‘Very high hopes’: New secrets of the universe will be on display in Rock Hill
As mankind readies to see new images from the deepest parts of space ever observed, there’s plenty to learn about them without having to leave Rock Hill.
The Museum of York County is an officially designated James Webb Space Telescope Community Event site. The museum will stay open late Tuesday and have special events from hands-on classroom activities to a virtual space expert panel, telescope talks and a meeting of the Carolina Skygazers.
The James Webb Space Telescope left Earth on Christmas Day. It’s a million miles into space now. Instruments had to cool and calibrate, then test, before new images could be captured and sent back. The first new images from the James Webb will be released publicly on Tuesday.
“I have very high hopes for the James Webb Space Telescope,” said Carole Holmberg, museum planetarium manager. “Because of its ability to peer through dust, because it sees infrared light, it has the ability to peer through clouds of dust and can also see objects in the early universe, which were once visible but now are redshifted into the infrared.”
While the Hubble Space Telescope was able to show early galaxies, Holmberg said, the James Webb could potentially show the first to form. The new telescope also could potentially tell the composition of atmospheres on planets outside our solar system.
“Could they have oxygen? Carbon dioxide? Water?” Holmberg said. “I’m very excited about the possibilities.”
There’s a reason for all the questions. What the new images will show, Holmberg said, is a closely guarded secret. A NASA latest news post last month on the scheduling and release of the first image notes a mission focused on the early universe, the evolution of galaxies, life cycles of stars and other worlds. It also notes the telescope is so powerful, it’s hard to say in advance exactly what it might capture.
“Of course, there are things we are expecting and hoping to see,” Space Telescope Science Institute lead science visuals developer Joseph DePasquale said in the post, “but with a new telescope and this new high-resolution infrared data, we just won’t know until we see it.”
In the same post, NASA program scientist Eric Smith stated we are on the precipice of an incredibly exciting period of discovery about our universe.
“The release of Webb’s first full-color images will offer a unique moment for us all to stop and marvel at a view humanity has never seen before,” Smith said.
The museum designation as an event site Tuesday continues a decades-long focus there of looking up. A planetarium has been in place for decades with programming on constellations and features of the night sky. The planetarium was upgraded in 2012 and now can show anything that can be computer generated in the right format, not just stars.
“We have public shows about dinosaurs right now (Dinosaur Discovery and Did an Asteroid Really Kill the Dinosaurs?),” Holmberg said. “To me, that’s an exciting feature, but I really love to show the night sky to people, both from Rock Hill and a moonless, cloudless country sky.”
Holmberg has been with the planetarium eight years. There have been other exciting achievements in space, like the Mars Perseverance rover and the coming Europa Clipper mission to explore a moon of Jupiter. Then there’s the DART mission to test the possibility of redirecting an asteroid.
“I have been waiting for the first (James Webb) images for years, so it definitely ranks up there, but NASA is doing so much,” Holmberg said. “It’s the stuff of science fiction.”
Want to go?
Museum of York County exhibits will remain open until 7 p.m. Tuesday. Admission is $8 for adults, $7 for seniors, $5 for youth and free to members. A First Science event related to the James Webb Space Telescope runs 5-7 p.m.
Guests can learn about the telescope with hands-on activities. Members of the Carolina Skygazers will demonstrate different types of telescopes and answer questions. A virtual expert panel assembled by NASA and the Space Telescope Science Institute will speak at 6 p.m. Holmberg, the Settlemyre Planetarium manager, will talk at the 7:30 p.m. Skygazer meeting about the James Webb and new images released through the day Tuesday. Admission to that meeting is free to members or prospective Skygazer members. Museum exhibits will be closed during that meeting.
For more information, visit chmuseums.org.
