The US, European and Canadian space agencies are preparing for a big unveiling on July 12 of early observations from the $10 billion observatory, the successor to Hubble that is set to reveal new insights into the origins of the universe. “I’m really looking forward to not having to keep these secrets any more, that will be a great relief,” Klaus Pontopitan, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STSI) who oversees Webb, told AFP last week. An international panel has decided that the first wave of color science images will include the Carina Nebula, a huge cloud of dust and gas 7,600 light-years away, as well as the Southern Ring Nebula, which surrounds a dying star 2,000 light-years away. The Carina Nebula is famous for its towering pillars that include “Mystic Mountain,” a three-light-year cosmic peak captured in an iconic Hubble image. Webb also performed spectroscopy — an analysis of light that reveals detailed information — on a distant gas giant called WASP-96 b, which was discovered in 2014. Nearly 1,150 light-years from Earth, WASP-96 b is about half the mass of Jupiter and orbits its star in just 3.4 days. Next is Stephan’s Quintet, a compact galaxy 290 million light-years away. Four of the five galaxies in the quintet are “locked in a cosmic dance of repeated close encounters,” NASA said. Finally, and perhaps most tantalizing of all, Webb put together an image using foreground galaxy clusters called SMACS 0723 as a kind of cosmic magnifying glass for the extremely distant and faint galaxies behind it. This is known as “gravitational lensing” and uses the mass of foreground galaxies to bend the light of objects behind them, like a pair of glasses. Dan Coe, an astronomer at STSI, told AFP on Friday that even in its first images, the telescope had broken scientific ground. “When I first saw the images … of this deep field of this galaxy cluster, I looked at the images and suddenly I learned three things about the universe that I didn’t know before,” he said. “It’s completely blown my mind.” Webb’s infrared capabilities allow it to see deeper back in time to the Big Bang, which occurred 13.8 billion years ago, than any instrument before it. Because the Universe is expanding, the light from the first stars is shifted from the ultraviolet and visible wavelengths in which they were emitted to longer infrared wavelengths — which Webb is equipped to detect in unprecedented resolution.
