NASA has its James Webb telescope — and Miami is lucky enough to have one, too | Editorial

You know Vincent Van Gogh’s “Starry Night?” Think how the 19th century Dutch painter might have portrayed on canvas — in his signature radiant swooshes and swirls and pinpoints of light — the stars and nebula that NASA’s James Webb Telescope is now revealing from 100 million miles away.

NASA’s Jane Rigby, the telescope’s operations project scientist, declared the images released “really gorgeous.” An understatement if there ever was one. The images are stunning in their crystalline clarity, saturated in color and flat-out bedazzling.

James Webb, by the way, became NASA’s administrator in 1961, a respected longtime public servant appointed by President John F. Kennedy. According to the website Hack the Moon — Don’t you love that name? — “Webb oversaw most of the Mercury and Gemini launches during the program and was responsible for heading the investigation into the tragic Apollo 1 spacecraft fire in 1967.“ His dedication to the space program and his skillful damage control “kept NASA from being completely smeared in the wake of the accident.“ Though he retired in 1968, his hard work got us to the moon the next year, when Neil Armstrong exited the spacecraft and moonwalked — years before Michael Jackson did.

And go figure! Miami has its own James Webb with his own telescope named after him. Our James Webb is a professor of physics at Florida International University. “We built a 24-inch telescope at FIU. Students call it “the James Webb Ground-Based Telescope,” he told me. “That’s the unofficial name. I like it.”

Webb studies quasars, super massive black holes. “They’re very exotic in the universe,” he said.

FIU’s James Webb never met NASA’s late James Webb, but he, too, is blown away by what there is for us earthbound beings to learn: “This is a huge accomplishment for science and technology. It will open the door to a new part of the universe,” he told the Editorial Board. “We’ll learn things about the universe we didn’t know before.”

And the images could help us better understand global warming, Webb said, as scientists use these latest images to look at the atmosphere around other planets and at molecules of life.

“We are going to be able to look further and deeper into the universe and further back into time than ever before and learn about how galaxies first formed,” he said.

“Why are we here? How did we get here? We are looking back to the Big Bang,” he said. “We are now closer to it than ever before.”

Clearly, it’s a star-spangled triumph for science, which has been beaten and battered these past few years. “Science works; we have to take advantage of that and not deny it,” Webb said.

Amen — and thank your lucky stars.

A shorter version of this editorial originally appeared in the Editorial Board’s free weekly newsletter The Miami Debate. To subscribe, go to miamiherald.com/TheMiamiDebate.

This story was originally published July 19, 2022 at 6:00 AM.