Greenbelt, Maryland – Following a presidential revelation Monday, NASA on Tuesday unveiled more spectacular images of the James Webb space telescope’s “first light,” showing interacting galaxies, the agony of a doomed star and a living star · Where only massive young people are born. , burning with storm-force solar winds sculpting large clouds of gas and dust.
Even for an untrained eye, the images take the observer far beyond the realm of the iconic Hubble Space Telescope, which has produced a steady stream of spectacular discoveries and images over the past three decades. For astronomers, the views from Webb are breathtaking.
“From the data I’ve seen so far, from the work we’ve seen in the start-up and after this first week of science, yes, this is going to be revolutionary,” said Jane Rigby, project director at Webb operations at Goddard. Space flight center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “These are amazing abilities we’ve never had before.”
Part of the Carina Nebula seen by the James Webb Space Telescope. NASA
Program scientist Eric Smith described the early release images as the result of “practices” with Webb’s four instruments. Still, “we’re making discoveries and we haven’t really started testing it yet. The promise of this telescope is amazing.”
Heated by cheerleaders with pompoms singing “JWST, JWST,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson, senior agency executives and a crowd of Webb enthusiastic engineers and scientists gathered in a Goddard auditorium to share Collectively the moment the images were revealed, one by one. time.
“In the words of the famous Carl Sagan,” somewhere, something amazing is waiting to be known, “Nelson said.” I think those words are becoming a reality. “
The first was the spectrum of stellar light passing through the atmosphere of an exoplanet 1,150 light-years from Earth, a world half the size of Jupiter orbiting its star closer than Mercury. it orbits the Earth’s Sun. The spectrum shows the chemical footprint of water vapor in the infernal atmosphere of the planet.
Clouds in another world. @NASAWebb captured the water signature on the giant gas planet WASP 96-b, which orbits a star 1,150 light-years away. For the first time, we have detected evidence of clouds in the atmosphere of this exoplanet: #UnfoldTheUniverse pic.twitter.com/f3HOX0HKis
– NASA (@NASA) July 12, 2022
Taking spectra from exoplanet atmospheres is not new, but Webb’s sharper infrared vision dramatically advances the state of the art, allowing more data to be collected in less time. Astronomers may one day be able to detect the effects of biological activity on planets in distant solar systems by studying the compounds in their atmospheres.
No one promises any such achievement by Webb, but the ability to analyze exoplanet atmospheres with the world’s most powerful infrared telescope is an important step in that direction.
Then there was a breathtaking view of the southern ring nebula, a half-light-year cloud of expanding gas and debris emitted by a central star nearing the end of its life when its core it runs out of nuclear fuel and the fusion runs out. a stop. It is a fate that awaits the sun in five billion years or so.
The front view of the Hubble Space Telescope of the Southern Ring Nebula was spectacular in itself, showing a huge cloud of smoke-like ring surrounding a bright inner star. But Webb’s vision goes much further, showing not one but two stars in the heart of the nebula and much more detail in the structure of the expanding gas layers.
The southern ring nebula seen by the James Webb Space Telescope. NASA
Then came a fascinating image of the Stephan Quintet, a well-known collection of five galaxies in the constellation Pegasus 290 million light-years from Earth that was discovered in 1877, the first such close group of galaxies that were detected.
Four of the five galaxies are spirals that interact gravitationally in a kind of slow-motion train wreck in the process of merging to eventually become a single huge elliptical galaxy.
Galaxy mergers are a common occurrence throughout the history of the universe, and studying the details of these collisions is one of Webb’s main goals. The image presented on Tuesday resolves unprecedented stars and clusters in galaxies and even captures light generated by debris running around a supermassive black hole.
Stephan’s Quintet seen by the James Webb Space Telescope. NASA
Finally, Webb’s team unveiled a mind-boggling view showing a segment of the Carina Nebula, a vast region of star formation in the southern constellation of Carina about 7,600 light-years from Earth that it is four times larger than Orion’s most famous nebula.
Visible to the naked eye, the Carina Nebula is home to the brightest known star in the Milky Way, as well as the Eta Carinae binary system, which includes a massive sun that is expected to explode in a supernova explosion in the future. (astronomically) close. .
The part of the nebula shown on Tuesday is full of massive, bright young stars, as well as remnants of supernova explosions that mark the cataclysmic death of much more massive stars than the sun. Powerful solar winds coming from hot young stars sculpt the surrounding gas clouds into complex-textured structures.
View of the James Webb Space Telescope from the Carina Nebula. NASA
The images unveiled on Tuesday followed an initial post Monday at the White House when President Biden revealed a sharp “deep field” look at a cluster of remote galaxies with numerous arcs of light, distorted views of the background galaxies augmented by the combined gravity of the cluster. .
Looking further back into space and time than ever before, a few hundred million years from the time the universe exploded 13.8 billion years ago, the image represents “a new window into the history of our universe, ”Biden said. .
The first published image of the James Webb Space Telescope, which shows countless galaxies and multiple arcs where the combined gravity of these galaxies increases the light of the background objects, making galaxies even more distant. NASA
Taken together, the images are clear proof, if need be, that Webb is finally ready to begin scientific operations six months after its launch on Christmas Day and years of technical problems, management mistakes and billions in excess of costs.
“These launches represented five days of observation with this observatory,” said Randy Kimble, a Webb project scientist at Goddard. “And they include something that is a deeper infrared image that has never been made in history, deeper than the Hubble images that took weeks to acquire. That was done in half a day with Webb.”
During the weeks and months since Webb’s launch, scientists and engineers accurately deployed and aligned the 18 segments that make up Webb’s 21.3-foot-wide mirror, deployed a giant parasol to help cool the optics up to a few degrees of absolute zero and were carefully reviewed. and calibrated the four instruments of the observatory.
Unlike the Hubble Space Telescope, which mostly observes light in the visible part of the spectrum, Webb is optimized to study the longest wavelength infrared radiation, which allows it to capture light from the sunrise. ‘universe that has been stretched by the expansion of space. over the last 13.8 billion years.
Space Surveillance: The Webb Telescope captures the deepest images of space in 03:22
Capturing the light of the first generation of stars and galaxies in the process of formation after the Big Bang is one of Webb’s main goals.
But the telescope will also be used to address other outstanding issues, drawing the evolution of galaxies over time, how they grow and merge in cataclysmic collisions, the life cycles of stars from birth to death. by supernova and the nature of exoplanets that are so common. like grains of sand across the Milky Way.
Images released on Tuesday, along with the deep field above, show these broad topics, convincingly demonstrating that Webb, the most expensive scientific probe ever built, is up to the task.
“I’m so excited and so relieved,” said John Mather, a Nobel Prize winner and senior scientist on the Webb project. “It’s impossible to convey how hard it really was. We took so much risk to say we’re going to do this, and it’s almost impossible. But we did it.”
More by William Harwood
Bill Harwood has been covering the U.S. space program full-time since 1984, first as head of United Press International’s Cane Head office and now as a consultant for CBS News. It covered 129 space shuttle missions, all interplanetary flights from the Neptune overflight of Voyager 2 and dozens of commercial and military launches. Based at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Harwood is a devoted amateur astronomer and co-author of “Comm Check: The Final Flight of Shuttle Columbia.”