The images are a sightseeing tour of the universe painted with colors no human eye has seen – the invisible rays of infrared or thermal radiation. Infrared rays are blocked by the atmosphere and so can only be studied in space. Among other things, they can penetrate the dust clouds surrounding the cosmic nurseries where stars are born, turning them into transparent bubbles that show the baby stars nestling inside. The first image will be unveiled Monday at 5 p.m. by President Biden at the White House in an event streamed on NASA TV or the agency’s YouTube channel. NASA will then show more photos at 10:30 a.m. ET on Tuesday in a live video stream. You can sign up here for a reminder in your personal digital calendar to get the first taste of them. Only the tiniest fraction of the world’s astronomers have already glimpsed what Webb has seen. But NASA officials who got an early look at the new images were only able to reveal it during a press conference in late June. Pamela Melroy, NASA’s deputy administrator and former astronaut, said she could barely contain herself.
Learn more about the James Webb Space Telescope
After traveling nearly a million miles to reach a location beyond the moon, the James Webb Space Telescope will spend years observing the universe.
“What I’ve seen has moved me as a scientist, as an engineer and as a human being,” he said. Thomas Zurbuchen, a NASA science mission associate, compared seeing the images to a moment when, as a graduate student analyzing data at 2 a.m., he realized he had discovered something about the universe that no one else knew. It was surprisingly moving, he said, to watch nature give up its secrets. Bill Nelson, NASA’s administrator, said, “We’re going to give humanity a new view of the universe” and praised the telescope as “a good example of what government can do.” Webb is the largest space telescope ever launched. Its mission is to explore the early days of the universe, when galaxies and stars were just gathering from the haze of the Big Bang, reaching further back in time and space than the Hubble Space Telescope can. Just as Hubble has defined astronomy for the past 30 years, NASA expects Webb to define astronomy for a new generation of astronomers who have been eagerly awaiting their own rendezvous with the universe. “We all know that Webb will blow Hubble out of the water by going deeper and finding the first galaxies,” said Garth Illingworth, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who has used Hubble and other telescopes to search for distant ones. primordial galaxies. The telescope is the fruit of the combined effort of about 20,000 engineers, astronomers, technicians and bureaucrats, according to Bill Ochs, the telescope’s project manager. It now orbits the sun at a point called L2, a million miles from Earth, where the combined gravitational fields of the moon, Earth, and sun conspire to create a semi-stable resting point. Its mirror consists of 18 gold-plated beryllium hexagons and looks like a sunflower—if you could see it from here—floating on the blade of a giant shovel, which is a sunscreen that keeps the telescope cool and always points outward from our own star. The images to be unveiled on Monday and Tuesday were selected by a small group of astronomers and experts in scientific approach to showcase the new telescope’s capability and knock the public’s socks off. The release of the images at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., on Tuesday will follow a science seminar and a rush of professional astronomers to their computers to begin receiving and analyzing their own data from science observations that began in June. . On Friday, NASA released a list of the five subjects of the photos. Among them are old amateur and professional astronomer friends, now seen in new infrared outfits. There’s the Southern Ring Nebula, a shell of gas ejected from a dying star about 2,000 light-years away, and the Carina Nebula, a vast swirling expanse of gas and stars that includes some of the most massive and potentially explosive star systems in the Galaxy. Another well-known astronomical scene is the Stephano Quintet, a tight cluster of galaxies, two of which are in the process of merging, about 290 million light-years from here in the constellation Pegasus. The team will also release a detailed spectrum of an exoplanet known as WASP-96b, a gas giant half the mass of Jupiter that circles a star 1,150 light-years from here every 3.4 days. It’s too hot and large to host life, but such a spectrum is the kind of detail that could reveal what’s in this world’s atmosphere. Last but not least is a patch of the southern sky evocatively named SMACS 0723. It’s a field frequently visited by Hubble and other telescopes and includes a massive cluster of galaxies whose gravitational field acts as a lens that magnifies and makes visible the light from the galaxies behind it and further back in time. Dr. Zurbuchen said this image was the deepest view into our universe’s past, showing galaxies emerging from the mists of creation nearly 14 billion years ago as sparks in the night. Later images, he added, would certainly look even further back. “With this telescope it’s really hard not to break records,” said Dr. Zurbuchen.
