A sparkling landscape of baby stars. A sparkling blue and orange view of a dying star. Five galaxies in a cosmic dance. The grandeur of the universe shone through in a new batch of images released Tuesday by NASA’s powerful new telescope. The unveiling by the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope kicked off Monday at the White House with a sneak peek at the first shot — a jumble of distant galaxies that went deeper into the universe than humanity has ever seen. Tuesday’s releases showed parts of the universe seen by other telescopes. But Webb’s sheer power, remote location from Earth and use of the infrared light spectrum showed them in a new light. “It’s the beauty but also the story,” Webb’s Nobel Prize-winning NASA senior scientist John Mather said after the unveiling. “It’s the story of where we came from.” And, he said, the more he looked at the images, the more convinced he became that life exists elsewhere in those thousands of stars and hundreds of galaxies. With Webb, scientists hope to see light from the first stars and galaxies that formed 13.7 billion years ago, just 100 million years after the Big Bang that created the universe. The telescope will also scan the atmospheres of alien worlds for possible signs of life. “Each image is a new discovery, and each one will give humanity a view of humanity that we’ve never seen before,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said Tuesday, rhapsodizing over images showing “the formation of stars, devouring black holes ». Webb’s use of the infrared light spectrum allows the telescope to see through cosmic dust and see distant light from the corners of the universe, the scientists said. “We have really changed our understanding of the universe,” said ESA director general Josef Aschbacher. The European and Canadian space agencies joined NASA in building the telescope, which launched in December after years of delays and cost overruns. Webb is considered the successor to the highly successful but aging Hubble Space Telescope. Some of Hubble’s most stunning images are shots of the Carina Nebula, one of the bright star nurseries in the sky, about 7,600 light-years away. Webb project scientist Klaus Pontoppidan decided to focus one of Webb’s first glances on that location because he knew it would be a picture-perfect beauty. The result was a picture of a colorful landscape of bubbles and cavities where stars were born. “This is art,” Pontopidan said. “I really wanted to have that landscape. It has that contrast. We’ve got blue. We’ve got gold. There’s dark. There’s bright. There’s just a sharp image.” For release Thursday: A close-up of Jupiter showing one of its faint rings and some of its moons, he said.
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The Southern Ring Nebula, sometimes called the “Eight Burst”. The images show a dying star with a frothy edge of escaping gas. It is about 2,500 light years away. A light year is 5.8 trillion miles. “This is the end for this star, but the beginning for other stars,” Pontoppidan said. As it dies, it throws away parts that seed the galaxy with elements used to form new stars, he said. The Quintet of Stephen, five galaxies in a cosmic dance that first appeared 225 years ago in the constellation Pegasus. It includes a black hole that scientists said showed material “swallowed up by this kind of cosmic monster.” Webb “just gave us a new, unprecedented 290-million-year view of what this Quintet is doing,” Cornell University astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger, who was not part of the Webb team, said in an email. A giant planet called WASP-96b. It is about the size of Saturn and 1,150 light-years away. A gas planet, it is not a candidate for life elsewhere, but a key target for astronomers. Instead of an image, the telescope used its infrared detectors to examine the chemical composition of the planet’s atmosphere. It showed water vapor in the superhot planet’s atmosphere and even found the chemical spectrum of neon, showing clouds where astronomers thought they didn’t exist.
The images were released one by one at an event at NASA’s Goddard Space Center that featured cheerleaders wearing pom poms the color of the telescope’s golden mirrors.
“It moves you. It’s so beautiful,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, head of NASA’s science missions, after the event. “Nature is beautiful. To me this is about beauty.” The world’s largest and most powerful space telescope was launched last December from French Guiana in South America. It reached its lookout point 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth in January. Then began the long process of aligning the mirrors, cooling the infrared detectors enough to operate, and calibrating the science instruments, all protected by a tennis court-sized sunshade. —— The Associated Press Health and Science Section is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Science Education Division. AP is solely responsible for all content.
