News hardware James Webb photographed something no one expected: our own loneliness
If you need a lesson in humility, look up to the sky. The infinitely large reminds us of how insignificant we are on the scale of the universe. The sublime photos taken by NASA’s ultimate space telescope, James Webb, show us above all our own loneliness.
The universe, stars, planets, and the Orion Nebula
The universe is an inhospitable place in which life is extremely unlikely to develop. The night plays us a dark spectacle during which a few rare stars dance. It is only near a very small fraction of these luminous points that it is imaginable to see life appear.
From Earth, it is quite easy to observe huge clouds of gas and dust. These clouds have a name: nebulae. We can admire the beauty of these giants for two reasons only:
- Some of the particles that compose them emit their own light.
- Other particles reflect the starlights.
Let’s take an example “close” to us: the Orion Nebula. In the night sky, just below Orion’s belt, we can lay our mortal eyes upon its splendor. The Orion Nebula is located 1300 light years from Earth. This tiny piece of universe spans 24 light-years, or about 227 trillion kilometres.
Protoplanetary disks in the Orion Nebula. NASA/ESA and L. Ricci (ESO)
Nebulae are fascinating. Around them, stars and planets form and deform. Compacted by gravity, dust and gas give birth to stars. New bright spots in the sky are constantly appearing around Orion.
However, the bubbles of this bubbling space activity are extremely distant from each other on our humble scale. Even in the most compact star clusters, the distances are thousands of astronomical units (one astronomical unit is about 150 million kilometers, this is the distance between the Earth and the Sun), even years- light. Luckily for them, the stars are almost never alone.
Very often, several planets orbit around a star. Astronomers have discovered a total of 42 protoplanetary ionized disks (called proplyds) in the Orion Nebula. Behind this barbaric term hide new clouds of dust which, one day or another, will end up compacting in turn to form planets, natural satellites and asteroids.
Protoplanetary disks captured by ALMA, VLT and the Hubble telescope.
Protoplanetary disk around the dwarf star PDS 70 captured by the VLT. ESO,
The photo of this NASA scientist who shows us our own loneliness
All these objects, we know them better thanks to Hubble and to the myriad of other space telescopes resulting from the various observatories throughout the world. It is by multiplying the points of view and the analyzes that we have come to all these formidable conclusions.
With James Webb, we have a particularly effective new tool to marvel at the infinitely large.
In a tweet dated October 7, 2022, Mark McCaughrean, scientist at ESA (European NASA), shares a photo of the Orion object 294-606 in all its glory… and its loneliness. Orion 294-606 is an assembly of a star and a protoplanetary disk. In the image you can see how the disc eclipses part of the star, the light from which escapes above and below.
“Hello darkness, my old friend”
A tiny snippet from our new #JWST data, showing a planetary system in the making, floating in space & silhouetted against the bright background light of the Orion Nebula.
— Mark McCaughrean (@markmccaughrean) October 7, 2022
What is most fascinating about this image is what it does not show. The disc extends over approximately 300 astronomical units (thus 300 times the average distance between the Earth and the Sun). Around him, nothing. The stars visible in the corners of the image are just over a light year from the disc.
In all its solitude, Orion 294-606 remains much closer to many stars than to our Sun.
Even within this vast universe, the Earth, located almost at the end of one of the arms of its galaxy, is a particularly isolated planet. The closest star to us, Alpha Centauri, is 4.367 light years from Earth.
Hubble and James Webb: the space telescopes that lift the veil on the Universe
You got it, we owe the image shared by Mark McCaughrean to the most amazing space telescope of our time: James Webb. Specifically, the photo is from the instrument NIRCam. It was captured in an infrared band of about 1870 nm, enough to reveal to us hydrogen emission and absorption flashes.
James Webb is not ready to rest. Having photographed the most distant known objects and taken spectacular images of nebulae, galaxies and planets (even within our solar system), the space telescope continues to be talked about.
on the left a photo taken by Hubble, on the right the same, James Webb version
In parallel, NASA is increasingly considering the possibility of extending the life of James Webb’s orbital counterpart, Hubble. If this extension materializes, we will benefit from the snapshots and scientific discoveries of this telescope set for quite a while.
What to swoon several more times in front of the magnificence of the universe, and especially to understand it a little better. Waiting, the eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.