Today, NASA has released a list of celestial targets that will be revealed next week when the agency releases the first full-color images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST. Targets include galaxies, nebulae, and a giant planet outside our Solar System.
JWST is NASA’s new deep space observatory, launched on Christmas Day 2021. With a large gold-plated mirror more than 21 feet in diameter, the observatory is poised to transform the field of astrophysics collecting light from the first stars and galaxies that formed just after the Big Bang. It is also designed to study objects from all over our Universe in unprecedented detail, giving us a glimpse of our distant Solar System, planets outside our cosmic neighborhood, asteroids, exotic stars in the deepest confines of space, and more. .
To obtain its first images, JWST observed these target objects and regions of space for 120 hours, collecting data for five days. So far, we didn’t know much about what the first JWST images would be, although we did get some clues from NASA’s leadership. Thomas Zurbuchen, associate science administrator at NASA, revealed that we will see the light from the atmosphere of a planet outside our Solar System, known as the exoplanet. And NASA administrator Bill Nelson said an image is the “deepest image in our universe ever taken.”
Study these deep space destinations before seeing them in vivid detail
We can now study these destinations in deep space before seeing them in detail next week. (In the case of the exoplanet, we hope to get a glimpse of its spectrum, a break in the light in its atmosphere.) The list of targets for this innovative moment was selected by an international team of people from NASA , the European Space Agency, the Canadian Space Agency and the Space Telescope Science Institute, which oversees the operations and science of JWST.
Some of the lenses we’ve seen before, thanks to images captured by JWST’s predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope. But JWST’s mirror is almost three times wider than Hubble’s; in addition, JWST is located approximately one million miles from Earth, while Hubble is in low Earth orbit. Compared to Hubble images, JWST images should be even more detailed.
See the list of objectives below, as well as brief descriptions provided by NASA:
Carina Nebula. The Carina Nebula is one of the largest and brightest nebulae in the sky, located about 7,600 light-years away in the southern constellation of Carina. Nebulae are stellar nurseries where stars form. The Carina Nebula is home to many massive stars, several times larger than the Sun.
WASP-96 b (spectrum). WASP-96 b is a giant planet outside our solar system, composed mainly of gas. The planet, located almost 1,150 light-years from Earth, orbits its star every 3.4 days. It has about half the mass of Jupiter and its discovery was announced in 2014.
Southern Ring Nebula. The Southern Ring, or “Eight Bursts” Nebula, is a planetary nebula: an expanding cloud of gas that surrounds a dying star. It is almost half a light-year in diameter and is about 2,000 light-years away from Earth.
Stephan’s Quintet: About 290 million light-years away, Stephan’s Quintet is in the constellation of Pegasus. It stands out for being the first group of compact galaxies ever discovered in 1787. Four of the five galaxies in the quintet are enclosed in a cosmic dance of repeated close encounters.
SMACS 0723: Clusters of massive galaxies in the foreground increase and distort the light of objects behind them, allowing deep field vision in both extremely distant and intrinsically weak galaxy populations.
NASA will unveil the images on July 12 at 10:30 ET. And they sure will be awesome. “What I’ve seen only excites me,” said Pam Melroy, a former astronaut and current NASA deputy administrator, during a press conference, “as a scientist, as an engineer, and as a human being.”