On Christmas Day last year, 30 years after its conception, the James Webb Space Telescope was launched from French Guiana. On December 28, it passed in front of the moon. On January 24, it fired its thrusters for five minutes and settled into its final orbit about 1.5m km from Earth. On July 12, after months of painstaking setup, it produced its first image, showing us, for the first time, distant galaxies as they were more than 13 billion years ago.
The Webb Telescope has been adding to this miraculous beginning ever since. Now it’s brought us something a little closer to home, just 615m km away: the most extraordinarily detailed images of Jupiter we’ve ever seen.
The James Webb Space Telescope is packed up for shipment to its launch site in Kourou, French Guiana. Photograph: Chris Gunn/Nasa/Reuters
Oxford University astrophysicist Dr Becky Smethurst, author of a forthcoming book, A Brief History of Black Holes, said there were many reasons to be skeptical it would ever get that far. “There were 344 single points of failure where if one little thing had gone wrong, the whole mission would have been scrapped. It was months of anxiety,” he said.
A major source of uncertainty after the satellite’s launch was how closely it would conform to its intended trajectory, with any inaccuracy entailing the need to burn valuable fuel. “But it was perfect. They promised us five years of data and instead we’re getting 20. It’s amazing.”
Here are some of the images this impeccably aimed telescope has produced, and what they show about how it works and the universe itself.
Webb’s first deep pitch
Webb’s first deep field, showing a galaxy cluster called SMACS 0723 as it appeared 4.6 billion years ago. Photo: ESA/PA
The first of the Webb images to be revealed, by Joe Biden, shows a galaxy cluster known as SMACS 0723. The entire image covers thousands of galaxies in an area of the sky equivalent to a single grain of rice held at a distance of an arm on the surface. of the Earth “We can see things in this tiny, tiny patch in more detail than we ever could with Hubble [the most powerful telescope until now]” said Smethurst. “It suggests that there is no longer a blank sky: everywhere you look, you will find something in the background.”
Like all images produced by Webb, what you can see here is not visible light, but signals from the infrared spectrum captured by the satellite in monochrome, sent back to Earth as ones and zeros, and then reconstructed. The different colors do not denote literal hues, but the wavelengths of the signals, which tell us how hot the source was. Colorizing images like this makes it easier for scientists to spot areas for further study (and generates more public excitement than a black-and-white image ever could).
In this image, the sharp, bright star in the center is in our own galaxy. The fuzzy white dots below are entire galaxies in the SMACS 0723 cluster, shown as they were about 4.6 billion years ago. Better yet, this cluster at the center acts as a kind of magnifying glass for other galaxies that lie much further away: up to 13 billion light-years away, almost to the dawn of the universe. Because they are distorted in the process, they show up as the arcs that cross the image: the red objects are filled with cosmic dust, a crucial ingredient in star formation, while the green ones are full of hydrocarbons.
The Carina Nebula
A comparison of James Webb Telescope views of the Carina Nebula with the Hubble equivalent. Photography: Nasa
Comparing this image of a nebula, a vast cloud of dust and gas covered in stars, with the equivalent area captured by Hubble is proof of how much more powerful Webb is. “The Carina Nebula is in our own galaxy,” Smethurst said. “Although I think it looks a bit like the Lake District here. The value of this image is really in what it shows us the benefit of looking at things relatively close in the infrared.
“It allows you to drill through the dust—those tiny molecules of heavier elements like oxygen and carbon that scatter visible light so you can’t see the stars that have formed. In this image, we cut through that dust to the three-dimensional structure of the nebula”.
Stephan’s Quintet
The first image from NASA’s James Webb Telescope of Stephan’s Quintet. Photograph: NASA/PA
This image, constructed from more than 150 m of pixels sent by Webb, shows a cluster of galaxies in the constellation Pegasus and provides scientists with the means to see how their interaction triggers star formation. “This is my favorite because it’s directly relevant to my work,” Smethurst said. “It shows four interacting galaxies, one with a growing black hole and one that isn’t. What’s amazing is that if you zoom in, you can see individual stars – until now we’ve barely been able to do that with our nearest galaxy, Andromeda, and these are much more distant.”
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The galaxy to the left of the formation is closer than the others: 40 m light-years away instead of 290 m. The upper vortex in the image contains a black hole 24 m times the mass of the sun. “It’s an incredibly bright light source,” Smethurst said. “What this shows is the gas swirling around the black hole lit up in all its glory.”
WASP-96b (spectrum)
A transmission spectrum from a single observation using Webb’s Near-Infrared Imaging and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS) reveals the atmospheric characteristics of the hot gas giant exoplanet WASP-96 b. Photo: NASA/UPI/Rex/Shutterstock
This isn’t quite an image, but “it’s still very exciting for astrophysicists,” says Smethurst. The dataset clearly reveals that this planet, 1,150 light-years away, has the distinctive characteristics of water.
Webb measured light from the WASP-96 system as the planet moved through the star, and the way the gas giant has “stolen some of the starlight” as it passes through its atmosphere reveals the unique signature of the water, said Smethurst. .
The findings are also important because they show “what the telescope is capable of,” Smethurst said. “This is a big, bright planet, very close to its star. It’s easier to observe light passing through the atmosphere because it often passes in front of the star. Because it’s so easy here, he suggests that with the most hard ones that are farther away and pass in front of their star less frequently like Earth, you won’t waste time. It’s this idea of finding “Earth’s twin,” something that looks incredibly habitable for life as we know her.”
jupiter
A new color-enhanced photo of Jupiter in space shows the planet’s features in detail. Photograph: Nasa/Zuma Press Wire Service/Rex/Shutterstock
If Webb’s main purpose is to tell us more about the light sent out by distant stars billions of years ago, it also turns out to be capable of producing stunning images of our own solar system unlike any we’ve seen before. “I was amazed when I saw the level of detail here – I thought it was going to wipe out because it’s so bright,” Smethurst said. “But it’s very clever how they’ve used different wavelengths to capture different things.”
The red haze at the planet’s north and south poles are auroras, created by the interaction of particles from the sun with the planet’s magnetic field. The famous Great Red Spot, a storm so big it could swallow the Earth, appears white because it reflects so much sunlight. “And the darker areas reveal the areas where light has penetrated the atmosphere the most,” Smethurst said.
While Webb’s observations will be valuable to scientists, images like this also seem important for their pure, universal beauty. “Everyone is curious about the world we live in,” he said.