2024-07-21 10:32:50
For the past two years, the James Webb Space Telescope has been sending back valuable data from the depths of the universe – and it may find a habitable planet.
The latest picture of the Weltraum “James Webb” telescope. is, and looks like… Penguin. A giant penguin in space. With the publication of the picture, in reality a couple was intertwined galaxies shows, known as Arp 142 and nicknamed “Penguin and Eggs”, marked the Nais Friday (July 12) marks two full years of scientific results from the telescope. The first is a spiral galaxy, the second is an elliptical galaxy.
“Penguin’s thinner regions of gas and dust were gravitationally pulled by the ‘dance’ of galaxies, causing them to collide in waves and form stars,” NASA said in a statement Press release. “Look at these areas in two places: the appearance of a fish in its ‘beak’ and the ‘feathers’ in its ‘tail’.”
The Webb Telescope has achieved everything astronomers hoped for: It looks deeper into space and further into the past than any other telescope before. And it produced beautiful images. The IS globe, captured by the mirror and instruments of the Webb Telescope, it is beautiful, dazzling and extravagant. These exciting images reveal the amazing secret of the Webb Telescope, the $10 billion successor to NASA’s still-operating Hubble Space Telescope.
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The “Webb” telescope looks further into the past than any telescope before
However, the main reason the Webb Telescope exists is that it can do something Hubble can’t: go far look at the infrared part of the spectrum, which the scientists of it is possible to analyze the strong refracted light emitted by galaxies when the universe was still very young. This came as a big surprise. Astronomers assumed that the early galaxies would be small and faint. That’s not what explorer Webb saw.
The distorted spiral galaxy in the center, the Penguin, and the compact elliptical galaxy to the left, the Egg, are in active inclusion. This image combines data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and marks the telescope’s second year of scientific work. © NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
Instead, there is an amazing array of large, bright galaxies, many of them supermassive black holes its light was only emitted about 300 million years after the Big Bang. (The best estimate of the age of the universe is 13.8 billion years.) The processes of star formation and galaxy merging were faster, more efficient, or simply different than the theorists thought.
This is how science is supposed to work: a new instrument with a new way of looking at nature provides hard data that previously only existed in theories, computer models and measurements. “Our biggest impact so far is understanding the first billion years. That was the main argument we used to sell the telescope, and I’m very glad we did,” said Jane Rigby, Webb’s chief scientist. “The universe cooperated.”
“Webb” did not disprove the Big Bang theory
The unexpected number of large, bright galaxies in the early universe does not mean that the Big Bang theory is wrong, Webb scientists managed to add. “We have this flood of data, we have all these interesting things that we’re finding, and we don’t quite understand why,” said NASA astrophysicist Amber Straughn. But this is not a discovery of “new physics” or something so revolutionary she said. “The Big Bang is still the best theory of the universe we have,” he said Straughn.
These wonders are hidden in the images from the James Webb telescope
View a series of photos
The Webb probe also studied the nearby universe, including a look at the amazing Trappist-1 planetary system, in which a swarm of rocky planets orbits a red dwarf star. This planetary system is about 41 light years away, within our own galaxy and almost next door in the cosmic scheme of things.
A current astrobiological question that Webb could answer is whether red dwarf stars are too stormy for nearby planets to have atmospheres and be plausible places where life could thrive. “So far we have not found a rocky planet like ours with an atmosphere that can support life,” planetary astronomer Heidi Hammel said in an email. “For this we might need an even bigger telescope.”
The James Webb Telescope Could Not Find a Habitable Planet
Could this telescope find the first irrefutable evidence of extraterrestrial life? That seems unlikely, Rigby said. “Personally, I don’t think Webb will get life. That’s not what it’s built for,” Rigby said. “I think we can find habitable planets.”
Garth Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California at Santa Cruz who was among the developers of the Webb in the late 1980s, said the telescope has a lot of data on it. Exoplanet collected – life orbiting the distant stars. “These data still need to be assembled into a coherent picture,” he said. “It’s a bit like an alien walking through the zoo of the Earth, seeing the huge range of animals and then trying to see the relationships and similarities,” he said.
The Webb was launched into space on the morning of Christmas 2021 and spent six months orbiting the Sonn, about a million miles from Earth, in shape. The big headline from that time was that the telescope survived 344 possible individual failures, including using a tennis court-sized solar shield required for observations at cold temperatures in the infrared part of the spectrum.
“James Webb” also looked around our solar system
A micrometeorite hit one of the telescope’s 18 hexagonal mirrors, but the impact was limited. NASA has since attempted to reduce the risk of such an impact by flying the telescope with the mirrors opposite the direction of flight. “We fly it so it’s not, quote-unquote, focused on the rain,” Straughn said.
The telescope has also brought attention to the worlds we know best, within our own Solar system. Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, long known to have a deep subsurface ocean, has mistakenly released carbon dioxide, according to Webb. And the telescope spotted a 6,000-mile-long plume of water coming from Saturn’s moon Enceladus, which, like Europa, has an ocean hidden beneath its icy crust, Hammel said.
“The next 20 years will only get more exciting as we push the possibilities of this amazing instrument into the unknown and the unexpected,” said Hammel.
Washington Post
Joel Achenbach reports on science and politics for the National Desk. He has been writing for the Post since 1990.
We are currently testing machine translations. This article was automatically translated from English to German.
This article was first published in English on July 12, 2024 by the “Washingtonpost.com” appeared – as part of a collaboration, it is now also available as a translation for the readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals.
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