court as the sun always gives off heat in deep space.

The telescope is expected to “study every phase in the history of our universe, from bright gleams after the Big Bang, to the formation of solar systems capable of supporting life on planets like Earth, to the evolution of our own system. solar, ”NASA officials said on the agency’s website.

Packham, who was born in Billericay, England, near London, and studied black holes while working on his doctorate in astrophysics at the University of Hertfordshire, said he would toast the launch with a team of astronomers of galactic activity, Torus and Outflow. Survey (GATOS), a collaborative research. He hosts a Zoom Eve party and invites team members to wear their favorite space gear or Christmas sweaters.

“We’ve been waiting for this moment for over 20 years – so of course people are anxious,” he said. “But NASA is incredibly cautious. Santa Claus checks his list twice. NASA checks its list probably 10 times.

GATOS is one of the organizations selected to access the data that Webb is expected to start collecting and reporting next year. The Webb is considered “a general observatory,” so its space agency partners have chosen proposals from around the world to use its technology for their research.

The Webb will use a high-frequency radio transmitter to deliver scientific and technical data to NASA’s Deep Space Network. NASA will forward the data to the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which will send a wealth of information to Packham.

Packham expects to receive the data between the summers of 2022 and 2023. A handful of UTSA graduate students will help it operate the Arc, the school’s high-performance computer system, to analyze the data. Then they will share the information with the GATOS group and work on writing research papers for publication.

“It’s amazing to me that we can have data a million miles away and bring it to San Antonio,” he said.

Time Machine

After digesting more than three decades of data from the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers are eager to examine the universe through Webb’s use of infrared light.

Infrared light is part of the electromagnetic spectrum. The human eye cannot see its long wavelengths, although we do encounter them when using a toaster or a remote control for a TV.

The Webb was designed “to detect things that are 10 billion times fainter than the faintest stars visible without a telescope,” NASA said. “It’s 10 to 100 times weaker than what Hubble can see.”

Packham compared the ability of the Hubble Telescope to that of firefighters using their eyes to navigate a room filled with smoke. A firefighter with Webb’s capabilities can use an infrared camera to see the location of heat points.

He said Webb’s use of infrared light should allow astronomers to see past blankets of space dust to find stars, planets and black holes.

“Astronomy is an unusual science because we can’t look from behind the object and we can’t touch the object generally because they are so far away,” he said. “So astronomers have to get so many observations at different wavelengths to study the object.”

“James Webb is opening a whole new window because of his tremendous sensitivity and these infrared wavelengths,” he said.

While Hubble gave astronomers views of the universe in the 500 million years after the Big Bang, estimated to be 13.8 billion years old, scientists believe Webb can see as many as 100 million to 250 million years after the creation of the universe.

“James Webb is like a time machine,” Packham said.

Studying black holes

In 2016, Packham received a grant of $ 387,214 from the National Science Foundation to study how the centers of galaxies produce massive amounts of energy.

Scientists agree that orbiting stars and planets are torn apart when they fall into black holes, a process that produces gas and dust which, in turn, creates energy visible to billion light years. Packham has sought to understand why and how this happens and how it affects a galaxy hosting a black hole.

He observed galaxies using telescopes in Hawaii, Spain and Chile while preparing to use the Webb, which was due to be launched in 2018. In the meantime, he worked with the TMT International Observatory, a international non-profit partnership building its own massive telescope. .

Two years later, he collaborated with the University of Florida on a study of the magnetic field of a black hole known as the V404 Cygni, which has a mass about 10 times that of the sun. They found that matter had decomposed around the black hole as its magnetic field – similar to Earth’s magnetic fields at the North and South Poles – launched jets of electrons at a speed close to the speed of light.

Packham said he wanted to use the Webb to learn more about the nature of these jets. However, he is mainly interested in the interactions between host galaxies and supermassive black holes.

“We always think of a black hole that only sucks something in, but the energy released by the disk around the black hole actually creates pressure to send some of the matter back into the host galaxy,” he said. he declares. “It’s not controversial, but we want to understand how it affects host galaxies.”

The results could provide important information on the evolution of galaxies.

“It allows us to understand how galaxies form and how they evolved,” he said. “If we are to understand Earth, we have to go back to these supermassive black holes. It’s all part of our origin story.

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