Thirty years after its conception, the James Webb space telescope launched from French Guiana. It passed the moon on December 28th. After five minutes of firing its thrusters, it settled into its final position about 1.5m away. It produced its first image on July 12th, showing us distant galaxies that were 13 billion years old.
Since then, the telescope has been adding to this amazing start. The most detailed images of Jupiter we have ever seen are just a short distance away.
The author of a forthcoming book said that there were many reasons to be skeptical. If any tiny thing went wrong, the entire mission would have been scrapped. She said it was a long time of anxiety.
The need to burn valuable fuel was one of the major sources of uncertainty after the satellite launch. It was flawless. We will get 20 years of data instead of five. It's amazing.
Here are some of the images this telescope has produced, and what they show about how it works and the universe itself.
Joe Biden revealed the first image of the telescope, showing a cluster of stars. A single grain of rice is held at arm's length on the surface of the Earth. The most powerful telescope until now, Hubble, can only see things in a small patch. You are going to find something in the background if you look at the sky.
Like all of the images produced by Webb, what you can see here is not visible light, but signals in the infrared spectrum captured by the satellite in mono, sent back to Earth as one and zeros, and then reconstructed. The wavelength of the signals tells us how hot the source was. It's easier for scientists to find areas for further study if the images are coloured like this.
The star at the center of this picture is in our own universe. The fuzzy white dots are from a cluster that was 4.5 billion years old. As far as 13 billion light years away, the cluster in the centre is a kind of magnifying lens for other galaxies. As the arcs streaking across the image show, red objects are caked in Cosmic Dust, a crucial ingredient of star formation, while green ones are full of hydrocarbons.
The image of a large cloud of dust and gas studded with stars is similar to the one captured by Hubble. The Carina Nebula is a part of our own universe. It looks like the Lake District to me. The value of this image is in what it shows us about the benefits of looking at things in the dark.
It allows you to pierce through the dust because it scatters light so that you can't see the stars that have formed. We can see through the dust to the three-dimensional structure of the nebula.
The image was created from more than 150m of data and shows a group of galaxies in the Pegasus constellation and gives scientists the means to see how their interaction causes the formation of stars. It is relevant to my work and is my favorite. One of the four galaxies is interacting with a black hole while the other is not. If you zoom in you can see individual stars, which is amazing since we have barely been able to do that with our closest galaxy, Andromeda, and these are far away.
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The galaxy to the left of the formation is closer to the stars than the other ones. A black hole is 24 times the mass of the sun. The source of light is bright. The black hole is lit up in all its glory, thanks to the gas swirling around it.
This isn't an image, but it's still exciting to astrophysicists The data shows that this planet is 1,150 light years away.
The gas giant has taken away some of the starlight as it passes through its atmosphere to reveal the unique signature of water.
The results show what the telescope is capable of. The planet is very close to its star. It is easier to see the light passing through the atmosphere when it is in front of the star. It suggests that with the harder ones that are further away and less likely to pass in front of their star, you won't be wasting your time. It is the idea of finding a twin that looks great for life.
It turns out that the primary purpose of the project is to tell us more about light that came from distant stars billions of years ago, but also to produce stunning images of our own solar system. I thought it would be washed out because it is so bright, but I was surprised by the level of detail here. They used different wavelength to capture different things.
The red haze at the planet's north and south poles are caused by particles from the sun interacting with the planet's magnetic field. The Great Red Spot is white because it reflects so much sunlight. There are areas where the light has pierced further into the atmosphere.
Images like this are important for their beauty and will be valuable for scientists. She said that everyone is interested in the world they live in.
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