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The big day has finally arrived and the James Webb Space Telescope is cranking out official science images. Everyone at Goddard Space Flight Center was amazed at the quality of the photographs. They were expecting them to be great but not anywhere near this quality.
First Webb Telescope images released
On Tuesday, July 12, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson was on hand to reveal the first five “groundbreaking” James Webb Space Telescope images, live from Goddard in Greenbelt, Maryland. They decided to impress the public with a range of photos that run “the astronomical gamut.”
One shows “some of the oldest and most distant objects in the universe.” Another isn’t even an image. It’s a dataset graphic “revealing the composition of the atmosphere of a planet in an alien solar system around 1000 light-years away.” It nailed down dihydrogen monoxide as one of those chemicals.
Starting with one informatively titled SMACS 0723, Webb managed to capture “the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe to date.” They’re calling it “Webb’s First Deep Field.” This galaxy cluster “is overflowing with detail.” The photo also gets a ribbon as “the most clear and full infrared image of the distant universe ever produced.”
Bill Nelson loves to put it in perspective. “This image covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length. It’s just a tiny sliver of the vast universe.” One team member says the instrument is so sensitive they can’t “find a single spot where there was mere blank sky.”
The specialty of James Webb is the ability to image the infrared spectrum. That can’t be done from Earth at all and it’s tricky in space, too.
Looking close at that photo shows “white galaxies that were formed roughly around the time that the Earth and Sun were also being formed. Some galaxies look stretched and pulled because they’ve been distorted by gravity from black holes or supermassive galaxies with black holes at their center, as Einstein famously predicted.”
Caught on two cameras
The next new image NASA can impress the public with is the Southern Ring Nebula. Two different cameras were used to shoot the side by side comparison of planetary nebula NGC 3132. It certainly doesn’t look like it’s 2,500 light-years away. You can see the “successive waves” where the dying star blasted out “large amounts of mass” a little at a time.
The “bubbly, foamy” stuff on the edges is gas and dust lit up by molecular hydrogen. It looks blue in the mid-infrared shot. Experts fought over the “eager egg” at the top and finally decided it’s a galaxy seen edge on.
The next major new release is called Stephan’s quintet. That highlights “a compact group of galaxies” locked “in a sort of cosmic dance.” It’s 290 million light years away in Pegasus. The honchos call it “especially significant” because it shows the “type of interaction that drives the evolution of galaxies and can be the mechanisms for galaxies’ growth.”
It also “provides scientists with new insights into how galactic interactions lead to star formation, as well as reveals more detail about a black hole in that region.”
The Carina Nebula appears as a spacey landscape of mountains and valleys. What looks like an impressionist painting is actually “the edge of a nearby, young, star-forming region called NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula.” It will tell the experts a lot about how stars form. They finished off the official images with the atmosphere study for exoplanet WASP-96 b.
What they found is “the distinct signature of water, along with evidence for clouds and haze, in the atmosphere surrounding a hot, puffy gas giant planet orbiting a distant Sun-like star.” For bonus points, the team released a calibration shot they took of Jupiter. They were surprised to see a rare glimpse of the gas giant’s elusive ring, along with the great red spot and some moons.
