The long-awaited giant leap in the field of astronomy is just around the corner as the $10 billion observatory located about 15,00,000 kilometers from home is about to take us beyond the world of imagination and into the realm of possibilities. It was just fantasies.
The first science image captured by the world’s most powerful observatory will drop on Tuesday.
Though MASA has been tight-lipped about the target of this first observation, it has been dropping teasers over the past six months as the telescope swung into the darkness of space since its launch late last year. While the target remains a mystery, there are indications that the data release will include “the deepest views of the universe ever seen, and spectra obtained from an exoplanet atmosphere.”
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The photos released over the past few months are so shocking that Thomas Jarbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD), apparently brought tears to his eyes!
Operating at infrared wavelengths that are inaccessible from Earth, Webb is the only current facility capable of giving unprecedented views of the universe at these wavelengths, with light expected to be from some of the first galaxies to form in the universe as well as exoplanetary atmospheres. Potentially life-saving signature in
The primary data delivered by JWST will be product images and spectra. Spectra contain highly complementary information regarding emission and absorption from atoms and molecules which is important to understand. For example, the chemical composition of stars and gases in distant galaxies and the atmospheres of planets orbiting other stars.
A spectrum is obtained by dividing the incoming light from astrophysical sources over a range of wavelengths. Whereas an image gives us information about the total brightness of an object in the photometric filter using which the object is observed, a spectrum gives us the differential brightness of that object over the entire wavelength range included in that filter.
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To study the formation and evolution of the most distant galaxies in the universe, the initial observation plan with JWST is to target parts of the sky that have already been observed with the Hubble Space Telescope over the past few decades. This will enable JWST observations to immediately build on the incredible legacy value of existing Hubble data, providing complementary observations at infrared wavelengths not previously possible. Doing so will allow spectroscopic follow-up of the more distant, extremely faint galaxies already identified in Hubble imaging, as well as the detection of even more distant galaxies, which Hubble has not been able to find, because the most distant galaxies in the universe. There is light from distant objects. “redshifted” to infrared wavelengths.
It is certain that whatever NASA intends to show at its JWST First Images event, these views of the universe will be humanity’s first foray into previously unknown territory.
This event is a historic moment not only for astronomers like me, but for humanity in general, reminding us once again that the sky under which we live is the same for all beings, and that we are incredible. There is only a piece of dust in the vastness of the universe, containing billions of stars, trillions of galaxies and a quarter of the possibilities.
(Dr. Ayush Saxena is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Astrophysics at University College London. His research aims to understand the formation and evolution of stars and supermassive black holes)
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