The telescope cost more than $10 billion to build (Getty)
Last Monday, the US space agency published (NASA) New pictures of the largest planets in our solar system: Buyer. Fog, storms, and winds appear on the gaseous planet’s surface, as well as its thin rings and small moons Amalthea and Adrastea.
These images were taken during the observations of the Nyrkam instrument of the telescope James WebbSince its launch last year, it has been sending more and more dazzling images of the universe.
It is the largest and most powerful telescope known to mankind in its quest to discover outer space, bearing the name of James Webb, the second director of NASA between 1961 and 1968, and its primary mission is to monitor the lights of stars andgalaxies The first is the search in the universe for traces of life.
On December 25, 2021, Release The James Webb Space Telescope from French Guiana on the northeastern coast of South America, aboard a European Ariane 5 rocket, after delays caused by various technical obstacles.
At the time, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson explained the purpose of sending it: “It will give us a better understanding of our universe and our place in it. Who we are, what we are and eternal search.” But he added, “When you want a big reward, you usually have to take a big risk.”
The telescope was described before its launch as “the new Hubble”, and the European and Canadian space agencies cooperated with their American counterparts to work on making it, which took more than 20 years and cost more than 10 billion US dollars, with the participation of thousands of technicians, engineers and workers.
Unlike Hubble, which had simple capabilities to capture infrared radiation, the telescope has the ability to monitor space phenomena older than those that previous telescopes were able to monitor, thanks to its huge main mirror, which is six times the size of the Hubble mirror, and its instruments that capture infrared signals. This allows him to monitor through clouds of dust.
James Webb is designed to capture light waves in the infrared range, which is very important in the study of astronomy, because dust around the Earth or the Hubble telescope (designed to pick up light waves in the visible range) absorbs the bulk of the visible light coming from stars.
A month after its launch, the telescope reached its location, 1.5 million kilometers from the planet, at a point scientists called “Lagrangian II”, one of the five Lagrangian points where gravity is zero, due to the equal gravity of the Sun and Earth. This means that the presence of the telescope at this point will enable NASA to maintain it at a constant distance from Earth without the need for energy consumption.
Last February, James Webb sent the first sound of a bright star 258 light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major.
And later, last May, he was exposed small meteorite impactcausing minor damage to its main mirror, but “NASA” said at the time that “the telescope is still operating beyond all requirements for its mission, despite observing a margin effect in the data collected.”
On July 8, last year, NASA published an experimental image of the universe taken by the James Webb Telescope, which it described in a statement as “one of the deepest images of the universe ever.”
This image was captured by the telescope’s Precision Orientation Detector, the tool that allows the state-of-the-art spacecraft to target and focus on objects of interest.
It was just a prelude to the event the agency had prepared at length for: the deepest infrared image of the universe ever taken by James Webb.
On July 11, nearly 6 months after the release of “James Webb”, US President Joe Biden appeared at a party from the White House, to unveil the image that reveals the largest number of details about the beginning of the universe.
“It’s a new window into the history of the universe we live in,” Biden said. “And today we’ll get a glimpse of the first light shining out of that window: light from other worlds, stars in orbits so far from ours. It’s amazing to me.”
In turn, NASA described the image as “the deepest and clearest captured of the universe to date”, showing thousands of galaxies that formed after the Big Bang and the birth of the universe.
Agency director Bill Nelson said that at least one of the oldest faint light scenes that appear in the “background” of the image dates back more than 13 billion years, which makes it only about 800 million years younger than the Big Bang, the theoretical spark that started the expansion of the known universe before About 13.8 billion years old.
The next day, NASA published another set of images, and announced the results of the first spectroscopic analysis of a distant exoplanet using a telescope. Spectroscopy is a tool for knowing the chemical and molecular composition of distant objects. In the case of a planet, this can help determine its atmosphere, monitor the presence of water, or analyze its soil.
Each of these images represents a “new discovery,” Nelson said, adding: “Each image will give humanity a new view of the universe that it has never known before.”
The images revealed details of the Southern Ring Nebula previously hidden from astronomers. Planetary nebulae are the shells of gas and dust emitted by dying stars. It allowed unknown details to emerge about the “Stefan Five” galaxy cluster, and revealed rare details about the interaction of galaxies that lead to star formation in each other and gas turbulence in galaxies.
Ahead of the unveiling of the new images taken by the telescope of Jupiter last Monday, “NASA” and the European Space Agency published new images of the galaxy. cartwheelThe rotating color ring reveals unprecedented clarity.
This galaxy is located about 500 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Sculptor, and acquired its shape during an amazing collision between two galaxies.
“James Webb gives us a glimpse into the current state of the cartwheel, but also provides insight into what happened to this galaxy in the past and how it will evolve in the future,” the agencies said in their statement.
Work on the James Webb Telescope took more than 20 years, and according to the plans developed by NASA, it is expected that its mission in outer space will last 20 years as well. It is a long period that will provide the US space agency and the world with unprecedented images of the universe and new details and information that we had not known.
Scientists hope to watch the dawn of the universe through a telescope that will go back to the time when the first stars and galaxies existed more than 13 billion years ago.