The images went live on NASA’s website just after 10.30am. EDT on Tuesday after the release of the first image Monday night, when U.S. President Joe Biden unveiled the first Webb Deep Field image of some of the faintest galaxies ever imaged in infrared light. . The images released Tuesday include Webb’s pictures of the Carina and Southern Wheel nebulae, a collection of galaxies known as the Stephen quartet, and a spectrum of light from the exoplanet WASP-96b. The first image presented on Tuesday is the same depth-of-field image that President Biden first presented on Monday night. The Webb Telescope’s first depth-of-field image. (Nasa) The deep field shows thousands of galaxies, some more than 13.2 billion light-years away, magnified by the gravity of a larger foreground galaxy cluster, causing the noticeable distortion in the image. The second image is a spectrum of light from the exoplanet WASP-96b, information about that planet’s chemical composition made possible by Webb’s infrared spectrometer, according to Nasa astrophysicist Knicole Colon. “We observed the planet as it cratered in front of a star,” he said. “Starlight filters through the atmosphere and you can break it down into wavelengths of light.” The first Webb-derived spectrum of the exoplanet WASP 96b (Nasa) These wavelengths appear as “bumps and shakes,” Dr. Colon notes, which in this case indicate the presence of water vapor in WASP-96b’s atmosphere. The third image, released on Tuesday, was the Southern Wheel Nebula, Webb’s portrait of a dying star. The release includes two different views of the nebula, one taken with the Webb Near-Infrared Instrument and the other with the Webb Mid-Infrared Instrument, allowing astronomers different views of the structure of this distant cloud of gas ejected from a star in the deadly riots. First Webb Telescope image of the Southern Ring Nebula taken in both near and mid-infrared light (NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI and The E) The fourth image, released Tuesday morning, was the Stefan Quintet, a collection of five galaxies about 290 million light-years from Earth. Two of the galaxies are in the process of merging, which helps astronomers understand the mechanisms of galaxy growth. The top galaxy in the image shows the bright glow of gas swirling around a black hole. The first Webb Telescope image of the Stephan Quintet, a collection of five galaxies more than 250 million light-years from Earth (Nasa) The latest image to be revealed is a stunning new look at the Carina Nebula, located about 7,600 light-years away in the southern constellation Carina. The Hubble Space Telescope has also produced stunning images of the Carina Nebula, but the Webb image reveals new levels of detail, revealing hundreds of never-before-seen baby stars forming in this stellar nursery. As noted during the webcast of the image release, these five images are just the appetizer for a Webb Telescope science mission that’s just getting started and is expected to last another 20 years. New discoveries and new images will come soon and will continue to come for a long time.
