NASA on Tuesday unveiled full-color images of the $ 11 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), marking the first of what will surely be many launches of the superpowered optical instrument. But even taken by themselves, these five images mark a massive achievement and the culmination of a 26-year process to give humanity an even more detailed view of the early universe.
The image unveiled today followed the release of the initial image by President Joe Biden on Monday. That photograph, called Webb’s “First Deep Field,” showed the SMACS 0723 cluster, a vast vortex of galaxies that actually only represents a part of the universe the size of a grain of sand at your fingertips. arm distance “. “, as NASA administrator Bill Nelson put it live.
Today’s revelations include a galactic cluster and a black hole; the atmosphere of a distant planet; the epic death knell of a distant star; and a “stellar nursery” where stars are born. We’ve taken a look at some of these targets before, thanks to JWST’s predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, and they were all known to astronomers. But because of the unprecedented sensitivity of JWST instruments and their ability to see objects in the infrared spectrum, we can see these galactic shapes more clearly than ever before.
“Oh my God, it works,” said Jane Rigby, a scientist in Webb’s operations project, upon seeing the first focused images from the observatory. “And it works better than we thought.”
Water signs and clouds on an inflated exoplanet
Image credits: NASA
There are more than 5,000 confirmed exoplanets, or planets orbiting a star other than our sun, in the Milky Way alone. The existence of exoplanets raises a fundamental question: are we alone in the universe? In fact, the explicit goal of NASA’s Exoplanet program is to find signs of life in the universe; now, thanks to JWST, scientists can capture more information about these planetary bodies and hopefully learn more about whether there is life on these planets and, if so, under what conditions it can thrive.
This brings us to WASP-96 b, an exoplanet that is about 1,150 light-years away. It is a large gas giant that is more than twice as small in mass as Jupiter, but is 1.2 times larger in diameter. In other words, it’s “inflated,” as NASA said. It also has a short orbital period around its star and is relatively uncontaminated by light emitted by nearby objects, making it a prime target for JWST’s optical power.
But this is not an image of the atmosphere of an exoplanet. It is an image of the transmission spectrum of the exoplanet, which can be less than exciting at first glance. However, this spectrum, captured with the near-infrared image and the slotless spectrograph (NIRISS) of the telescope, showed unmistakable signs of water and even evidence of clouds. Clouds! It’s an “indirect method” for studying exoplanets, project assistant scientist James Webb Knicole Columbus told a media conference, but the telescope will also use direct observation methods over the next year.
NIRISS can also capture evidence from other molecules, such as methane and carbon dioxide. Although not observed in WASP-96 b, they could be detected in other exoplanets observed by JWST.
Gas and dust shells expelled by dying stars
Image credits: NASA
JWST also took a look at a planetary nebula officially named NGC 3132, or the “Southern Ring Nebula,” providing scientists with more clues about the fate of stars at the end of their life cycles. NASA showed two images side by side of this nebula, a near-infrared light shot (left) with the osci NIRCam and a second image taken with the JWST medium infrared instrument ( right).
A planetary nebula is an area of dust and cosmic gas generated by dying stars. This one in particular, which is about 2,500 light-years away, was also captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, but NASA says this updated image of JWST offers more details of the sleek structures surrounding the binary star system.
Of the two stars (best seen in the image on the right), there is a fainter, dying star at the bottom left and a brighter star that is at an earlier stage in its life. The images also show what NASA calls “shells” surrounding the stars, each marking a period in which the faintest and dying star (the white dwarf at the bottom left of the right image) lost part of its mass. It has been ejecting this material for thousands of years and NASA said its three-dimensional shape looks more like two bowls placed together at the bottom, which open from each other.
The cosmic dance of Stephan’s Quintet
Image credits: NASA
The Stephan Quintet, first observed by French astronomer Edouard Stephan in 1877, shows the strange interaction of five galaxies with a degree of detail never seen before. This final image is made up of about 1,000 individual images and 150 million pixels, and marks JWST’s largest image to date, which accounts for about one-fifth of the moon’s diameter.
The picture is slightly misleading; the leftmost galaxy is actually far in the foreground, about 40 million light-years away from us, while the remaining four galaxy systems are about 290 million light-years away. These four galaxies are grouped so close together, relatively speaking, that they actually interact with each other.
The image even reveals a supermassive black hole, located in the center of the highest galaxy, which is approximately 24 million times the mass of the sun.
I think this could be just heaven
Image credits: NASA
JWST also gives us a more detailed look at the Carina Nebula, a region of the Milky Way about 7,600 light-years away. As we watched Carina with Hubble, the new image shows hundreds of new stars, thanks to JWST’s ability to pierce cosmic dust. The Carina Nebula reveals that the birth of stars is not a peaceful and placid affair, but characterized by highly unstable processes that can, in some ways, be as destructive as they are generative.
The amber landscape flowing at the bottom of the image marks the edge of the massive, chaotic region of the nebula’s star formation, so massive that the highest points in this band of amber, which NASA calls ” Cosmic Cliffs, ”are about seven. light years tall. JWST data will give scientists more information about the process of star formation and can help address why certain numbers of stars are formed in certain regions, as well as how stars end up with the mass they have.
Ultimately, these successes are just the beginning. Scientists still have many questions about exoplanets, the formation of the universe and more, and now they have a powerful new tool in their arsenal to look for answers.