Flaming Dance: Four of the galaxies in “Stephan’ Quintet” are on a collision course with each other. Only the large spiral nebula on the left is a foreground object. Where the two currently colliding galaxies touch, star-forming regions blaze up.
Bild: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI
The first images from the James Webb Space Telescope are thanks to an international collaborative venture. The road to these recordings was long and rocky – the project was once close to the end.
In July 2011, the image shown below of the Carina Nebula in the constellation of the Ship’s Keel looked like it might never exist. At that time, a committee of the US House of Representatives was pushing for the cancellation of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Originally budgeted at $500 million, the project was four years behind schedule and had already cost $3 billion. After the company was saved from the red pencil, it took another ten years and an additional seven billion dollars before the successor to the aging Hubble Space Telescope could be launched – by far the most expensive unmanned mission in space history to date.
But what a happy ending! On Monday evening, US President Joe Biden personally presented one of the first five JWST scientific images, together with his Vice President Kamala Harris, in their capacity as Chair of the National Space Council. Another four were released by NASA and the space agencies of Europe and Canada involved in the telescope on Tuesday afternoon. They are still the results of “practice runs”, as NASA program scientist Eric Smith put it, i.e. warm-up exercises for the preparation of the data. However, unlike the previous test images, they were intended for celestial objects of increased scientific interest. However, their selection was aimed at demonstrating the capabilities of the 6.5-metre reflecting telescope orbiting the sun 1.5 million kilometers from Earth and its four scientific instruments in some of its subject areas.
Sands of Time: Composed in part of hydrocarbon dust, the orange nebulae were modeled by light from young stars into the jagged structures of star-forming region NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula.
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Image: ESA
The Carina Nebula is a place where cosmic dust and gas masses form stars and are shaped and made to glow by their radiation. In previous images of this area, these young stars have remained hidden behind the clouds from which they formed. With the JWST, however, you can now see them because, unlike Hubble, the mirrors and instruments here are specially designed for infrared light. In order to obtain an image that our eyes can perceive, the data was transposed into the visible spectral range, so to speak. But no viewer should be bothered by that. Even astrophotographs taken in visible light do not show the celestial objects as things in themselves, nor as an astronaut would see them if he got close enough. Anyone who has ever looked at the well-known Ring Nebula in the Lyra constellation through an amateur telescope may have missed the colors and contrasts that only long exposure times and suitable image processing techniques bring to light.
Cosmic Perspectives: That nothing went wrong with this astronomical record project borders on a miracle. The first images that have now been published give an impression of this miracle, such as this view of the Southern Ring Nebula, which is around 2000 light-years away.
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Image: ESA
Another of the five images shows an object very similar to the Ring Nebula in Lyra, the so-called Southern Ring Nebula in the constellation of Vela, the Sails. Here, JWST was able to resolve the frothy structure of a dying star’s ejected gas envelope and the layered structure of the plumes, evidence of the final pulsations before its demise. On top of that, another mid-infrared image made it possible to visualize the partner with whom it orbits in a binary star system.