The article was first published at The Conversation. The article was included in Space.com's expert voices: op-ed and insights.
The Professor of Astronomy is Silas Laycock.
The first science-quality images from the new telescope have been made public. There is evidence of water on a planet 1000 light-years away, and amazing details about the birth and death of stars. The five images released on July 12, 2022, make good on the promise of exploring the origins of the universe, of stars and of life.
After the suite of instruments onboard all cooled down and were running smoothly, the astronomer wasted no time in putting the telescope to use. Major scientific results can be produced on their own from each of the first images.
The James Webb Space Telescope's first photos are in the gallery.
The entire red to mid-infrared spectrum is blocked by Earth's atmosphere and was designed to collect light. With its giant mirror and sun-shade blocking the rays of the sun, Earth and moon, the telescope can produce sharper images than any other telescope can.
The buzz among professional astronomer like me (opens in new tab) has been great since members of the team shared test images. The real images are better than expected. During the presentation where the first images were released, Jane Rigby said, "For Webb, there is no blank sky; everywhere it looks it sees distant galaxies." Until now, most of them were not seen.
The first image the world saw was of a group of stars. It is 5.12 billion light-years away from Earth.
There are thousands of individual galaxies in the picture. It is like the universe in high definition, and I encourage you to zoom in to truly appreciate the details.
The white galaxies in the middle of the image are the same age as the sun and Earth. There are more distant galaxies that are stretched into spectacular arcs as if seen through a microscope. That is what is occurring. The light of the background galaxies is magnified by the gravity of the much closer cluster.
There are red galaxies in the background. The galaxies are far away. Figuring out the abundance of different elements in the early galaxies can be done by measuring the light's attributes.
The Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990 and it did not take long for it to do the same. The Hubble Deep Field took two weeks to be exposed to. Astronomers will be able to see some of the first stars and galaxies that formed right after the Bigbang once the longer observations that allow it to collect more light are carried out.
A spectrum is a breakdown of the strength of light at different wavelength.
As the exoplanet WASP 96-B passed in front of its parent star, the mirror pointed at it. The star's light was passed through the planet's atmosphere and left a "chemical fingerprints" in the light's spectrum. There are clouds and water in the atmosphere of WASP 96-B.
Astronomers expect to detect the fingerprints of oxygen, nitrogen, ammonia and carbon in the form of methane and other hydrocarbons when they observe smaller planets that could potentially harbour life. The goal is to find biosignatures of life, that is, chemistry that points to the atmosphere being modified by living organisms.
This initial result barely scratches the surface of the scientific content of the spectrum because of the enormous technical challenge of doing this type of observation.
It is related to the search for alien life.
As the telescope explored the birth and death of stars, the last three images showed the amazing resolution of the telescope.
The ability of the cameras to cut through dense clouds of dust and gas is due to the mid-IR range. The Carina Nebula is a place where stars are born.
He is well suited to study the end of a star's life The stunning Southern Ring Nebula, which was imaged by Webb, is a result of stars getting old. There were never-before-seen details of the waves of matter expelled by the central star. While Hubble was unable to see through the expanding cloud of dust and debris, he was able to see the first look at the binaries star system.
Stephan's Quintet is a group of five galaxies 300 million light-years away from Earth, interacting in a Cosmic Dance. The telescope can simultaneously pick up details of individual stars in these galaxies, see the cold dust and gas fueling star formation within these galaxies and block out the stars, gas and dust to see the material swirling around the super massive black.
The data on hundreds of individual star-forming regions will take months to analyze.
The result of 25 years of work by thousands of scientists, engineers and administrators belonging to an international collaboration of space agencies, companies, research centers and universities around the world is the name of the project. The journey (opens in new tab) was emotional for the project leader. It's hard to say how hard this was. There were a lot of ways it could have gone wrong.
It went well. The greatest space telescope in the world is open for business.
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