Even to the untrained eye, the images take the observer far beyond the realm of the iconic Hubble Space Telescope, which has produced a steady stream of discoveries and spectacular images over the past three decades. For astronomers, the view from Webb is breathtaking. “From the data I’ve seen so far, from the work we’ve seen during the commissioning and then this first week of science, yes, this is going to be revolutionary,” said Jane Rigby, the Webb project manager at Goddard. Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “These are incredible capabilities that we’ve never had before.” Part of the Carina Nebula as seen by the James Webb Space Telescope. NASA Program scientist Eric Smith described the early release images as the result of “practice” with Webb’s four instruments. Even so, “we’re making discoveries and we really haven’t even started trying yet. The promise of this telescope is amazing.” Warmed by pom-pom-waving cheerleaders chanting “JWST, JWST,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, senior agency officials and a crowd of enthusiastic Webb engineers and scientists gathered in an auditorium at Goddard to collectively share the moment the images were revealed . year. “In the words of the famous Carl Sagan, ‘somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known,’” Nelson said. “I think those words are coming true.” First was the spectrum of starlight passing through the atmosphere of an exoplanet 1,150 light-years from Earth, a world half the size of Jupiter that orbits its star closer than Mercury orbits the sun land. The spectrum shows the chemical signature of water vapor in the planet’s hellish atmosphere. Clouds in another world. @NASAWebb has captured the signature of water on the gas giant planet WASP 96-b, which orbits a star 1,150 light-years away. For the first time, we’ve detected evidence of clouds in this exoplanet’s atmosphere: #UnfoldTheUniverse pic.twitter.com/f3HOX0HKis — NASA (@NASA) July 12, 2022 Capturing spectra of atmospheric exoplanets 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 is promising such achievements from Webb, but the ability to analyze atmospheric exoplanets with the world’s most powerful infrared telescope is an important step in that direction. Next up was a stunning view of the Southern Ring Nebula, a half-light-year cloud of expanding gas and debris ejected from a central star nearing the end of its life as its core runs out of nuclear fuel and fusion grinds to a halt. It’s a fate that awaits the sun in another five billion years or so. The previous Hubble Space Telescope view of the Southern Ring Nebula was impressive in its own right, showing a huge ring-like cloud of smoke surrounding a bright inner star. But Webb’s view goes much further, showing not one but two stars at the heart of the nebula and much more detail in the structure of the expanding gas shells. The Southern Ring Nebula as seen by the James Webb Space Telescope. NASA Next came a stunning image of the Stephano Quintet, a well-known collection of five galaxies in the constellation Pegasus, 290 million light-years from Earth discovered in 1877, the first such galaxy group to be detected nearby. Four of the five galaxies are gravitationally interacting spirals in a kind of slow-motion train wreck in the process of merging to eventually become a single giant elliptical galaxy. Galaxy mergers are a common occurrence throughout the history of the universe, and studying the details of such collisions is one of Webb’s main goals. The image revealed on Tuesday analyzes previously unseen stars and clusters in galaxies and even captures the light produced by debris racing around a supermassive black hole. Stephan’s Quintet as seen by the James Webb Space Telescope. NASA Finally, the Webb team revealed a stunning view showing a portion of the Carina Nebula, a vast star-forming region in the southern constellation Carina about 7,600 light-years from Earth that is four times larger than the more famous Orion Nebula. Visible to the naked eye, the Carina Nebula is home to the brightest known star in the Galaxy as well as the binary system Eta Carinae, which includes a massive sun that is expected to explode in a supernova explosion in the (astronomically) near future. The part of the nebula shown on Tuesday is filled with huge, bright young stars, as well as remnants of supernova explosions that mark the cataclysmic deaths of stars much more massive than the sun. Powerful solar winds ejected from hot young stars sculpt the surrounding gas clouds into complex structures. The James Webb Space Telescope view of the Carina Nebula. NASA The images revealed Tuesday followed an initial release Monday at the White House, when President Biden unveiled a sharp look at a cluster of distant galaxies with many arcs of light, the distorted faces of the background galaxies magnified by the cluster’s combined gravity. Looking further back in space and time than ever before, within a few hundred million years since the universe exploded 13.8 billion years ago, the image represents “a new window into the history of our universe,” said Mr. Biden. . The first public image from the James Webb Space Telescope, showing countless galaxies and multiple arcs where the combined gravity of these galaxies magnifies light from background objects, bringing even more distant galaxies into view. NASA Taken together, the photos are clear evidence, if any were needed, that Webb is finally ready to begin scientific activities six months after its Christmas Day launch and years of technical problems, mismanagement and billions in cost overruns. “These releases represented five days of observation with this observatory,” said Randy Kimble, Webb program scientist at Goddard. “And they include something that is a deeper infrared image than has ever been taken in history, deeper than the Hubble images that took weeks to get. This was done in half a day with Webb.” In the weeks and months since Webb’s launch, scientists and engineers have developed and precisely aligned the 18 sections that make up Webb’s 21.3-foot-wide mirror, opened a giant sunshade to help cool the optics to a few degrees from absolute zero and carefully checked and calibrated the observatory’s four instruments. Unlike the Hubble Space Telescope, which mostly observes light in the visible part of the spectrum, Webb is optimized to study longer-wavelength infrared radiation, allowing it to capture light from the dawn of the universe stretched by the expansion of space itself. the last 13.8 billion years. Space Watch: Webb Telescope captures deepest images of space 03:22 Capturing light from the first generation of stars and galaxies in the process of forming in the wake of the Big Bang is one of Webb’s primary goals. But the telescope will also be used to address other outstanding questions, mapping the evolution of galaxies through time, how they grow and merge in cataclysmic collisions, the life cycles of stars from birth to supernova death, and the nature of exoplanets that are as common as grains of sand in the Galaxy. The photos released Tuesday, along with the previous deep field, show these general themes, proving convincingly that Webb, the most expensive science probe ever built, is up to the task. “I’m so excited and so relieved,” said John Mather, a Nobel laureate and senior scientist on the Webb project. “It’s just impossible to convey how hard it really was. We risked so much to say we’re going to do this, and it’s so close to impossible. But we did it.” More William Harwood Bill Harwood has covered the US space program full-time since 1984, first as Cape Canaveral bureau chief for United Press International and now as a consultant for CBS News. It covered 129 space shuttle missions, every interplanetary flight since Voyager 2’s flyby to Neptune, and dozens of commercial and military launches. Based at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Harwood is a dedicated amateur astronomer and co-author of “Comm Check: The Final Flight of Shuttle Columbia.”
