STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS AND USED WITH PERMISSION
Artist’s concept of the James Webb Space Telescope as it appears in space. Credit: ESA/ATG medialab
After six months of testing and verification, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is finally ready to open a new window on the universe, capturing the faint light of the first stars and galaxies, probing the mysteries of black holes and studying the atmospheres of alien worlds.
On Tuesday, NASA will unveil the first color images from the $10 billion observatory, pictures expected to rival or surpass the first spectacular images from the refurbished Hubble Space Telescope nearly three decades ago.
“We’re going to give humanity a new view of space, and it’s a view that we’ve never seen before,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told reporters during an advance briefing. “One of these images … is the deepest image of our universe ever taken. And we’re only just beginning to understand what the Web can and will do.
Hubble has become one of the most iconic instruments in astronomical history, helping astronomers determine the age of the universe, confirming the presence of supermassive black holes, capturing the deepest views of space ever collected, and providing flyby-class images of planets in Earth’s solar system.
But Webb, operating just a few degrees above absolute zero behind a canopy the size of a tennis court, promises to push the limits of human knowledge even deeper with a 21.3-foot-wide segmented primary mirror capable of detecting the faint, stretched infrared light from the first generation of stars to light up after the Big Bang.
Launched on Christmas Day, Webb is placed in a gravitationally stable orbit nearly a million miles from Earth. Over the past six months, engineers and scientists have worked on a complex series of deployments, activations and checks, fine-tuning the telescope’s focus and optimizing the performance of its four science instruments.
This image of the Carina Nebula, one of the James Webb Space Telescope’s first observational targets, was taken with the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 instrument in 2010. Courtesy: NASA, ESA, Mario Livio (STScI), Hubble 20th Anniversary Team (STScI)
The images released Tuesday, selected by an international team of astronomers, will “show the world that Webb is actually ready for science and that it is producing excellent and impressive results,” said Klaus Pontoppidan, Webb project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute.
“And it’s also to highlight the breadth, the sheer breadth of science that can be done with Webb and to highlight all four science instruments,” he added. “And last but not least, to celebrate the start of normal science operations.”
Goals for Webb’s first public images include:
– The Carina Nebula: A vast star-forming region in the constellation Chilia about 7,600 light-years from Earth that is four times the size of the Orion Nebula. The Carina Nebula is home to the brightest known star in the Milky Way, as well as the binary system Eta Carinae, which includes a massive sun that is expected to explode in a supernova explosion in the (astronomically near) future.
– Southern Ring Nebula: An expanding cloud of gas half a light-year in diameter ejected from a dying star. Relatively low-mass stars like Earth’s sun will end their lives by blowing off their outer layers, forming so-called “planetary nebulae” as their cores contract and slowly cool.
– Stephen’s Quintet: A collection of five galaxies in the constellation Pegasus 290 million light-years from Earth, discovered in 1877, the first such nearby group of galaxies to be discovered. Four of the five galaxies interact gravitationally in a delayed merger.
–WASP-96b: An unusual cloudless exoplanet 1,150 light years away that is about half the size of Jupiter, orbiting its sun every 3.4 days. By spectroscopically analyzing the light from the parent star as it passes through the exoplanet’s atmosphere on its way to Earth, astronomers can understand details of its chemical composition.
– SMACS J0723.3-7327: The combined gravity of countless stars in huge galaxy clusters like this can be a powerful lens, if the alignment is right, to magnify light from more distant objects into the far background to provide a deeper look back in space and time than would otherwise be possible.
Steven’s Quintet, a group of five galaxies in the constellation Pegasus. Four of the galaxies interact gravitationally. Courtesy: NASA, ESA and the Hubble SM4 ERO team
“The first images will include observations that span a number of Webb science topics,” Pontoppidan said. “From the early universe, the deepest infrared view of the cosmos yet. We will also see an example of how galaxies interact and grow, and how these cataclysmic collisions between galaxies drive the star formation process.
“We will see several examples of the life cycle of stars, starting from the birth of stars, where Webb can reveal new, young stars emerging from their natal cloud of gas and dust, to the death of stars, such as a dying star that seeds the galaxy with new elements and new dust that may one day become part of new planetary systems.
Last but not least, he said, the team will show the first chemical fingerprints of an exoplanet’s atmosphere.
One of the Hubble Space Telescope’s most astonishing images was its initial “deep-field” look at a small patch of seemingly empty sky over a 10-day period in 1995. To the amazement of professionals and the public alike, this long- exposure revealed more than 3,000 galaxies of all shapes, sizes and ages, some of them the oldest, most distant ever seen.
Subsequent Hubble Deep Fields went back even further in time, detecting the faint light of galaxies that glowed within about 500 million years of the Big Bang. How stars formed and organized so quickly into galactic structures is still a mystery, as is the development of supermassive black holes at their cores.
Webb’s four instruments are expected to push the boundaries even closer to the beginning of galaxy formation. A test image from the telescope’s Canadian Fine Pointing Sensor, which is not optimized for detecting extremely faint objects, nevertheless reveals thousands of galaxies.
Webb’s view of SMACS 0723 is expected to demonstrate the observatory’s enormous scope.
“This is really just the beginning, we’re just scratching the surface,” Pontoppidan said. “In the first images, we have several days of observations. Looking ahead, we have many years of observations, so we can only imagine what this will be.
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