{"id":11413,"date":"2022-07-10T18:08:11","date_gmt":"2022-07-10T10:08:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/astronomers-eagerly-await-first-images-from-the-james-webb-space-telescope\/"},"modified":"2022-07-10T18:08:11","modified_gmt":"2022-07-10T10:08:11","slug":"astronomers-eagerly-await-first-images-from-the-james-webb-space-telescope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/astronomers-eagerly-await-first-images-from-the-james-webb-space-telescope\/","title":{"rendered":"Astronomers eagerly await first images from the James Webb Space Telescope"},"content":{"rendered":"

STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION<\/p>\n

\"\"
Artist\u2019s concept of the James Webb Space Telescope as it appears in space. Credit: ESA\/ATG medialab<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

After six months of tests and checkout, NASA\u2019s James Webb Space Telescope is finally ready to open a new window on the universe, capturing the faint light of the first stars and galaxies, probing the mysteries of black holes and studying the atmospheres of alien worlds.<\/p>\n

On Tuesday, NASA will unveil the first color images from the $10 billion observatory, photos expected to rival or surpass the first spectacular images from the repaired Hubble Space Telescope nearly three decades ago.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re going to give humanity a new view of the cosmos, and it\u2019s a view that we\u2019ve never seen before,\u201d NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told reporters during a preview briefing. \u201cOne of those images \u2026 is the deepest image of our universe that has ever been taken. And we\u2019re only beginning to understand what Webb can and will do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hubble went on to become one of the most iconic instruments in astronomical history, helping astronomers pin down the age of the universe, confirming the presence of supermassive black holes, capturing the deepest views of the cosmos ever collected and providing fly-by class images of planets in Earth\u2019s solar system.<\/p>\n

But Webb, operating at just a few degrees above absolute zero behind a tennis-court size sunshade, promises to push the boundaries of human knowledge even deeper with a 21.3-foot-wide segmented primary mirror capable of detecting the faint, stretched-out infrared light from the first generation of stars to light up after the Big Bang.<\/p>\n

Launched on Christmas Day, Webb is stationed in a gravitationally stable orbit nearly a million miles from Earth. For the past six months, engineers and scientists have been working through a complex series of deployments, activations and checkouts, fine tuning the telescope\u2019s focus and optimizing the performance of its four science instruments.<\/p>\n

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This image of Carina Nebula, one of The James Webb Space Telescope\u2019s first observing targets, was captured with the Hubble Space Telescope\u2019s Wide Field Camera 3 instrument in 2010. Credit: NASA, ESA, Mario Livio (STScI), Hubble 20th Anniversary Team (STScI)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The images released Tuesday, selected by an international team of astronomers, will \u201cdemonstrate to the world that Webb is, in fact, ready for science, and that it produces excellent and spectacular results,\u201d said Klaus Pontoppidan, Webb project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd it\u2019s also to highlight the breadth, the sheer breadth of science that can be done with Webb and to highlight all of the four science instruments,\u201d he added. \u201cAnd last but not least, to celebrate the beginning of normal science operations.\u201d<\/p>\n

The targets for Webb\u2019s first public images include:<\/p>\n

\u2013The Carina Nebula: A vast star-forming region in the constellation Carina some 7,600 light years from Earth that\u2019s four times as large as the Orion Nebula. The Carina Nebula is the home of the most luminous known star in the Milky Way as well as the Eta Carinae binary system, which includes a massive sun expected to explode in a supernova blast in the near future (astronomically speaking).<\/p>\n

\u2013Southern Ring Nebula: An expanding cloud of gas a half light year across that was ejected from a dying star. Relatively low-mass stars like Earth\u2019s sun will end their lives by blowing off their outer layers, forming so-called \u201cplanetary nebulas\u201d while their cores shrink and slowly cool.<\/p>\n

\u2013Stephen\u2019s Quintet: A collection of five galaxies in the constellation Pegasus 290 million light years from Earth that was discovered in 1877, the first such close-together grouping of galaxies to be detected. Four of the five galaxies are gravitationally interacting in a slow-motion merger.<\/p>\n

\u2013WASP-96b: An unusual cloudless exoplanet 1,150 light years away that\u2019s about half the size of Jupiter, orbiting its sun every 3.4 days. By spectroscopically analyzing light from the parent star as it passes through the exoplanet\u2019s atmosphere on the way to Earth, astronomers can tease out details about its chemical composition.<\/p>\n

\u2013SMACS J0723.3-7327: The combined gravity of countless stars in huge galaxy clusters like this one can as a powerful lens if the alignment is just right, magnifying the light from more distant objects in the far background to provide a deeper look back across space and time than would otherwise be possible.<\/p>\n

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Stephen\u2019s Quintet, a group of five galaxies in the constellation Pegasus. Four of the galaxies are gravitationally interacting. Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cThe first images will include observations that span the range of Webb science themes,\u201d said Pontoppidan. \u201cFrom the early universe, the deepest infrared view of the cosmos to date. We will also see an example of how galaxies interact and grow, and how these cataclysmic collisions between galaxies drive the process of star formation.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ll see a couple of examples from the life cycle of stars, starting from the birth of stars, where Webb can reveal new, young stars emerging from their natal cloud of gas and dust, to the death of stars, like a dying star seeding the galaxy with new elements and new dust that may one day become part of new planetary systems.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last but not least, he said, the team will show off the first chemical fingerprints from the atmosphere of an exoplanet.<\/p>\n

One of the Hubble Space Telescope\u2019s most astonishing images was its initial \u201cdeep field\u201d look at a tiny patch of seemingly empty sky over a 10-day period in 1995. To the amazement of professionals and the public alike, that long-exposure image revealed more than 3,000 galaxies of every shape, size and age, some of them the oldest, most distant ever seen.<\/p>\n

Subsequent Hubble deep fields pushed even farther back in time, detecting the faint light of galaxies that were shining within about 500 million years of the Big Bang. How stars formed and got organized so quickly into galactic structures is still a mystery, as is the development of the supermassive black holes at their cores.<\/p>\n

Webb\u2019s four instruments are expected to push the boundaries still closer to the beginning of galaxy formation. A test image from the telescope\u2019s Canadian-built Fine Guidance Sensor, one that wasn\u2019t optimized for the detection of extremely faint objects, nonetheless revealed thousands of galaxies.<\/p>\n

Webb\u2019s look at SMACS 0723 is expected to demonstrate the enormous reach of the observatory.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is really only the beginning, we\u2019re only scratching the surface,\u201d Pontoppidan said. \u201cWe have in the first images, a few days worth of observations. Looking forward, we have many years of observation, so we can only imagine what that will be.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION Artist\u2019s concept of the James Webb Space Telescope as it appears in space. Credit: ESA\/ATG medialab After six months of tests and checkout, NASA\u2019s James Webb Space Telescope is finally ready to open a new window on the universe, capturing the faint light of the first stars and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11413"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11413"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11413\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}