Behold the cosmos-wide Webb

Opinion editor's note: Editorials represent the opinions of the Star Tribune Editorial Board, which operates independently from the newsroom.

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In the 1997 film "Contact," Jodie Foster plays a scientist who gets an opportunity to travel across the cosmos. Her conveyance is a capsule that makes multiple stops on its way to a distant star. At one such stop, a gobsmacked Foster gazes at the beauty of a celestial object and murmurs, "They should have sent a poet."

Her point, we understand, is that a background in unsentimental science has left her with an impaired ability to express awe and wonder. There is some irony in the realization, 25 years after "Contact," that an instrument of pure science — the James Webb Space Telescope — can deliver all the awe and wonder we sentimental humans can handle.

The first few images from the Webb telescope invite viewers to contemplate many big and incomprehensible things all at once: time. Gravity. Relativity. Light. We look at an image of galaxies as they appeared 4.6 billion years ago — because that is how long it took their light to reach us — and discover how their gravity distorts the image of other galaxies even farther away.

And there are other distortions at work, ones that improve our perception even as they trick our senses.

When we see one of Webb's images — for example, the picture christened Webb's First Deep Field, showing an area seemingly packed with multicolored galaxies — we are tempted to imagine that we are seeing it as would have appeared to Jodie Foster's character, or to us if we were lucky enough to travel out into space with her.

In other words, Webb's First Deep Field is not a view we could travel somewhere to see. The best scenic overlook in the known universe is right here, courtesy of this remarkable new telescope.

The images also render objects in color that we wouldn't see without Webb and its human handlers.

If we were looking at a nebula directly, with our own eyes, we might be disappointed at the lack of Technicolor brilliance that the images from Webb and its older cousin, Hubble, have conditioned us to expect. We would probably see a hazy, fairly monochromatic cloud.

Webb, though, allows us to see wavelengths of radiation that would be invisible to human eyes. What people see as visible light is a relatively narrow slice of the electromagnetic spectrum. What the telescope can see is different.

Before Webb's images are released to the public, scientists assign color values to different parts of the otherwise invisible spectrum. It is that process, part science and part art, that reveals such astonishing detail — the rivers and eddies and towering peaks of starry stuff that become vivid only when certain wavelengths of radiation are given colors.

We don't think so. These are not passed off as pictures of jackalopes or Bigfoot. The colors assigned to the images are there for a scientific purpose: To discover the varieties of elements that are present, and to make visible phenomena that are already there. That the colors may prompt us to dream of boldly going where no one has gone before? That's just a bonus.