A sparkling terrain of newborn stars. A bubbly blue and orange panorama of a dying star. Five galaxies in a cosmic prom. The splendors of the cosmos are illuminated in a fresh collection of photographs released last month from NASA’s new powerful telescope.
The unveiling from the giant and most advanced James Webb Space Telescope started at the White House with a glimpse of the first shot — a clutter of remote galaxies that went deeper into the cosmos than humankind has ever seen.
Later releases revealed parts of the universe already shown by other telescopes. But Webb’s sheer strength, the distant zone from Earth, and the benefit of the infrared light spectrum exhibited them in a new glow that scientists said was almost as much art as science.
“It’s the beauty but also the story,” NASA senior Webb researcher John Mather, a Nobel laureate, expressed after the reveal. “It’s the story of where did we come from.” And, he said, the more he glanced at the photographs, the more he became confident that life exists elsewhere in those thousands of galaxies and stars.
With Webb, astronauts expect to detect light from the earliest stars and galaxies formed almost 13.7 billion years ago, merely 100 million years from the Big Bang. The telescope will also scan alien worlds atmospheres for possible signs of life.
“Every image is a new discovery, and each will give humanity a view of the humanity that we’ve never seen before,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said, commenting over images. Scientists said that Webb’s use of the infrared light range lets the telescope see through the cosmic dust and catch distant light from the corners of the universe.
“We’ve really changed the understanding of our universe’ said Josef Aschbacher, European Space Agency director general. The Canadian and European space agencies united with NASA in building the telescope, which was launched in December after years of delays and expenditure overruns. Webb is regarded as the successor to the highly successful but aging Hubble Space Telescope.
Some of Hubble’s most spectacular pictures have been photographs of the Carma nebula, one of the radiant stellar nurseries in the sky, approximately 7,600 light-years away. Webb project scientist Klaus Pontoppidan decided to concentrate on one of Webb’s early gazes on that spot because he knew it would be a frameable magnificence shot. The outcome was a picture of a colorful landscape of bubbles and hollows where stars were being born.
“This is art,” Pontoppidan said. “I really wanted to have that landscape. It has that contrast. We have blue. We have golden. There’s dark. There’s bright. There’s just a sharp image.”
Among the other new shots is the Southern Ring nebula, which is also called “eight-burst.” Photographs show a dying star with a bubbly edge of escaping gas. It’s nearly 2,500 light-years away. “This is the end for this star, but the beginning for other stars,’ Pontoppidan said. As it dies, it throws off parts that seed the galaxy with elements used for new stars, he said.
Stephan’s Quintet, five galaxies in a celestial dance first seen 225 years ago in the constellation Pegasus. Scientists said it comprises a black hole that showed material “swallowed by this sort of cosmic monster.” Webb “has just given us a new, unprecedented 290 million-year-old view of what this Quintet is up to,” Cornell University scientist Lisa Kaltenegger, who wasn’t part of the Webb team, said in an email.
A gigantic planet called WASP-96b. It’s roughly the size of Saturn and is 1,150 light-years away. A gas planet, it’s not a contender for life elsewhere but a key target for scientists. Instead of a photograph, the telescope utilized its infrared sensors to look at the chemical composition of the planet’s conditions. It showed water vapor in the super-hot planet’s atmosphere and even discovered the chemical spectrum of neon, showing clouds where astronomers supposed there were none. The images were showcased at an event at NASA’s Goddard Space Center.
“It moves you. This is so so beautiful,”Thomas Zurbuchen, chief of NASA’s science missions, said after the event. “Nature is beautiful. To me this is about beauty.”
The world’s most giant and powerful space telescope rocketed away last December from French Guiana in South America. It got to its lookout point 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth in January. Then the lengthy procedure started to align the mirrors, get the infrared sensors cold enough to operate, and calibrate the science instruments, all shielded by a sunshade the dimensions of a tennis court.
