Saturday, July 9, 2022 – 3:53 PM
WASHINGTON, July 9, 2019 (WAM) — The US space agency, NASA, said 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.
According to Agence France-Presse, the American, European and Canadian space agencies are preparing to reveal on July 12 the first images taken by the $10 billion telescope and launched as a successor to the “Hubble” telescope, on a mission to explore.
The first batch of color scientific images that will be revealed will be of 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, as it orbits its star in only 3-4 days.
James Webb also took a picture of Stephan’s Pentagram, a group of galaxies 290 million light-years from Earth, and NASA noted that four of the five galaxies in Stephan’s Pentagram are “trapped in frequent close shocks.”
Perhaps the most awaited image is an image taken by the telescope using forward galaxy clusters called SMACS 0723 as a kind of cosmic magnifying glass for the distant and very faint 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.
Wam / Abdel Nasser Monem