NASA said Friday that the first cosmic images from the James Webb Space Telescope will include unprecedented views of distant galaxies, bright nebulae and a distant giant gas planet.
U.S., European, and Canadian space agencies are preparing for a major revelation on July 12 of the first observations of the $ 10 billion observatory, Hubble’s successor that will reveal new ideas about the origins of the spacecraft. ‘universe.
“I’m really looking forward to not having to keep these secrets anymore, this will be a great relief,” Klaus Pontoppidan, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STSI) overseeing Webb, told AFP.
An international committee decided that the first wave of full-color scientific imaging would include the Carina Nebula, a huge cloud of dust and gas 7,600 light-years away, as well as the southern ring nebula, which orbits a star. dying 2,000 light-years away.
The Carina Nebula is famous for its tall pillars that include “Mystic Mountain,” a three-light-year cosmic pinnacle captured in an iconic image by Hubble.
Webb has also conducted a spectroscopy, a light analysis that reveals detailed information, about a distant gas giant called WASP-96 b, which was discovered in 2014.
About 1,150 light-years from Earth, WASP-96 b has about half the mass of Jupiter and revolves around its star in just 3.4 days.
Then comes the Stephan Quintet, a compact galaxy 290 million light-years away. Four of the quintet’s five galaxies are “embedded in a cosmic dance of repeated close encounters,” NASA said.
Finally, and perhaps most attractive of all, Webb has compiled an image using clusters of galaxies in the foreground called SMACS 0723 as a kind of cosmic magnifying glass for the extremely distant, faint galaxies behind it.
This is known as “gravitational lenses” and uses the mass of galaxies in the foreground to bend the light of objects behind them, like a pair of glasses.
STI astronomer Dan Coe told AFP on Friday that even in its first images, the telescope had broken scientific ground.
“When I first saw the images … of that deep field of this slow-moving cluster of galaxies, I looked at the images and suddenly learned three things about the universe that I didn’t know before,” he said.
“It totally blew me away.”
Webb’s infrared capabilities allow it to look further back in time to the Big Bang, which happened 13.8 billion years ago, than any previous instrument.
As the Universe expands, the light from the first stars changes from the ultraviolet and visible wavelengths at which it was emitted, to longer infrared wavelengths, which Webb is equipped to detect with a unprecedented resolution.