NASA announced Friday that the first space images from the James Webb Space Telescope will include unprecedented views of distant galaxies, bright nebulae and a distant gas giant planet.
The US, European and Canadian space agencies are gearing up for a big unveiling on July 12 of early observations from the $10 billion Hubble successor observatory that should reveal new insights into the origins of the universe.
“I’m very much looking forward to not having to keep these secrets anymore, it will be a great relief,” Klaus Pontoppidan, 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 full-color scientific images will include the Carina Nebula, a vast 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, which include “Mystic Mountain,” a three-light-year-high 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 Stefan’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 has put together an image using a foreground galaxy cluster 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, much 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 lensing of a 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 just blew my mind.”
Webb’s infrared capabilities allow it to see further back in time to the Big Bang, which occurred 13.8 billion years ago, than any other instrument before it.
As the universe expands, light from the earliest stars shifts from the ultraviolet and visible wavelengths in which it was emitted to longer infrared wavelengths—which Webb is equipped to detect with unprecedented resolution.
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