Scientists are excited about the first full-color images of the James Webb Space Telescope, the largest and most powerful infrared space telescope, to be unveiled in July.
“[The images] they will surely offer a long-awaited “wow” for astronomers and the public, ”said Klaus Pontoppidan, an astronomer at the U.S. Space Telescope Science Institute.
It took more than two decades to develop the James Webb Space Telescope, at a cost of about $ 10 billion ($ 9.48 billion), and these first images are expected to serve in some way to justify all the work. , time and money.
A joint project between NASA, the US space agency and European and Canadian space agencies, the James Webb Space Telescope was launched in December 2021.
It uses infrared to allow scientists to see deep into space. They want to see distant galaxies and stars and understand how they formed.
They also hope that the telescope will allow them to learn more about exoplanets, planets that orbit stars than our sun, and look for signs of life.
What is infrared?
As with visible light, which we can see with our eyes, infrared is a form of electromagnetic radiation.
Electromagnetic radiation occurs in different wavelengths found in a spectrum, which begins with the radio at one end and includes microwaves, infrared, visible light, ultraviolet, X-rays and gamma rays.
Infrared is in itself a large part of the electromagnetic spectrum and is divided into near infrared, medium infrared and far infrared.
If you’ve seen movies like “Predator,” the documentary series “Planet Earth,” or the performance of Thirty Seconds to Mars at the 2017 MTV Video Music Awards, you’ll know about infrared light and some of its uses.
All of the above examples used thermal cameras, which capture infrared light.
Thermal cameras are also used at airports to measure people’s body temperature, which rises when you have a fever, for example from a SARS-CoV-2 infection.
Some snakes such as vipers, pythons and boas have special “smelting” organs that can also detect infrared radiation, or body heat, from their prey.
How do infrared thermal cameras work?
Anything above absolute zero (-273.15 degrees Celsius / -459.67 degrees Fahrenheit), whether alive or inanimate, emits infrared radiation, which includes you and the chair where you are sitting.
Even if we cannot see the object with our eyes, it will emit heat radiation. We can detect this infrared radiation and then convert this data into an image, using different colors to illustrate the intensity of the infrared radiation. And this creates an outline with detailed outlines of the object.
The James Webb Space Telescope will offer the sharpest images of deep space to date
This is similar to how infrared telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope create images from space.
Why use infrared on the James Webb Space Telescope?
Astronomers need infrared to be able to see the first stars and galaxies.
Infrared allows us to see through dust clouds that would otherwise block our view.
Dust clouds are where stars and planets are born, and being able to see them through them will help us better understand how these stars and planets form.
The James Webb Space Telescope has a massive mirror to capture the light of distant stars and planets.
The mirror is six times larger than the one used in its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope. The James Webb Space Telescope should be able to see objects that are 10 to 100 times weaker than Hubble could see, and take much sharper, more detailed infrared images than any previous telescope of this type.
A new infrared era
The infrared was discovered in 1800 by German-born British astronomer William Herschel, one of the leading astronomers behind the discovery of Uranus.
Herschel used a prism and a thermometer to measure how different colors of light influenced temperature and noted that the largest increase in temperature occurred in a region known as infrared.
The James Webb Space Telescope was launched in December from the European Space Port in French Guiana
There have been many more discoveries and technological improvements since then, including the first detection of infrared radiation from the Moon in 1856.
In 1878 came the invention of the bolometer, an infrared measuring device, which was used up to date at the Herschel Space Observatory until 2013.
Infrared detectors continue to improve in sensitivity and accuracy, allowing scientists to detect infrared light from planets such as Jupiter and Saturn.
The James Webb Space Telescope will now be added to this rich story looking back in time than ever before and with unprecedented detail.
If we’re lucky, it will reveal what the universe was like just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.
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A look back at the best Hubble images
Computer error resolved
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope was unable to send images between June 13 and July 15, 2021. A faulty computer memory system stopped the telescope’s operations. Only retired NASA experts got it working again. For more than three decades, Hubble has provided fascinating images of distant stars and galaxies.
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A look back at the best Hubble images
The stars are born
This is one of the most photogenic examples of the many turbulent stellar nurseries that the Hubble Space Telescope has observed during its lifetime. The portrait shows the 2014 NGC giant nebula and its neighbor, NGC 2020, which together are part of a vast region of star formation in the Large Magellanic Cloud. This satellite galaxy in the Milky Way is about 163,000 light-years away.
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A look back at the best Hubble images
Better than ‘Star Wars’
Just as a new episode of “Star Wars” hit theaters in 2015, Hubble took this photo of a cosmic lightsaber. The celestial structure is about 1,300 light-years away. It is the birth of a stellar system: two cosmic jets emitting outward from a newborn star and some interstellar dust. The space telescope takes stunning photographs. Here are some more…
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A look back at the best Hubble images
Eyes in space
Since 1990, the king of all space telescopes has been orbiting the Earth at a speed of more than 17,000 miles per hour (27,000 kilometers per hour) and an altitude of 340 miles (550 kilometers). The Hubble is 11 meters (36 feet) long and weighs 11 metric tons (12.2 U.S. tons), making it comparable in weight and size to a school bus.
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A look back at the best Hubble images
Exploring cosmic bubbles
Hubble has helped us understand the birth of stars and planets, approximate the age of the universe, and examine the nature of dark matter. Here we see a giant ball of gas created by the explosion of a supernova.
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A look back at the best Hubble images
Fleeting colors
Different gases emit all sorts of different colors. Red, for example, is a sign of sulfur. Green is hydrogen. And blue is oxygen.
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A look back at the best Hubble images
Hubble needs glasses
The first images Hubble sent back were a catastrophe, however, because its main mirror had been cut in the wrong shape. In 1993, the space shuttle Endeavor brought experts to Hubble to fix the problem, giving him some glasses. This was just one of five updates the telescope has received over the years, the last in 2009.
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A look back at the best Hubble images
Space nursery
Hubble took this amazing photo in December 2009. Blue dots are very young stars, only a few million years old. This star nursery is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a nearby galaxy and a satellite of our Milky Way.
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A look back at the best Hubble images
Butterfly?
How about this snapshot from space? No one really knows what Hubble had in its lens here, but that doesn’t mean the photography is any less impressive. This image is just one of more than 30,000 that Hubble has captured over the centuries.
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A look back at the best Hubble images
Divine hat
This virtually transcendent photograph is, like most Hubble images, a composition of many individual photographs. The Sombrero galaxy is a barrier-free spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo and is only 28 million light-years from Earth.
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A look back at the best Hubble images
Hubble in the flesh
The telescope was named after the American astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble (1889-1953). He was the first person to observe that the universe is expanding. With this finding, he paved the way for our current cosmological understanding of the Big Bang as the initiator of the universe.
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A look back at the best Hubble images
Pillars of Creation
These columnar structures are found in the Eagle Nebula, about 7,000 light-years from Earth. They were documented by Hubble and have received worldwide recognition under the name “Pillars of Creation.”
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A look back at the best Hubble images
In the output blocks
Hubble is strong again. However, due to its constantly sinking orbit, the telescope may re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere in 2024 and burn. But its successor is ready: James Webb, which is being tested inside a thermal vacuum chamber here, is scheduled to launch this year. Its workplace will be about 1.5 million kilometers (932,000 miles) from Earth.
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A look back at the best Hubble images
Space emoticon
This, by the way, is another of Hubble’s creations: a space smile! The easy explanation? It was done by bending the light.
Author: Judith Hartl (glb)
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany