Paris. the space telescope James Webb, in orbit since the middle of the year to scrutinize the confines of the universe and the atmosphere of distant planets, it delivered exceptional images throughout 2022, just a sketch of what could come in the not too distant future.
The results of the Webb, located 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, far exceed those of the veteran telescope hubble, which is still in operation, but without the precision of its young competitor’s lenses.
Thanks to its successful launch, the James Webb it should operate for at least 20 years, instead of the 10 initially envisioned.
“It behaves much better than we expected,” Massimo Stiavelli, head of mission at the Space Telescope Sciences Institute, who pilots the 6.5-ton device, assured Afp.
“The instruments are more efficient, the lenses more precise and stable,” which is key to achieving sharp images, he explained.
The images that come from Webb they are initially invisible to the human eye, because they essentially operate in the infrared spectrum, unlike Hubble.
However, thanks to the spectacular coloring of those photographs, he has managed to dazzle the fans.
With that frequency of infrared waves, the James Webb it can detect the weakest light trails in the universe, that is, the dawn of its birth without being affected by stellar nebulae, or analyze the atmosphere of exoplanets with a spectrograph.
The launch of the telescope aboard the Ariane 5, at the end of 2021, it crowned an odyssey started by NASA more than 30 years ago.
After several failures, an investment of 10 billion dollars and the contribution of 10,000 people, the telescope was perfectly placed in its orbit in the middle of the boreal summer, notably with the deployment of a sunshade the size of a soccer field. tennis.
Its main mirror, 6.5 meters in diameter, consists of 18 petals that were gradually opened and calibrated until reaching unmatched precision, with a margin of error of just one micron.
The Webb sent on July 12, 2022, five images that highlighted its capabilities: thousands of galaxies, some formed shortly after the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago.
Months later he was able to photograph Jupiter in great detail, which will help to understand the inner workings of this gigantic gas planet.
Other astonishing color images were the Pillars of Creation, huge structures of gas and dust filled with stars of bluish, red and gray tones.
These images and data invite scientists to “revise their models of star formation,” NASA added.
Just five months after it went into operation, the telescope gave astronomers a glimpse of a galaxy that formed just 350 million years after the Big Bang.
These galaxy formations are much brighter than previously thought and may have formed much earlier than previously thought.
“We have an ‘excess’ of galaxies with respect to theoretical models in the distant universe,” David Elbaz, scientific director of the Department of Astrophysics of the French Commission for Atomic Energy and Alternative Energies, told Afp.
There where hubble saw only “irregularly shaped galaxies,” the precision of the Webb It “turns them into magnificent galactic spirals” in a similar way to ours.
A kind of “universal pattern” that could help unravel the formation of stars.
Regarding exoplanets, the first confirmation of the presence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Wasp 39-b was achieved, in whose clouds photochemical phenomena could occur.
According to Stiavelli, these first observations portend “big surprises” in the not too distant future.
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