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NASA Releases More Stunning Images from Webb Telescope; Japan Grieves as Funeral Held for Former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Aired 10:30-11a ET

Aired July 12, 2022 - 10:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: A project that could help scientists solve the mysteries of the universe.

[10:30:05]

You will see it all unfold live right here, next.

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JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: Any second now, NASA is going to unveil new images collected from deep space, the clearest in human history, really. This high resolution, full color images, this is the one they sent out yesterday, captured by the powerful James Webb Telescope. The images show -- well, let's look at that one.

[10:35:00]

That is the size of a grain of sand held up to the sky at arm's length, and yet in that one photo, Poppy, and I am amazed, intimidated, bowled over by this, thousands of galaxies. Those aren't stars. Each of those is a galaxy with many millions of stars.

HARLOW: It's so mind-blowing and beautiful and we're all very excited. But no one is as excited as our own Innovation and Space Correspondent Rachel Crane.

You live for this stuff. We're going to get the images maybe as you're speaking, so bring them to us as you get them. What are we waiting for?

RACHEL CRANE, CNN INNOVATION AND SPACE CORRESPONDENT: Poppy, I am honestly shaking here. I am so excited to see these images. And that first image that the White House released, that is the deepest and sharpest infrared image of our early universe we have ever seen. And I just want to remind our viewers, infrared it's invisible to the human eye.

So, this telescope, this time machine is really making the invisible visible to us. And as Jim pointed out in this tiny sliver of our universe, this image right here, you're seeing thousands of galaxies and only just 100 years ago, you guys, we thought the Milky Way was the only galaxy out there. Now we know there's hundreds of billions of them, with hundreds of billions of stars, all those stars have planets. The James Webb Telescope is going to be able to look at some of those exoplanets and give us a sense of what their atmosphere, if they have one, what it's comprised of. Could life potentially be harbored on one of these exoplanets. It's going to look at nebulas. We're going to see some images of those nebulas today. Those are essentially stellar nurseries seen back 13 billion years into the past here.

And in that first image, you see in the foreground that there are galaxies but you see how some of the light is stretched around them. Now, that's as a result of phenomena called gravitational lensing. So, essentially, it warps the light of the galaxies behind it so you are literally able to see behind those galaxies. So, some of those galaxies you see are 4.6 billion light years away, some them are 13 billion light years away.

And I just want to remind our viewers, our universe is 13.6 billion years old. So, we are really seeing back to the cosmic dawn here. And this telescope is going to be operational for 20 years so it's really going to help us get a better understanding of those huge questions that we all ask ourselves. Are we alone out there? Where do we come from? Where do we originate from?

And in the press conference just a moments ago leading up to this historic space moment that we are living through right now, somebody said that this gives new meaning to the phrase as far as the eye can see. And that really struck me. And we're about to see nature revealing its secrets to us.

And it's truly an emotional moment for space enthusiasts and scientists around the world because these aren't just images, as you guys know. Scientists are really going to be able to learn so much from these images. They are able to look at this data through a different lens, through a different eye than the rest of us.

So, while we are sitting here and our minds are blown, the scientists here -- this is three decades in the making for them. So, they are just so eager to get their hands on these images and all of the science that is to come and be surprised by what we can't even imagine James Webb is going to reveal to us.

SCIUTTO: It's almost -- I think the comparison might, and I wasn't alive for this, but the moon landing in 1969, I'm sort of refreshing on my phone to wait for these images to be released what we're witnessing. It's a time machine, right, because we are looking many billions of years back in time, it takes so long for the light from these galaxies to reach us here. And it is also, you, Rachel, you know this better than us, a reflection of the technology here, because an image like this would have taken weeks, I believe, for the Hubble telescope, the previous sort of amazing thing, to compile an image like this. But the Webb Telescope does it much more quickly.

CRANE: Yes. Well, it still does take a considerable amount of time for these images to be made. I mean, it doesn't come down like an image from your iPhone. It's data that they have to put into these images. So, it takes a considerable amount of time as well. But the James Webb Telescope, it's 100 times more powerful than Hubble, so it's really building upon the history of Hubble.

And we know how much we learned from Hubble itself. We learned from Hubble that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. We learned about the age of our universe. I mean, every astronomy book is filled with information that we learned from Hubble over the last three decades and James Webb is going to rewrite all of that for us.

And as you pointed out, one thing that sticks out to me is the Earth rising photo that Apollo 8 took, and you think about the power of a picture.

[10:40:00]

That image where you saw the lunar surface and the Earth just over it, that really gave birth to the modern environmental movement. So, we can't even imagine what's going to come out science-wise from these images but also just the power like on humanity that seem just how small we are, what that's going to have from these images and all the images to come.

The power of the picture, never underestimate it. We all know we're about to have our minds blown right now at the risk of sounding punny, it's truly out of this world what we are about to see.

SCIUTTO: By a long shot, for sure.

HARLOW: For sure. The overview effect multiplied many times in what we're about to see.

Rachel, stand by. We're just going to wait, take a quick break while we wait for these images to come any second from NASA. You'll see them right here as soon as we get them.

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[10:45:00]

HARLOW: Turning back to NASA and the first images from the James Webb Telescope, photos that will give us an unprecedented look at our universe and answer many of the mysterious questions.

Joining us now, Janet Ivey, the president of Explore Mars Inc. and the creator and CEO of the children science show, Janet's Planet, and also Ray Jayawardhana, an astrophysicist and dean of the college arts and sciences at Cornell. He has spent the last 18 years as a team member working on one of the telescope's key instruments.

This is very exciting. We're starting to get these images in, the first one from last night. We're waiting on pins and needles for the next one.

Janet, let me just begin with you, because this telescope is going to show us the deepest and sharpest images of space we've ever seen. Why does it matter to us and those kids sitting behind you maybe future astrophysicists? JANET IVEY, PRESIDENT, EXPLORE MARS INC.: It's like I am joyfully aware and simply marvel at the fact that we today are witnessing our cosmic inheritance, that, truly, we are the elemental descendents of these ancient stars, that we are atomically related to our universe. And I am hoping that is inspiring to every earthling looking up and a reminder to all of humanity how interconnected we are, when partner agencies and partner nations work together and thousands upon thousands of scientists and astronomers and engineers put their minds to it, great things can come.

So, I'm hoping this is just a watershed moment for everybody, because I know my students in the back here, I'm hoping there are a few astronomers and astrophysicists birth today.

SCIUTTO: Janet, thank you. Ray, great work on the telescope. You did a good job here from early results --

HARLOW: Good job building it.

SCIUTTO: I was trying to place this in the context, right? I mean, first of all, to Janet's point, I mean, the calcium in our bones carry star dust. We are in the world's (INAUDIBLE), we are star dust, part of us is. The moon is 240 miles away. We're looking trillions of miles away here billions of years back in time. In historical context, in terms of our exploration of the universe, have we ever been to a point like this?

RAY JAYAWARDHANA, ASTROPHYISICIST AND ASTRONOMER PROFESSOR, CORNELL UNIVERSITY: Well, we really are living through an extraordinary age of discovery here and what James Webb is revealing for the first time is the latest and the greatest in the era of discovery.

In my own little bit of astronomy, when I work on planets around other stars, we've had a true revolution. 30 years ago, we knew only one solar system with gas giant planets on the inside, terrestrial planets, like the Earth on the inside and gas giant planets out, and then there was Pluto that we struggled to classify. And in that period, after millennia of speculation, decades of failed attempts, we now have discovered thousands of worlds around nearby stars. So, instead the one solar system we knew about, we now know of thousands of others and the diversity of worlds and planetary systems out there is mind blowing. I think the word that you used, Poppy, is the right one.

And it's not only that we're finding these planets but we can actually take measure of them, we can take their temperature, we can begin to figure out what their atmospheres are made of. It's like remote- sensing across hundreds of even thousands of light years. We're looking at worlds that are so far away, we couldn't otherwise directly see them, and yet we can start to tell you what they're made of, what temperatures they have, whether they even have gigantic storms, big weather phenomena in the atmosphere.

We've come a long way in a short times and I can't wait to see what the Webb Telescope has in store for us.

HARLOW: All right. So, shall we see one new, I think, Rachel Crane, image. Do we have it?

[10:50:00]

CRANE: Yes, So, this is what is called an indirect image. So, it certainly looks different that the image that you just saw, but this is of exoplanet Wasp 96-B. And what it reveals here is the atmosphere of this exoplanet.

Now, this is a gas giant. It's smaller than Jupiter, about a third, but it's really close to its star. And what this shows, if there's actually water. And it's not water as we know it and, of course, it's far too hot because it orbits its star every three and a half days, so that water is steam.

But this is truly incredible. I mean, what you are seeing right now is this telescope being able to peer into the atmosphere of an exoplanet that's more than 1,000 light years away. I mean, this is truly the stuff of science fiction and this is just the start. We're going to be able to look at exoplanets that might be in the goldilocks zone of their host star. Now, goldilocks zone, meaning that life could potentially be there, that people on that exoplanet might be looking back at us.

So, again, today is really about demonstrating James Webb's capabilities and showing off essentially to the world this $10 billion investment that this incredible observatory that we have in the sky. So, this is really just a taste of the incredible science that it's going to do in the next 20 years.

SCIUTTO: Okay. Ray, so let's look at what the Webb, NASA is saying about what they found of this exoplanet, unambiguous signature of water, indications of haze, evidence of clouds once thought not to exist there. Those are all, if I have right from basic high school biology, some of the essential elements of life. How significant is it to see a planet like this?

JAYAWARDHANA: Well, this is what I've been waiting for. This particular graphic may not look as dazzling to you as the image released last evening, those thousands of galaxies in the far reach of the universe, but this graphic is spreading out the light of the star going through that planet's atmosphere and reaching the Webb Telescope.

And the various fingerprints of different elements and molecules in the atmosphere of that planet, it's telling us what that planet is made of, what its conditions are. Water is really exciting. However, this particular planet is ultra hot. It's about 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. And it's a giant ball of gas more like Jupiter. So, it's not the kind of planet where we expect to detect evidence of live. But as was described before, this is really just a teaser of what's to come and I'm part of team that built one of Webb's core instrument called Nillis (ph), and we are dedicating 200 hours of Webb observing time to target 14 planets ranging from ultra hot, scorching planets like this one to planets that are not bigger than the earth and temperatures much comparable to what we have in our own atmosphere. And that's where the true excitement, the true frontier of discovery is ahead of us. I am so excited 3 of the 14 targets have been observed by Webb, two of them today. I can't wait to get my hands on the data along with my team members spread around multiple countries. And, by the way, this really is the work of thousands of scientists and engineers coming together and this is generating data that a whole new generation of astronomers around the world will be getting their hands on and really teasing out what it's telling us, telling us about the farthest reaches of the universe, the dawn of the cosmos but also much closer to form in our own cosmic neighborhood, what other worlds there are and if some of them might have the conditions that would lend themselves to life.

HARLOW: And, Janet, speaking to those future generations that Ray just brought up, what do you think? I mean, what is this going to allow our children to learn and study and discover that they couldn't before?

IVEY: Well, we owe a huge debt of gratitude to Hubble. I don't know when an astronomer or astrophysicist or space lover who wasn't gob smacked when that first Hubble deep space field image first arrived. So, I believe today's images are just going to propagate an entirely new generation of folks who are going to be astronomers and astrophysicists or planetary geologists or space explorers. And, again, it is one of these moments where we finally have this technology.

[10:55:02]

And it's like I saw a great meme last night for Hubble was taking its bow and sort of handing the torch over to Webb. And, again, I think it's just that we're going to be able to directly observe how this universe went from hydrogen and helium to stars and planets and then we're going to be able to peer into, wow, what does it really take to have those conditions for life. And I think you're going to see some major advancements in astronomy.

SCIUTTO: To say the least, it's exciting to watch, I'll tell you.

IVEY: It's exciting.

SCIUTTO: Good. I mean, to say the least, really. I mean, it's hard to find the words for it. Janet Ivey, Ray, I want to get your name right, Jayawardhana, and also Rachel Crane, of course, thanks so much to all of you for helping us digest this.

HARLOW: Thanks, guys. I hope you get to have a big party afterwards and celebrate all of this.

Thanks so much and thanks to all of you for joining us. And also coming up CNN's special coverage of the January 6 committee hearings, those are happening in just three hours from now. The committee is focusing on right-wing extremists and their role in the insurrection at the Capitol, more next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) SCIUTTO: This morning, a nation still in shock, the people of Tokyo paid their final respects to former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe as he was laid to rest in a private funeral.

HARLOW: Abe was the country's longest serving prime minister. His assassination has left millions reeling as Japan has one of the lowest gun violence rates typically in the world.

Our International Correspondent Blake Essig is live in Tokyo. Blake, what's the latest?

BLAKE ESSIG, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, Poppy, Jim, it is a sad day here in Japan where even the weather, gray skies and at times a lot of rain seems to be reflecting the mood here as Japan said goodbye and laid to rest its longest serving prime minister. This afternoon, a funeral service for Shinzo Abe limited to only family and friends was held at a temple here in Tokyo.

Abe's body then traveled in procession to the prime minister's office, parliament and the LDP headquarters before heading to the funeral hall to be cremated, his body visited those specific locations, because in Japanese culture, sometimes the body will be driven to places the deceased was heavily associated as a sign show respect.

Now, we saw his hearse pass by Japan's parliament, hundreds lined the street, including children, people who looked like they had left work, Diet members and Diet police, all were there to say farewell to Abe's body, some of them in tears.

[11:00:04]

Poppy, Jim?

HARLOW: Of course. Well, Blake, thanks very much for being on the ground for your reporting.