China to join a new era in space research
- The breathtaking images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope have fascinated the world and given a glimpse of the universe just 700 million years after the big bang. China will join this great scientific endeavour next year with the launch of the Chinese Space Station Telescope
Infrared radiation and gravitational lensing are not the kind of scientific phrases that usually attract news headlines, let alone global coverage. But the latest images of deepest space and the early universe taken by the James Webb Space Telescope and unveiled by Nasa have rightly fascinated the world. The breathtaking images represent some of the oldest stars and galaxies ever seen in such high resolution, dating to just 700 million years after the big bang, which itself happened about 13.8 billion years old.
All that was made possible because the US$10 billion Earth-orbiting telescope cleverly exploits those two natural but unseen phenomena to give people a glimpse of our universe as a newborn baby. Infrared radiation is invisible to the naked eye but its spectrum of light is detected by the telescope to peer into the earliest stages of the still evolving universe. And by using Albert Einstein’s general relativity theory which describes how massive objects bend space, scientists are able to use the orbiting telescope to reveal and magnify the most distant objects. The Webb telescope is a joint effort of the American, Canadian and European space agencies.
Next year, China will join this great scientific endeavour by launching the Chinese Space Station Telescope. In effect an optical and ultraviolet space observatory, its resolution is similar to that of the famed Hubble Space Telescope, but its field of view will be 350 times larger, allowing it to observe much greater expanses of deep space equivalent to 40 per cent of the sky in much higher resolution.
Rather than being attached to the Chinese space station whose construction is nearly complete, the telescope will co-orbit with it in slightly different orbital phases, but may dock with the station for maintenance. Closer to observing our own “neighbourhood” in space, the Chinese space agency is scheduled to launch in October the Advanced Space-Based Solar Observatory (ASO-S) to capture never-before-seen images of the sun during its stormy season. The mission aims to study the nature and causes of solar flares and other violent space weather phenomena.
We are at the dawn of a new era in which scientists are moving ever closer to “seeing” the birth of our universe, perhaps creation itself.