James Webb: Telescope's incredible images after 2 years in space

More than 70% of his time is devoted to Spectroscopy. This means sampling light from objects and separating it into the colors of the rainbow.

How scientists can retrieve important information about the chemistry, temperature, density and velocity of targets to be studied.

“You can think of the Webb telescope as a giant spectrograph that occasionally takes beautiful photos,” jokes Eric Smith, a scientist with NASA's James Webb Research Program.

Thursday | The largest planet in the solar system, Jupiter, is visible in infrared light. In the image, bright areas appear at higher altitudes: the tops of convective storm clouds.

James Webb observed the depths of the universe, even without using his abilities to the full Show us the galaxies that existed 13.5 billion years ago.

Many of these cosmic systems are brighter, more massive and more mature than many scientists thought after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago.

“We thought we would see diffuse blobs of stars, but we saw fully formed galaxies, with perfect spiral arms,” ​​Professor Gillian Wright, director of the UK Center for Astronomical Technology, explains to BBC News.

“Theorists are working to understand how these mature structures began in the universe. In this sense, the Web is really changing scientific thinking,” he adds.

M51 | Whirlpool Galaxy M51 can see the night sky using simple devices. Here, the most powerful space telescope ever launched uses its incredible capabilities to study its complex spiral arms.

Chameleon I | The Chameleon I molecular cloud is 630 light-years from Earth. It was here, at about -260 degrees Celsius, that Webb discovered a type of ice molecule that had never been observed before..

Sagittarius C | The Webb Telescope observes the center of our galaxy, close to a supermassive black hole. There are about 500,000 stars in this picture, spanning about 50 light years. The blue color on the left highlights the hydrogen gas activity in the region.

Not only did the first galaxies surprise scientists with their ability to form stars; The size of black holes in the centers of galaxies.

At the center of our Milky Way is a “monster”. 4 billion times the mass of the Sun.

One theory suggests that these giants were formed over time by the accumulation of many small black holes produced as remnants of exploding stars (supernovae).

“But the initial evidence from JWST is that some of these early supermassive black holes may have completely outgrown this stellar state,” said researcher Adam Cornall of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

“There is a scenario where large gas clouds in the early universe could violently collapse and become black holes.”

NGC 3256 | This is what happens when two galaxies collide. The event in the picture is estimated to have occurred about 500 million years ago. This collision leads to the formation of new stars that light up the surrounding gas and dust.

Crab Nebula | The famous supernova remnant was first discovered by Chinese astronomers in 1054. It is located 6,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Taurus.

When the James Webb Telescope was launched at Christmas 2021, it was believed to operate for about 10 years. This is because the device needs fuel to stay active 1.5 million km from Earth.

But it flew into orbit on an Ariane rocket launched by European researchers, and its fuel reserves are more accurate. They will be enough for the next 20 yearsIf not yet.

This means that instead of rushing through observations, astronomers can take a more strategic approach when working with the telescope.

“We thought we'd be wasting revenue (if the observations were accelerated) that we didn't have to do,” says NASA's Smith.

One activity that will soon accelerate is conducting “deep fields”: long-term observations of specific regions of the sky that allow telescopes to observe light from fainter, more distant galaxies.

This is how telescopes discover the first galaxies and perhaps some of the first stars to shine in the universe.

Saturn | The famous ringed planet appears very dark in this image because the abundant methane gas strongly absorbs infrared light. To the left of the photo you can see three of Saturn's moons.

HH212 | A young star, about 50,000 years old, shoots jets of energy from both poles, causing hydrogen molecules to glow pink. The entire system is 1.6 light years in diameter.

The famous Hubble telescope observed only one corner of the universe for several days.

“I don't think we'll need the hundreds of hours of exposure that Hubble requires, but I do think we'll need several deep fields,” predicts researcher Emma Curtis-Lake of the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom.

“We've had very long exposures with JWST and seen many variations, so we can't devote everything to a small area because there's no guarantee we'll find something really interesting there,” he explains.

Jades | The JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey Project, also known as Jades, discovered the galaxy Jades-GS-z13-0, observed 325 million years after the Big Bang.

A constellation of stars IC 348 | Thin filaments of gas and dust flow between clusters of bright stars. In this image, the telescope detected a brown dwarf star, or “failed star.” This system has three to four times the mass of Jupiter.

Astronomer Massimo Stiavelli from the Space Telescope Science Institute dreams of finding a star; That is, A It bears the signature of the original chemistry from the Big Bang And it is not contaminated by elements created later in cosmic history.

“When they explode we should see them as supernovae,” explains Webb, head of the mission office.

“To achieve this, we need to start observing the same places year after year, with the aim of detecting them before and after they erupt. They are very rare and we have to be very lucky.”

EARENDEL | The most distant individual star ever observed is called Earendel. James Webb confirmed that its light took 12.9 billion years to reach us. This light is driven by the gravitational pull of the foreground galaxies.

Orion Nebula | The famous part of the star system can be seen by the naked eye as a point in the sky. A spacecraft traveling at the speed of light (almost 300,000 km per second) would take more than four years to cross the scene captured by Webb.

RHO OPHIUCHI | This cloud complex is the closest star-forming region to Earth, just 400 light-years away. The star that illuminates the main white hole is a few million years old.