A YEAR LATER, THE JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE SHINES

This is the time of year when the days shrink, the earth slumbers, and we welcome the shortest day of the year, winter solstice. With Yule, Hanukkah, Dongzhi, Christmas and other cherished traditions, we feast, give gifts, light candles and string lights, illuminating the darkness and anticipating the promise of new life in the coming new year.

We’d like to add a scientific breakthrough into this mix of holiday celebrations: The James Webb Space Telescope, christened the “First Light Machine” by astronomers, that was launched on Christmas Day last year. Hear us out and you’ll understand.

The religious traditions named above come with a multitude of highly distinctive beliefs, many of which sound strange or counterintuitive to the modern ear. When their adherents affirm their particular myths as true, they find themselves at loggerheads with competing religions.

Scientific breakthroughs are different. Scientists from different cultures are connected by shared understandings of the world. Instead of dividing, scientific discoveries have a unique capacity to unite people from many different backgrounds and religions.

Think of it. The poignance of the Webb’s launch was almost unbearable for those who were paying attention, especially for the thousands of scientists, engineers and technicians from all over the world who had worked together to design, build and launch their creation a year ago. If all went well, the Webb telescope would enable all of us — scientists and laypeople alike — to see back in time almost 13.8 billion years ago, to when the first light of our cosmos was bursting into being, just 200 million years after the Big Bang.

Nobody wanted to think about whether it might crash and burn. The telescope’s creators had planned for every scenario, of course. But still.

Fortunately, their care paid off, spectacularly! The “First Light Machine” arrived at its orbiting destination on Jan. 24, 2022. There, beyond the moon and about 1 million miles from Earth, is a sweet spot where the gravity of the sun and Earth effectively cancel each other out. The telescope circles both at the same time, using Earth to shield itself from the sun, to collect light unimpeded from deep space.

After the one-month outbound journey, and five more months of commissioning and calibrating, the floating observatory’s creators could finally put their machine through its paces.

Its breathtakingly beautiful images of the “Pillars of Creation” deservedly received the most attention. A “star factory” in the Eagle Nebula, some 6,500 light years away, the pillars are, according to NASA, “a region where young stars are forming, or have barely burst from their dusty cocoons as they continue to form.”

But the images generating the most excitement among astrophysicists who study our cosmic origins are the “baby pictures” of our universe. There’s even hope that these images will shed light on the ultimate cosmic mystery: the dark matter and dark energy that make up roughly 27 percent and 68 percent, respectively, of the cosmos.

Besides spectacular beauty and intriguing mysteries, there are two additional cosmic characteristics that the telescope powerfully illuminates.

First is the fact that the vast majority of the universe is extremely inhospitable to life. Our cosmos has been around for some 13.8 billion years, and modern humans emerged only about 120,000 years ago. For that reason, many of us find it a bit of a stretch to infer that an omnipotent God constructed the whole thing for our benefit alone. Natural processes produced Earth’s species, including ourselves. We look more like a brief afterthought or accident in the great scheme of creation.

But there’s something else that the Webb illuminates, exquisitely, something that the devout and secular alike can welcome: interconnectedness. Humans and everything else in our universe are related to one another as discrete forms that its staggering flow of mass and energy have taken. Truly, we are all star stuff. No matter what happens, we are all in this together.

Whether religious or not, we share an unbreakable bond.

We now realize that our cosmos is far more complex and grand than those who formed our ancient religious traditions could have imagined.

While we still experience the same awe and wonder that must have stirred them, we are now working with a much larger and more complete understanding of ourselves, our communities and our universe. This gives us the opportunity to reframe our ethics in less divisive directions and to expand our vision of what is sacred.

Further, it enables us to work together more closely across the boundaries that separate us, in order to address the most pressing problems of our times.

So let’s celebrate the outstanding success of the Webb telescope, the First Light Machine — it’s another reason to be jolly this season!

Pearce