NASA said Friday that the first cosmic images from the James Webb Space Telescope will include unprecedented views of distant galaxies, bright nebulae and a distant giant gas planet.
The US, European and Canadian space agencies are preparing to make a big disclosure about the initial observations of the $10 billion (about Rs 79,330 crore) observatory on July 12. Hubble Which sets out to reveal new insights into the origins of the universe.
“I’m so eager not to keep these secrets anymore, it would be a great relief,” Klaus Pontopidan, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STSI) who oversees. Webtold AFP last week.
An international committee decided that the first wave of full-color scientific images would include the Carina Nebula, a giant cloud of dust and gas 7,600 light-years away, as well as the Southern Ring Nebula, which captures a dying star 2,000 light-years away. surrounds.
The Carina Nebula is famous for its colossal pillars that include “Mystic Mountain,” a three-light-year-tall cosmic peak captured in an iconic image by Hubble.
Webb has also performed a spectroscopy – an analysis of light that reveals detailed information – on a distant gas giant called WASP-96b, which was discovered in 2014.
about 1,150 light years from EarthWASP-96 b is about half the mass of Jupiter and orbits its star in just 3.4 days.
Next comes Stephen’s Quintet, a compact galaxy 290 million light-years away. Four of the five galaxies within the quintet are “locked in a cosmic dance of repeated close encounters,” NASA Told.
Finally, and perhaps most fascinating, Webb has assembled an image using foreground galaxy clusters called SMACs 0723 as a sort of cosmic magnifying glass for the extremely distant and faint galaxies behind it.
This is known as “gravitational lensing” and uses the mass of foreground galaxies to bend the light of objects behind them, much like glasses.
Dan Coe, an astronomer at STSI, told AFP on Friday that even in its first images, the telescope had broken scientific ground.
“When I first saw the images … of this deep region of this galaxy cluster lensing, I looked at the images, and I suddenly learned three things about the universe that I didn’t know before,” he said.
“It’s completely blown my mind.”
Webb’s infrared capabilities allow it to look deeper into the time of the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years earlier than any instrument before it.
Because the universe is expanding, light from early stars shifts from ultraviolet and visible wavelengths to longer infrared wavelengths—which Webb is equipped to detect at an unprecedented resolution.