Last Tuesday, NASA published five accurate, color images of the universe, taken with the James Webb Space Telescope.
The images highlighted the great potential of the telescope in discovering the secrets of deep space.
And the American newspaper “New York Times” reviewed, in its report, things we have learned regarding the famous telescope so far.
1- The telescope works well
NASA’s experiment with the Hubble Space Telescope, which was sending out blurry images, showed that sometimes advanced scientific instruments don’t work as intended.
Astronauts made multiple trips to Hubble to repair it, but such repairs were not possible for Webb, who is far from Earth.
After the anticipation and anxiety of repeating the Hubble experiment, then deploying the telescope, its mirrors, and the sun shield, the mission scientists had to make sure that its scientific instruments were working properly.
Jane Rigby, operations project scientist for the telescope, explained during a press conference on Tuesday that it is performing well, even better than all expectations.
2- Deeper than ever images of the universe’s past
President Joe Biden on Monday presented an image captured by the Webb Telescope that was hailed by NASA officials and astronomers as one of the deepest images ever taken of the universe.
An image of a distant star cluster called SMACS 0723 revealed the presence of distant galaxies scattered across the sky.
The light from those galaxies, amplified in the field of view by the cluster’s gravitational field, originated more than 13 billion years ago.
Astronomers hypothesize that the most distant and older stars may be different from the stars we see today.
3- Exploring the atmosphere of distant planets
The planet has previously been studied from Earth by Hubble, but the Webb Telescope has also picked up evidence of water vapor, fog and some previously invisible clouds, surprising scientists with its capabilities.
And while WASP-96b is unlikely to be home to any living thing, using the same techniques might reveal whether smaller, rocky worlds orbiting other stars are habitable.
“I think we’ll be able to find planets that we think have good prospects for life,” said Megan Mansfield, an astronomer at the University of Arizona, “but we won’t necessarily be able to identify life right away.”
And the relatively small size of these exoplanets has made them extremely difficult to study until now, and the Webb telescope will allow astronomers to look more closely at these worlds.
Dr. Mansfield said the Webb Space Telescope is the first large space observatory to take into account the study of the atmospheres of exoplanets in its design.
4- Reveal the unexpected
Webb’s presentation gave us exciting images of the Southern Ring Nebula, a ball of gas and dust created by a dying star, and the Stefan Quintet, a group of galaxies millions of light years away.
But the most striking image was of the Carina Nebula, a vast cloud of dust orbiting a star, and home to some of the brightest and most exploding stars in the Milky Way.
The nebula, seen in infrared light, resembles a looming eroded coastal cliff dotted with hundreds of stars that astronomers have never seen before.
“It took me a while to figure out what I should mention in this image,” Amber Straun, deputy telescope project scientist, said of the images.
The image also contained structures that scientists might not explain, such as a strange curved feature.
“As always, there is room for the unexpected, we have no idea what this is,” said Amaya Morrow Martin, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, who presented the image to colleagues there on Tuesday.
“We have to expect more of these discoveries, things that have never been seen before, and that need to be explained,” she added.
5- The telescope is fragile
For a spacecraft like the James Webb Space Telescope, bits of cosmic dust would likely have hit its mirrors, however, and it was an unpleasant surprise for NASA officials when they discovered that one of the telescope’s mirrors had been damaged by a micro-meteorite strike in late May and that the impact was larger than expected. .
NASA officials said the distortion was barely noticeable and that Webb’s performance still exceeded all of his requirements, and engineers also modified the position of the damaged mirror to cancel out part of the distortion.
