NASAin collaboration with ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency), broadcast live the first full color images and spectroscopic data obtained by the James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to Hubble and the most powerful put into orbit. Already on Monday the “deepest and sharpest infrared image of the early universe” had been released, which was taken during an engineering test. In it you can see “faint stars and galaxies”, the Planetarium of Buenos Aires Galileo Galilei detailed on its official social networks.
“This morning, people from all over the planet are going to see the images taken by this telescope, and every image is a new discovery,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.
“Each of them will give humanity a view of the universe that we have never seen before”he added.
The photos that NASA showed
The images from the James Webb Telescope are the first in which galaxies can be seen with greater distance and sharpness.
- Carina Nebula: One of the largest and brightest nebulae in the sky, located regarding 7,600 light-years away in the southern constellation of Carina. Nebulae are stellar nurseries where stars form. The Carina Nebula hosts many massive stars, several times larger than the Sun.
- WASP-96 b (spectrum) – A giant planet outside the solar system, composed mostly of gas. The planet, located almost 1,150 light-years from Earth, orbits its star every 3.4 days. It is regarding half the mass of Jupiter and its discovery was announced in 2014.
- South Ring Nebula: is a planetary nebula, an expanding cloud of gas surrounding a dying star. It has a diameter of almost half a light-year and is located regarding 2,000 light-years from Earth.
- Stephan’s Quintet: About 290 million light years away, it is located in the constellation of Pegasus. It is notable for being the first compact group of galaxies discovered in 1877. Four of the five galaxies in the quintet are caught in a cosmic dance of repeated close encounters.
- SMACS 0723: Massive foreground galaxy clusters magnify and distort light from objects behind them, allowing deep-field views of both extremely distant and intrinsically faint galaxy populations.
The James Webb Telescope
James Webb is a $10 billion telescope that was launched in December last year from French Guiana on an Ariane 5 rocket, and now orbits the Sun 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, the news agency specified. Tel. The lens can go where no telescope has gone before, thanks to its huge main mirror and infrared-focusing instruments, allowing it to see through dust and gas.
Considered an engineering marvel, the total cost of the project is estimated at $10 billion, making it the most expensive scientific platform ever built, rivaled only by the European Organization for Nuclear Research’s Large Hadron Collider ( CERN). The AFP agency pointed out that NASA estimates that the Webb’s propellant may have a useful life of 20 years, during which it will work together with the Hubble and Spitzer telescopes to answer the fundamental questions of the cosmos.
It is the world’s leading space science observatory. Webb will solve the mysteries of our solar system, see beyond distant worlds around other stars, and explore the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. POT.
What we see in the first image from the James Webb Telescope
Through its infrared capabilities, the worthy successor to the Hubble telescope was able to discover thousands of galaxies. And it is that its sophisticated near infrared camera (NIRCam, for its acronym in English), crossed clouds of cosmic dust and detected light coming from the first stars.
According to specialists, it is also the first “deep field” image of Webb, taken with a long exposure time of 12.5 hours, which makes it possible to detect the faintest flashes. In addition, they clarified that thanks to these characteristics, it managed to reach greater depths in infrared wavelengths than those of the deepest fields of the Hubble Space Telescope, which took weeks.
The photo shows what a group of galaxies called SMACS 0723 looked like 4.6 billion years ago, which, acting as a magnifying glass, also revealed very distant objects in the cosmos behind it, thanks to an effect called gravitational lensing, developed by Télam.
The combined mass of this galaxy cluster acts as a gravitational lens, magnifying much more distant galaxies behind it. Webb’s NIRCam has brought distant galaxies into sharp focus: they have tiny, faint structures you’ve never seen before, including star clusters and fuzzy features. The scientific community will soon begin to learn more regarding the mass, age, history, and composition of these galaxies, as Webb searches for the earliest galaxies in the universe.