On Friday, NASA released the first full-color image of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) — the largest and most powerful telescope ever launched into space.
Thanks to its huge mirror and ability to look at the infrared part of the spectrum, it can look back billions of years to capture the faint, red-shifted light from the very beginning of the universe.
The image, known as Webb’s First Deep Field, did not disappoint. According to the agency, this is the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the early, distant Universe to date.
Greetings, Humanoids
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It shows the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 as it looked 4.6 billion years ago†
According to NASA, the combined mass of this cluster of galaxies acts as a gravitational lens, magnifying much more distant galaxies behind it — which were brought into sharp focus by the telescope.
The sharpness of JWST also allowed researchers to identify elements: oxygen, hydrogen and neon.
This makes SMACS 0723 the most distant galaxy cluster we have this kind of detailed information about.
On Tuesday, we got an awe-inspiring front row seat to groundbreaking space exploration, when NASA unveiled four more breathtaking images from the telescope:
WASP-96 b
WASP-96 b is a giant planet outside our solar system, made up mostly of gas. It is located nearly 1150 light-years from Earth and orbits a Sun-like star.
The planet is about the same size as Jupiter, but half as massive.
This image does not show the planet itself, but shows Webb’s unprecedented ability to analyze atmospheres hundreds of light-years away.
Web measured the light from the WASP-96 system for 6.4 hours as the planet passed over the star.
The result is a light curve showing the overall dimming of starlight during transit, and a transmission spectrum revealing the brightness change of individual wavelengths of infrared light – shown in the image above.
Among the most striking findings are the clear features of evaporated water and the evidence of clouds and haze.
Southern Ring Nebula
This is a planetary nebula – an expanding cloud of gas that surrounds a dying star. It is nearly half a light-year across and is located about 2,000 light-years from Earth.
Two stars, locked in a tight orbit, make up the local landscape you can see above.
The stars – and their layers of light – are prominent in Webb’s image Near infrared camera (NIRCam) on the left. On the right the image of Webb’s Mid infrared instrument (MIRI) shows for the first time that the second star is surrounded by dust.
The brighter star is at an earlier stage in its stellar evolution and is likely to eject its own planetary nebula in the future. It is also the one that affects the appearance of the nebula.
Stephan’s Quintet
Stephan’s Quintet, located about 290 million light-years away, is a group of five galaxies in the constellation Pegasus. It is notable for being the first compact galaxy group ever discovered in 1877.
This massive mosaic is Webb’s largest image to date, spanning about one-fifth the moon’s diameter. It contains over 150 million pixels and is made up of nearly 1,000 individual image files.
The telescope also poked through the veil of dust that surrounds the core of the group’s upper galaxy to reveal hot gas near the active black hole and measure the rate of bright outflow. It saw these outflows powered by the black hole at a level of detail never seen before.
This information should provide new insights into how galactic interactions fueled the evolution of galaxies in the early universe.
Carina Nebula
The Carina Nebula is one of the largest and brightest nebulae in the sky, located about 7,600 light-years away. It is home to many massive stars several times larger than the Sun.
The 3D image from the telescope seen above shows the edge of the giant gaseous cavity in NGC 3324 — a star-forming region in the nebula.
This cavernous region has been carved out of the nebula by the intense ultraviolet radiation and stellar winds from extremely massive, hot, young stars, located in the center of the bubble, above the region shown in this image.
Webb has managed to penetrate cosmic dust, identify emerging stellar nurseries never seen before, and in turn shed more light on how stars are born.
In general, these images are not just breathtaking. The JWST shows the potential to unravel the mysteries of the formation of the early universe and, with it, of our existence.
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