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The first images taken by the James Webb Telescope show unprecedented views of distant galaxies and luminous nebulae, as well as a distant gas giant planet, NASA reported Friday, July 08, 2022.
The US, European and Canadian space agencies are preparing to unveil on July 12 the first images taken by the $10 billion telescope, which was launched as a successor to the Hubble telescope, on a mission to explore the history of the universe.
“I am really looking forward to being free of these mysteries and it will be a great relief to me,” Klaus Pontopedan, an astronaut at the Observatory for Space Sciences that oversees James Webb, told AFP last week.
An international committee decided that the first batch of color scientific images to be revealed will be the Carina Nebula (the base nebula), a huge cloud of dust and gas 7,600 light-years away, in addition to the Southern Ring Nebula, which surrounds a dying star 2,000 light-years away from Earth.
The Carina Nebula is famous for its giant pillar that includes the “Misty Mountain”, a region in the nebula whose pillar measures three light-years and was captured by the Hubble Telescope.
James Webb captured spectroscopy, a technique that analyzes light that reveals detailed information about space objects, an image of the gas giant WASP-96 b, which was discovered in 2014.
This planet is about 1150 light-years from Earth, and its size is about half the size of Jupiter, while orbiting its star in just 3.4 days.
James Webb also took a picture of the Stephan Quintet, a group of galaxies 290 million light-years from Earth. NASA noted that four of the five galaxies in Stephan’s Quintet are “trapped in frequent close shocks.”
Perhaps the most awaited image is an image taken by the telescope using foreground galaxy clusters called SMACS 0723 as a kind of cosmic magnifying glass for the distant and very weak galaxies behind it.
This technique, known as “gravitational lensing”, uses the mass of the foreground galaxies to repel the light of objects behind them, similar to what happens in glasses.
Dan Koe, an astronaut at the Institute of Space Observatories, confirmed to AFP on Friday that James Webb made a scientific breakthrough as soon as his first pictures were taken.
“When I first saw the images of this deep range of galaxies, I just stared at them and quickly inferred three things about the universe that I didn’t know before, which really amazed me,” he said.
Thanks to its infrared sensors, James Webb is able, more than any previous telescope, to observe the first stars and galaxies that formed after the Big Bang, which occurred 13.8 billion years ago.
As the universe expands, the light emitted by the first stars has changed from ultraviolet and visible wavelengths that were emitted in them, to longer infrared wavelengths that James Webb has been equipped with instruments to capture with unprecedented accuracy.