Today’s unveiling of the image followed President Joe Biden’s initial release of the image on Monday. This shot, dubbed “Webb’s First Deep Field,” showed the cluster SMACS 0723, a massive swirl of galaxies that actually only represents a slice of the universe about the size of “a grain of sand at the tip of your finger at arm’s length, as NASA Administrator Bill Nelson reported on the live stream. Today’s revelations include a galaxy cluster and a black hole. the atmosphere of a distant planet. the epic death of a distant star. and a “stellar nursery” where stars are born. We’ve had a look at some of these targets before, thanks to JWST’s predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, and all of them were known to astronomers. But because of the unprecedented sensitivity of JWST’s instruments and its ability to see objects in the infrared spectrum, we are able to see these galactic forms more clearly than ever before. “Oh my god, it’s working,” said Jane Rigby, Webb’s project scientist, when she saw the first focused images from the observatory. “And it works better than we thought.”
Signs of water and clouds on a bloated exoplanet
Image credits: NASA There are over 5,000 confirmed exoplanets – or planets orbiting a star other than our sun – in our Milky Way alone. The existence of exoplanets raises a fundamental question: Are we alone in the universe? Indeed, the express goal of NASA’s Exoplanet Program is to find signs of life in the universe. now, thanks to JWST, scientists can capture more information about these planetary bodies and hopefully learn more about whether life exists on these planets and, if so, under what conditions it might thrive. This brings us to WASP-96 b, an exoplanet located about 1,150 light-years away. It is a large gas giant that is more than twice as massive as Jupiter, but 1.2 times larger in diameter. In other words, it’s “inflated,” as NASA put it. It also has a short orbital period around its star and is relatively uncontaminated by light emitted by nearby objects, making it a prime target for JWST’s optical power. But this is not a picture of an exoplanet’s atmosphere. It’s a picture of the exoplanet’s transmission spectrum, which may be less than exciting at first glance. However, this spectrum, recorded with the telescope’s Near Infrared Imaging System and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS), showed clear signs of water and even hints of clouds. clouds! It’s an “indirect method” for studying exoplanets, James Webb associate scientist Knicole Colón explained in a media briefing, but the telescope will also use direct observation methods next year. NIRISS can also pick up traces of other molecules, such as methane and carbon dioxide. Although these were not observed in WASP-96 b, they could be detected in other exoplanets observed by JWST.
Shells of gas and dust ejected from dying stars
Image credits: NASA JWST also took a look at a planetary nebula officially named NGC 3132, or the “Southern Ring Nebula,” giving scientists more clues about the fate of stars at the end of their life cycle. NASA showed two side-by-side images of this nebula, one taken in near-infrared light (left) with the observatory’s NIRCam camera and a second image taken with JWST’s mid-infrared instrument (right). A planetary nebula is a region of cosmic dust and gas created by dying stars. This particular one, which is about 2,500 light-years away, was also captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, but NASA says this updated image from JWST offers more detail on the elegant structures surrounding the binary star system. Of the two stars (best seen in the right image), there is a fainter, dying star in the lower left, and a brighter star in an earlier stage of its life. The images also show what NASA calls “shells” surrounding the stars, each of which marks a period when the faintest, dying star (the white dwarf in the bottom left of the right image) lost some of its mass. It has been expelling this material for thousands of years, and NASA said its 3D shape looks more like two cups placed together at the bottom, opening from each other.
The secular dance of Stephan’s Quintet
Image credits: NASA Stephan’s Quintet, first observed by French astronomer Édouard Stephan in 1877, shows the strange interaction of five galaxies in a degree of detail never seen before. This final image consists of nearly 1,000 individual images and 150 million pixels, and marks the largest image from JWST to date, representing about one-fifth of the moon’s diameter. The image is slightly misleading. the leftmost galaxy is actually far in the foreground, about 40 million light-years away, while the other four galaxy systems are about 290 million light-years away. These four galaxies are clustered so close together, relatively speaking, that they actually interact with each other. The image even reveals a supermassive black hole, located at the center of the leading galaxy, which is about 24 million times the mass of the sun.
I think this might actually be heaven
Image credits: NASA JWST also gives us a more in-depth look at the Carina Nebula, a region of our Milky Way galaxy about 7,600 light-years away. While we looked at Carina with Hubble, the new image shows hundreds of new stars, thanks to JWST’s ability to cut through cosmic dust. The Carina Nebula reveals that the birth of stars is not a peaceful, calm affair, but one characterized by highly volatile processes that can, in some ways, be as destructive as they are generative. The flowing amber landscape at the bottom of the image marks the edge of the nebula’s massive, chaotic star-forming region — so massive that the highest points in this amber belt, which NASA calls the “Cosmic Rocks,” are about seven light-years across height. Data from JWST will give scientists more information about the star formation process and may help address why certain numbers of stars form in certain regions, as well as how stars end up with the mass they have. Ultimately, these achievements are just the beginning. Scientists still have many questions—about exoplanets, the formation of the universe, and more—and now they have a powerful new tool in their arsenal to seek answers.
