A trip through the wonders of technology
My dad is a strange man. Normally, he is not superstitious and never crosses his fingers when he sees a black cat, or salutes to magpies, and tries to open umbrellas indoors! However, when we visited Santa Croce in Florence, at Galileo’s tomb, he suddenly broke character and asked Galileo to bless me with some of his intelligence.
Galileo Galilei was an Italian physicist who is credited with the invention of some of the most remarkable scientific tools in history, pioneering the laws of motion and the concept of inertia which Isaac Newton later built on. He is also known for his laws on falling bodies which states that bodies, no matter their mass when dropped from the same height will fall at the same velocity in a vacuum. A physicist and astronomer, he is credited to have invented the most powerful telescope of his time. Fast forward today, telescopes are massive lenses in open fields and sometimes even in space, which can see objects thousands of light years away, but Galileo’s telescope was the first of its kind. With his small, yet vastly more powerful than earlier telescopes he could see the moon’s craters and the phases of Venus. This supported the heliocentric model of the solar system proposed by Nicholas Copernicus, where the Sun is at the centre of our solar system and planets revolve around it. This idea was not popular with the Pope and most Christians at the time, as the Bible states that the Earth is fixed and lies at the centre of all things. Which is why in 1610, when Galileo made his ideas public, the Pope’s men interviewed him and when Galileo would not back down from his truth, they put him under house arrest for the remaining 9 years of his life. It is only in 1979 when Pope John Paul II officially declared that Galileo was right.
His invention of the modern telescope led to a lonely final decade of his life but was it worth it in the end?
One of the largest ground telescopes is located in the Atacama Desert, Chile and is used for exploring hidden corners of galaxies. It has already captured images of new born stars. This telescope not only helps us detect the life span of neighbouring stars but also at what rate the universe is growing. Due to their large lens size, these telescopes can see objects millions of light years away. For example, the brightest star that we on Earth can see, is called Sirius and is located 8.6 light years away. This means that when we look at Sirius, we are looking at what the star looked like over 8.6 years ago because the light from the star takes time to travel to us.
In January 2022, James-Webb, a space telescope with a 21-foot lens, was released into space. This telescope broke the record for the furthest celestial body detected; a galaxy 13.5 billion light years away. James Webb captured this image while the galaxy was still at a young age and astrophysicists believe that this galaxy was born only 280 million years after the Big Bang. The James Webb did not just take a photo of a galaxy, but it travelled 13.5 billion years back in time; to a time when Earth didn’t exist and hydrogen was still fusing into helium. It was a large step forward for the space industry, as it produces some of the most powerful and detailed images of faraway corners of our universe. Imagine witnessing stars being devoured by supermassive black holes and the collapse of giant stars into dense neutron stars. These findings have shaped our understanding of familiar concepts like gravitational attraction but also new ideas like spaghettification (what happens to an object when it enters a black hole).
However, the most remarkable achievement of this particular telescope is the discovery of potential life. The James Webb telescope analysed the chemical composure of K2-18b, a planet 700 trillion miles away. Then scientists back on Earth inspected to find a large number of molecules in its atmosphere which on Earth can only be produced by living organisms. Due to the large proportion of these molecules, scientists believe that if this planet is home to organisms, it is teeming with life. K2-18b is two and a half times bigger than Earth but otherwise remarkably similar; it is a water world, thought to be covered entirely by oceans. The evidence collected by this one telescope is growing, making it more and more likely that there is life in those depths.
So, we thank you Galileo for sacrificing your freedom. Without it, our knowledge of the entirety of the universe would be limited to still trying to prove the heliocentric model. Young curious minds like mine may never have been drawn to star-gazing. I wish you could see what your small, 51-millimetre telescope has inspired and what information has been found because of it.
Maybe, my dad was right. A man who started the domino effect that led to these new findings deserves to be treated like a God. On behalf of all qualified and aspiring scientists out there, bless us with knowledge, integrity and innovation like yours.
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