Science | Astrophysics
The NASA/ESA Infrared Observatory has imaged a nursery of stars, interacting galaxies and dying stars in unprecedented detail.
The oldest documented light in the history of the Universe, over 13 billion years ago, let me repeat that, 13 billion years. It is difficult to understand », acknowledged President Joe Biden when he presented
the First Webb Deep Field last morning. The first scientific image of
space telescope of NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian (CSA) is dizzying.
The Carina Nebula, a stellar nursery where astrophysicists have discovered hundreds of new stars. /
The reddest formations are the oldest known objects. They are galaxies that shone only 600 million years after the Big Bang, the great explosion with which everything began 13.8 billion years ago. And the image, as NASA Administrator General Bill Nelson pointed out, corresponds to “a piece of sky the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length.” Imagine what remains to be discovered.
But if the time travel that we have already done with the Webb is incredible, even more so is its speed in extracting its secrets from the Cosmos. “We took that image before breakfast. What is surprising about the James Webb is the speed at which we can make discoveries”, said astrophysicist Jane Rigby regarding the image of the early Universe. Something that Hubble takes weeks to do, Webb does in a day.
The Southern Ring Nebula is caused by gas and dust ejected by a dying star and is seen here imaged by two Webb instruments.
“It’s just the beginning,” stressed all the scientists who took the floor this afternoon in the presentation of the first images of the infrared observatory. Not only beautiful and breathtaking, but also scientifically valuable, they include views of a star nursery, a dying star, and interacting galaxies. Furthermore, Webb has already made the most complete spectrum of an exoplanet.
The most spectacular photo is that of a stellar nursery, the Carina Nebula. It is a gigantic cloud of gas and dust from which stars and planets form, just as the Sun and Earth did 4.6 billion years ago. The highest ‘peaks’ in the image reach 58 light-years, about 580 billion km, and each bright point is a star.
Stephan’s Quintet, in which four galaxies are caught in a cosmic dance. /
If stars are born in the Carina Nebula, the Southern Ring Planetary Nebula is the remains of a dying star. in the center of the image, which has been emitting gas and dust in all directions for thousands of years. It is part of a binary system, of two stars, and its companion is in an earlier evolutionary stage. Another photo corresponds to Stephan’s Quintet, a group of five galaxies, four of which are caught in a cosmic dance. That Webb image also shows black hole-driven outflows in a level of detail never seen before.
The least spectacular of the images, but very valuable scientifically, is the spectrum of WASP-96 b, a gas giant like Jupiter located 1,150 light-years away. By detecting signs of water in its atmosphere, Webb makes clear its key role in the coming years in the search for potentially habitable worlds by determining the composition of their atmospheres.
The most complete spectrum of an extrasolar planet’s atmosphere demonstrates Webb’s ability to find habitable worlds. /
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