The guest presenter who’ll launch Nanaimo Astronomy Society’s 2025 lecture series will bring some Hubble history and wonders from the Webb to this month’s meeting.

Chris Gainor, president of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada’s Victoria Centre and editor of Quest: The History of Spaceflight Quarterly, will be the guest presenter at the society’s meeting Thursday, Jan. 23. He’ll talk about how the Hubble Space Telescope has revolutionized humankind’s view of the universe in its 35 years of operation, and will also discuss how recent discoveries by the James Webb Space Telescope have shifted and extended astronomers’ knowledge farther into the depths of space and time. 

“James Webb has been going for three years now and there have been some discoveries with it,” said Gainor, who is also the author of the official NASA History of Hubble Space Telescope Operations. “Webb can look farther back into the history of the universe, closer to the beginning of the so-called big bang.” 

But he said what the Webb telescope is finding is not what what astronomers have expected. 

“You have this event at the beginning and then stars are formed and galaxies are formed and things like that, but the formation of galaxies – which are just mind-blowingly big bodies – they’ve found have taken place earlier than they expected in the history of the universe, so they’re trying to figure out why that is,” Gainor said. “The history of the universe … is different from what we thought it was, say, five years ago.”

The James Webb Space Telescope is much larger than the Hubble and instead of orbiting the Earth, operates from a stationary position in space about 1.5 million kilometres from Earth. Webb is also tuned to look at infrared light, whereas Hubble scans wavelengths from ultraviolet to near infrared. 

“That’s important because, as you get farther out from here and you get closer to the beginning of the universe, objects are moving away from us at a faster rate, and their light kind of shifts into the infrared because they’re moving away from us,” Gainor said. “So this is why you need an infrared instrument like Webb. It looks farther away than Hubble does and, therefore, it gets us closer to the beginnings of the universe.” 

Both Webb and Hubble are also heavily involved in the search for exoplanets orbiting stars in our galaxy. 

“In 1990 when Hubble was launched we didn’t know of any exoplanets, we’d not found any,” Gainor said. 

Hubble, he said, wasn’t designed to find exoplanets, but combined with information from Earth-based telescopes, Webb and other space telescopes specially designed for the task – such as the transiting exoplanet survey satellite and and Kepler, which in its years in deep space found there are millions of exoplanets in our galaxy alone – can now look at those exoplanets and gather more information about them. In fact, Canada contributed the Webb’s guidance and orientation system, near infrared imager and slitless spectrograph that measures the chemical composition of exoplanet atmospheres.

“Now, obviously, what people are looking for are planets that are like the one we’re sitting on,” Gainor said. “So far, they’ve not succeeded. They’ve found some with atmospheres … The search has gone on and it turns out that it seems like most stars have some sort of planets going around them and there’s even some planets just, kind of, floating out there in the middle of nowhere … So, when you’re pointing Hubble and Webb at these things it’s a bit of a needle-in-haystack situation.” 

Gainor makes his appearance via Zoom at Nanaimo Astronomy Society’s meeting Thursday, Jan. 23, at 7 p.m. For more information, visit www.nanaimoastronomy.com.