James Webb Space Telescope

Analysis: astronomers are hoping future images will show 'cosmic dawn', the forming of the first galaxies 13.5bn years ago.

For researchers, the waves of relief are now waves of excitement: now the real work begins. Webb will do more than look back to the early stirrings of the universe. Against the odds, the observatory made it to the launch pad, reached its destination unscathed, and appears to be operating beautifully. On Tuesday, Nasa will release more images to give a flavour of what the telescope can do. Nasa’s Hubble defined our view of the heavens for the past 30 years, and now Webb, its successor, is poised to shape our understanding for many decades to come. Webb’s impressive performance comes from its remote position in space, a spot 1m miles from Earth called the second Lagrange point, or L2, its large mirror, and the extreme sensitivity of its infrared instruments.

Among the newly released images are breathtaking views of a distant galaxy group called Stephan's Quintet that was discovered in 1877.

Researchers have said that Webb could unlock mysteries from as far back as 100 million years after the Big Bang — observations that could help astronomers understand how the modern universe came to be. As such, the telescope is expected to provide first-of-its-kind infrared views of the universe, and capture some never-before-seen cosmic objects. Scientists have said the observatory, which will be able to see deeper into space and in greater detail than any telescope that has come before it, could revolutionize human understanding of the universe.

NASA revealed the first science-quality images from the James Webb Space Telescope on July 12, 2022, marking the beginning of the observatory's tenure.

Regardless of what it is called, the telescope is set to make history. Leading up to the release of the first images, some astronomers have expressed mixed emotions on Twitter, as excitement for the new data and dislike of the name mingle. Over the years, Webb was sometimes severely strapped for funding, and at least once was in danger of being canceled due to soaring costs. "This is just one sliver of data that Webb is providing us, using the NIRISS instrument specifically." Startling new insights could start to stream in quickly as research begins on every conceivable scale in our universe, from our solar system to the very first galaxies. "You get a bunch of what looks like bumps and wiggles to some people, but it's actually full of information," Colón said. Stephan's Quintet is a group of five galaxies that appear preposterously close together, about 290 million light-years away from Earth. Four of the galaxies are locked in a sort of cosmic dance that will one day result in the quartet colliding, and three sport elongated, spiral-like shapes from their interactions. The gas giant world, about half the size of Jupiter, is the closest of the newly revealed objects, at about 1,150 light-years away. Together, the images and data represent the huge potential of the telescope to contribute to scientific research, and signal Webb's transition into an active scientific instrument. The Carina Nebula, one of the brightest and largest nebulas in the sky, is 7,600 light-years away from Earth. Spanning over 300 light-years across, it includes Eta Carinae, a dying supergiant star on the brink of a massive explosion, as well as Trumper 14, one of the youngest known clusters of star formation. The only known cloudless planet, WASP-96 b has been an enigma and a prime target for further study since its discovery in 2013. "This stunning vista of the cosmic cliff of the Carina Nebula reveals new details about this vast stellar nursery.

Two Northwestern University astrophysicists have gained coveted early access to the James Webb Space Telescope, beginning observations this summer.

If the team is able to confirm that the sources are stars, that would imply that planets, too, could form in stressed environments near galaxies’ central supermassive black holes. Throughout her career, Strom has used some of the world’s largest telescopes to address this question, leveraging their enormous technological power to observe “adolescent” galaxies in the very distant universe. With CECILIA, we have a chance to directly measure the chemistry of distant galaxies, using an incredibly powerful method that is only possible with JWST. CECILIA will be the cipher, similar to the Rosetta Stone, that enables astronomers to crack the code and accurately interpret the thousands of other spectra of distant galaxies that JWST will observe throughout its lifetime.” Named after Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, one of the first women to earn a Ph.D. in astronomy, the CECILIA Survey will observe the spectra (or amount of light across different wavelengths) from distant galaxies in order to decipher the galaxies’ chemical compositions. This project is led by Nadeen Sabha at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. Next year, Yusef-Zadeh also will lead a project using JWST to examine Sagittarius A*, our galaxy’s central supermassive black hole. “A key piece of evidence is what those galaxies are made of.

A "stellar nursery" and a "cosmic dance" are among James Webb's first batch of colour images.

Astronomers refer here to a "cosmic reef", or "cosmic cliff" - a kind of broad demarcation between dust in the bottom half, and then gas in the top half. But this treasure trove comes from only a few days of observations, and so far the telescope's only looked at a minute fraction of the sky. Key partners on the Webb project are the European and Canadian space agencies. And this was the great hope - that we would have Webb working alongside Hubble. They have different strengths and being able to compare and contrast will give scientists a new dimension to their studies. These first images from the James Webb Space Telescope are jaw-dropping. But the officials at Nasa who are in charge of the old warhorse have just submitted a five-year budget plan. Except in this Webb image, we not only see the stars - our eyes are drawn to all that gas and the dust. The Southern Ring, or "Eight-Burst" nebula, is a giant expanding sphere of gas and dust that's been lit up by a dying star in the centre. This Webb image doesn't look that different from the Hubble version at first glance, but the new telescope's infrared sensitivity will pull out different features for astronomers to study. Four of the five galaxies within the quintet are locked in a cosmic dance of repeated close encounters. Everywhere you see a red arc-like structure - that's something - a galaxy - way off in the distance and far further back in time. It's known to astronomers as a "gravitational lens" because the mass of the cluster bends and magnifies the light of objects that are much further away.

Scientists 'thrilled and relieved' to get first images from most powerful space-based observatory ever built.

Since it blasted off in December, scientists have endured a nailbiting six months as the observatory has unfolded, deployed a sunshield the size of a tennis court, and aligned its 18 gold-plated mirrors en route to its destination 1m miles from Earth. This revealed the presence of water vapour, though the planet is too hot to harbour liquid water. It’s more than capable of doing that kind of science, superbly well.” “We’re seeing these galaxies in detail we’ve never been able to see before,” said Dr Jane Rigby, an operations project scientist on Webb. The “deep field” image released on Monday showcased Webb’s ability to harness the gravitational forces of galaxy clusters to magnify far more distant galaxies behind them. “I am so thrilled and so relieved,” said Dr John Mather, Nasa’s senior project scientist on the mission.

Cosmic cliffs and dancing galaxies: NASA's James Webb telescope begins new era of astronomy · "Each will give humanity a view of the universe that we've never ...

The telescope also found water vapour in the atmosphere of a faraway gas planet. Like a camera held in one's hand, the structure must remain as stable as possible to achieve the best shots. "We've seen the effect of what happens when a planet and its atmosphere passes in front of the star, and the star light filters through the atmosphere, and you can break that down into wavelengths of light," said NASA's Knicole Colon. A dim star at the center of the Southern Ring Nebula was revealed for the first time to be cloaked in dust, as it spews out rings of gas and dust in its death throes. The cosmic cliffs of a stellar nursery, a quintet of galaxies bound in a celestial dance: the James Webb Space Telescope released its next wave of images on July 12, heralding a new era of astronomy. The latest tranche included the "mountains" and "valleys" of a star-forming region called NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula, dubbed the "Cosmic Cliffs," 7,600 light years away.

NASA released detailed images showing stellar nurseries and distant galaxies.

The release comes less than 24 hours after President Biden unveiled the first image from the set, showing a galaxy cluster called SMACS 0723. On the bottom, similar imagery captured by the older Hubble Space Telescope. NASA released detailed images showing stellar nurseries and distant galaxies.

“Wow. Wow. This. This near infrared image is … wow,” Alex Lockwood, a James Webb Space Telescope project scientist, managed to utter as she and astronomer Karl ...

According to NASA, the image shows for the first time “previously invisible areas of star birth.” “We humans really are connected to the universe.” Stephan’s Quintet is a group of five galaxies whose gravitational forces have locked four of them in a “cosmic dance,” said Giovanna Giardino, an astronomer with the European Space Agency. Two are in the process of merging into a single galaxy, she added. “We knew this was a binary star, but we didn’t really see much of the actual star that produced the nebula,” Gordon said. Instead, it represents the final life stages of a dying star that’s “expelled a large fraction of its mass in successive waves,” said Karl Gordon, mid-infrared astronomer and Webb instrument scientist. But we also know we’re going to find things we never even imagined and it’s just going to open up a whole new world of astrophysics.”

All these distinct lights are contained in a tiny speck of space. How tiny? Scientists proposed this way of envisioning: Take a single grain of sand, hold it ...

For the farther we see, the humbler we become, and the fruit of humility is gratitude. We turn steadily around a small but reliable star, and were it not for the problems we cause ourselves, we would live in a near utopia. It’s not too much to say that a handful of images published over the space of 24 hours has already justified the decades of work and $10 billion invested in the Webb telescope. This is Hubble on steroids, the closest humans have yet come to glimpsing the true dimensions and inner workings of the universe. The word gets tossed around a lot, but the scale of it is not easily grasped. That is the speck of space Webb looked at to acquire its first observation.

Images of five targets showcase the most distant objects ever observed in outer space.

In the mid-infrared image on the right, we can see the white dwarf more clearly, surrounded by dust, a view made possible because of the power of JWST’s instruments. The gravitational interactions pull broad trails of gas and dust away from the galaxies, and Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) shows huge shockwaves as one of the galaxies, NGC 7318 B, slams through the cluster. This massive landscape of cosmic mountains and valleys in the Carina Nebula is known as the “Cosmic Cliffs.” Here the bubbles, cavities, and jets of newborn stars are made visible through the dust in a way that was impossible when the Hubble Space Telescope imaged this region of intense star formation. This pair of images of the Southern Ring Nebula shows two powerful perspectives on the same binary star system, a white dwarf and its younger counterpart. The youngest stars appear as red dots in the darker areas of the dust cloud; others are emitting ‘protostellar’ jets typical of early star birth. The space telescope, a project 30 years in the making, launched in December 2021 and arrived at its destination point in January. After a lengthy “unfolding” process, JWST turned its 21-foot mirror on the stars.

The five pictures from the most powerful space observatory ever launched offer a deep look back in time and the promise of stellar things to come.

Scientists are ready with well-laid plans to explore the early universe, chart how galaxies form and evolve over time, observe the lifecycles of stars, and delve into the mysteries of exoplanets. Our own atmosphere blocks infrared light from space, which is one reason the Webb has to operate from orbit. But the fact that it’s now in orbit, and operational, stands as a testament to scientific collaboration on a massive scale. The roughly $10 billion telescope allows us to see deeper into space, and farther back towards the origins of our universe, than humans have ever been able to see before. Though Webb will allow us to explore deeper into space than ever before, the telescope will do so much more. Webb also captured images of Stephan’s Quintet, a compact group of five galaxies found in the constellation Pegasus, and of the intriguing planet WASP-96b, a gassy giant some 1,150 light-years from Earth.

The first photos from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have been released. Here's everything you need to know about space's hottest new photographer.

The Webb telescope cost $10 billion. NASA's website describes Webb as the government official who did more for science than perhaps any other and a fitting recipient to be the namesake of the Next Generation Space Telescope. The James Webb telescope is designed to capture light 100 times fainter than that captured by Hubble. As for the planets in our own solar system – the Webb telescope can see those too, of course. The telescope looks back in time using gravitational lensing. They are seen in part because the James Webb Telescope targeted a cluster called SMACS 0723, which has a gravitational field so strong it magnifies the light of older, more distant galaxies.

Much-anticipated images from Hubble's successor show, in brilliant and startling detail, far corners of the unseen universe.

We're going to answer so many questions and then, of course, we're going to have more questions that we never dreamed of. "From a scientific perspective, there is something about humanity that just really wants to know about where we are and to where we came from," LaMassa says. Just being involved in seeing all these different subsystems that need to work together—having 18 different individual mirror segments working as one—for all the instruments getting initial data and starting to process it and getting things working to the point where we could take these amazing images," she says. The space telescope, Hubble's successor, will be able to see back in time, capturing images such as the first galaxies that formed after the big bang, and will offer much-more-detailed views of nebulas and star systems in the distant universe. "And so, we're really seeing for the first time what galaxies looked like in the early universe." But an endeavor doesn't get any more cosmic than that of the $9.7 billion James Webb Space Telescope, which in December launched on a journey 1 million miles from Earth and today released its first batch of images from space.

NASA released five new images from the James Webb Space Telescope, revealing incredible details of ancient galaxies, stars and the presence of water in the ...

Webb is also excellently suited to study the end of a star’s life. The large white galaxies in the middle of the image belong to the cluster and are similar in age to the Sun and Earth. Surrounding and interspersed among the cluster galaxies are more distant galaxies, but stretched into spectacular arcs as if seen through a magnifying glass. During this transit, a portion of the star’s light was filtered through the planet’s atmosphere and left a “chemical fingerprint” in the light’s unique spectrum. It is like the universe in high definition, and I encourage you to look at the full resolution image and zoom in to truly appreciate the details. Webb was designed to collect light across the entire red to mid-infrared spectrum – wavelengths of light that are blocked by Earth’s atmosphere. In them are the oldest galaxies ever seen by human eyes, evidence of water on a planet 1,000 light-years away and incredible details showing the birth and death of stars.

The first set of science images from the James Webb Space Telescope revealed marvellous stars and galaxies. Space reporter Leah Crane answers all your ...

What’s special about WASP-96b is that it isn’t cloudy – the new spectrum shows some evidence of clouds and haze, but not much. The images are all of systems that are already very well studied, but we just have far more detail now than ever before. I’ve seen 13.5 billion light years quoted – that seems very close to the age of the universe at about 13.8 billion years. In fact, the picture of Stephan’s Quintet that was just released is providing some interesting information on one already. JWST should be able to see between 100 and 250 million years after the big bang! On 12 July, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) released its first set of full-resolution science images.

NASA says its extended inquiry into what Webb's role might've been in homophobic government policies is complete, an update is coming, and the name stays.

"Memorialization is important because it expresses a nation's values," Szkody said in the follow-up letter. American Astronomical Society President Paula Szkody sent a letter to Nelson in November requesting a public and formal report on the investigation and calling for a more inclusive naming process. "On the specific allegations against Webb the evidence is clear," Oluseyi concluded. "The records clearly show that Webb planned and participated in meetings during which he handed over homophobic material," the column reads. In May 2021, four astronomers circulated a petition that gathered more than 1,700 signatures from scientists and others calling for the telescope to be renamed. James Webb was NASA administrator, the agency's highest-ranking official, from 1961 until 1968, shepherding the agency through a golden era, including much of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs.

The first images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have been released by NASA, following an initial reveal by US President Joe Biden.

JWST’s view of the galaxies in infrared light shows as never before how those interactions are driving the formation of stars inside the galaxies. First up might be the diabetes drug metformin. The power of JWST’s optics are so great that individual stars can even be seen inside the galaxies. One of those observations was a detailed study of the atmosphere of a gas giant planet 1,000 light-years from Earth, called WASP-96 b. Countless more stunning vistas and copious amounts of invaluable data are set to come our way. JWST’s stunning first science image, which was unveiled by Biden on Monday, is a deep view into the universe showing thousands of galaxies, showcasing the immense power of the $10 billion telescope.

The cosmic cliffs of a stellar nursery and a quintet of galaxies bound in a celestial dance: NASA released the next wave of images from the James Webb Space ...

Like a camera held in one's hand, the structure has to remain very still for the best shots, with Webb's engineers minimising its wobble to just 17 millionths of a millimetre. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement