A new era of astronomy is dawning as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration completed its release of the first set of scientific images from the James Webb Space Telescope.
“It’s progress like this that drives us forward and it gives us inspiration,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said overnight (AEST). “Our rockets run on fuel. But inspiration is the fuel that drives NASA and indeed, drives humanity.”
The full-colour images were released during a televised broadcast from the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. They showcase Webb’s ability to peer deeper into space – and thus further back in time – than has ever before been possible.
“I keep telling people that this week astronomy on the whole is going to change,” said Kevin Hainline, a University of Arizona astronomer and a mission scientist working on the primary imager of the truck-size telescope – the largest, most powerful one of its kind ever built.
The release comes less than 24 hours after a White House event during which President Joe Biden unveiled the first image from the set, a deep-field image showing a galaxy cluster called SMACS 0723. It is the deepest image of the universe taken to date, according to NASA.
Images released today show the Carina Nebula, one of the largest stellar nurseries; the Southern Ring Nebula, a cloud of gas around a dying star in the constellation Vela; and a group of five galaxies about 290 million light-years away known as Stephan’s Quintet.
NASA also released visual data detailing which molecules are present in the atmosphere of WASP-96b, a mainly gaseous planet beyond our solar system. The data is in the form of a “spectrum,” the result of a technique known as spectroscopy in which starlight filtering through a planet’s atmosphere is used to determine chemical signatures in the atmosphere.
Astronomers can use such spectra to look for signatures associated with the building blocks of life like water vapour. WASP-96b’s spectrum revealed the presence of water vapour in its atmosphere, and experts spotted evidence of clouds.
With its huge 21.5-foot primary mirror, the Webb telescope is 100 times as powerful as NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, which has orbited our planet for more than 30 years. Webb orbits the sun about 1 million miles from Earth, using its instruments to peer at some of the oldest and most distant galaxies and stars in the cosmos and searching for exoplanets that might be habitable.
Webb was jointly developed by NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.
Unlike Hubble, which detects mostly visible light, Webb detects mostly infrared light. That enables it to capture images of older and more distant galaxies, giving astronomers a peek into how the universe took shape just after the big bang almost 14 billion years ago.
“We’ve never looked at the sky in this way before,” said Steven Finkelstein, an associate professor of astronomy at the University of Texas, Austin. “The biggest thing we want to understand is when and how do galaxies actually form in the early universe, and this is something that Hubble simply is not big enough – and doesn’t have sensitivity enough and the infrared wavelength regimes – to do.”
Following today’s release, Webb will continue its first “cycle,” or year, of observations, Dr Finkelstein said.
The new images aren’t among those proposed by any scientists for the first cycle of observations, according to University of Arizona astronomer Marcia Rieke, the principal investigator for Webb’s primary imager.
“This way we’re not, you know, trampling on their science program,” Dr Rieke said. “But they’re targets that are meant to be, shall we say, aesthetically pleasing and showing that this telescope is delivering just absolutely fantastic image quality.” Among the most expensive science instruments ever built, the $10 billion Webb telescope was delayed for about a decade before successfully launching on December 25 from French Guiana and completing a commissioning process that lasted months.
Despite the delays and a series of budget cuts that almost derailed Webb, Dr Hainline said, “We showed we can come together as an international science community to put something in space to do something no one has done.”
DOW JONES
