December 25, 2021, a rather special Christmas for Pierre Guillard. In his living room in the Paris region, the astrophysicist with his family attends the launch of the James Webb space telescope from the Guiana Space Center in Kourou. He is part of the international team that designed the revolutionary infrared telescope, whose mission is to unravel the mysteries of the universe and the birth of the first galaxies.
The mission of this jewel of technology is to enable us to “many steps forward on the knowledge of our solar system, the chemical composition of the surface of asteroids for example. Asteroids are very small objects. You need an extremely powerful, extremely fine telescope to observe them. And that’s actually quite unique.” explains Pierre Guillard. It is the culmination of more than 30 years of collective work by tens of thousands of researchers, engineers and technicians from all over the world. Pierre Guillard worked specifically on Miri, one of the cameras on board the telescope. In recent months, the scientist has followed each stage of the James Webb’s journey into space, with, at each stage, a dose of stress and emotions.
On the day of the launch, he admits having paid his “little tear. It was a very impressive moment. The kids also realized there was ‘daddy’s rocket’, although I had nothing to do with the launch. It was a moving family moment. And then we followed the journey of the telescope and crossing our fingers that everything unfolds well and everything works well, ” comments Pierre Guillard.
Despite all the precautions of years of work and investment, state-of-the-art equipment, the thousands of researchers including Pierre Guillard experienced long months of anxiety and stress between the launch and the first images. “There are a lot of things that could have gone wrong. There has been an incredible adventure in this project. There have been cyclones, there have been delays, there have been hiccups. It doesn’t was not a linear path at all, so yes, there was a lot of stress. The deployment of the telescope, it was something incredible. There were 300 points that could malfunction. Everyone was shaking. When we got the first clear image of this calibration star, we thought ‘wow, it works this time’,” claims Pierre Guillard.
The other outcome was seeing the first images from the telescope simulcast around the world on July 12, “a moment of intense emotion. There, we measure all the work that has been accomplished for 30 years. It’s not so simple for the general public because it’s a telescope that sees light that our eye can’t see, an infrared light. And all that, you have to explain how it’s different from what we did before this telescope. It’s very evocative in fact to see the invisible and that’s something that I find quite poetic”, said Pierre Guillard.
Several keys to understanding will be revealed with these images. “It’s really a time machine. Even more efficient than Hubble, the previous generation, or Spitzer, the infrared satellite. And so, suddenly, we’re going to try to go back to this first light. So it’s really go back to the origin of the world, our own origins. And that’s what James Webb will really do. After the big bang, there was night, there was darkness, there was there were no stars yet and with this telescope, we will see, we will witness for the first time the ignition of the first stars and the first galaxies”, enthuses Pierre Guillard.
“We are going to see the first glimmers of the universe which then generated the planets, the stars. Life is really about going back to our own origins.”
Pierre Guillardat franceinfo
An exciting phase of observation of all these data now opens with the massive data provided by the telescope: “I’m going to work on it unfortunately while I’m on vacation, because there’s one of the images that was released on July 12 which is the image of Stephan’s quintet. It’s a group of galaxies dancing together actually, which interact together gravitationally. And that happens to be the object I worked on during my thesis,” comments Pierre Guillard.
This project represents an important part of Pierre Guillard’s activities, “it’s both a childhood dream and a project that scientifically takes up a lot of space in my career as a researcher. It’s really the perfect instrument for doing the science I want to do. Having the opportunity to mobilize technically for an instrument, but then using it, is a bit like receiving a great Christmas present. Manipulating a telescope like that, using it, receiving data from the most impressive telescope, from the most pharaonic project that has ever been done. Yes, it’s a childhood dream.”
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