South Dakota Research Facility Helping NASA Space Discoveries
You may be familiar with NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the extraordinary photos that it returned to Earth.
Well, one South Dakota physicist, Mark Hanhardt, compares those photos to taking selfies with a cell phone. These images show galaxies and stars as they were 13 billion years ago. It's "a bit like turning a cell phone camera on ourselves. Those images are us, in a very primordial form."
The JWST aims to help us understand the universe's evolution, discovering early stars and galaxies formed less than 400 million years after the Big Bang. But the JWST cannot see inside stars.
However, the Compact Accelerator System for Performing Astrophysical Research (CASPAR) at Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) can. CASPAR is decoding the complex reactions in stars, allowing physicists to predict how stars evolve.
So it is incredible to think a South Dakota institution, like the Sanford Underground Research Facility, has a part in the scientific search for answers to understanding our universe and ourselves.
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