{"id":44629,"date":"2024-11-08T01:23:28","date_gmt":"2024-11-07T17:23:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/nearly-three-years-since-launch-webb-is-a-hit-among-astronomers\/"},"modified":"2024-11-08T01:23:28","modified_gmt":"2024-11-07T17:23:28","slug":"nearly-three-years-since-launch-webb-is-a-hit-among-astronomers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/nearly-three-years-since-launch-webb-is-a-hit-among-astronomers\/","title":{"rendered":"Nearly three years since launch, Webb is a hit among astronomers"},"content":{"rendered":"

From its halo-like orbit nearly a million miles from Earth, the James Webb Space Telescope is seeing farther than human eyes have ever seen.<\/p>\n

In May, astronomers announced that Webb detected the most distant galaxy found so far, a fuzzy blob of red light that we see as it existed just 290 million years after the Big Bang. Light from this galaxy, several hundreds of millions of times the mass of the Sun, traveled more than 13 billion years until photons fell onto Webb\u2019s gold-coated mirror.<\/p>\n

A few months later, in July, scientists released an image Webb captured of a planet circling a star slightly cooler than the Sun nearly 12 light-years from Earth. The alien world is several times the mass of Jupiter and the closest exoplanet to ever be directly imaged. One of Webb\u2019s science instruments has a coronagraph to blot out bright starlight, allowing the telescope to resolve the faint signature of a nearby planet and use spectroscopy to measure its chemical composition.<\/p>\n

These are just a taste of the discoveries made by the $10 billion Webb telescope since it began science observations in 2022. Judging by astronomers\u2019 interest in using Webb, there are many more to come.<\/p>\n

Breaking records<\/h2>\n

The Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates Webb on behalf of NASA and its international partners, said last week that it received 2,377 unique proposals from science teams seeking observing time on the observatory. The institute released a call for proposals earlier this year for the so-called \u201cCycle 4\u201d series of observations with Webb.<\/p>\n

This volume of proposals represents around 78,000 hours of observing time with Webb, nine times more than the telescope\u2019s available capacity for scientific observations in this cycle. The previous observing cycle had a similar \u201coversubscription rate\u201d but had less overall observing time available to the science community.<\/p>\n

,<\/p>\n

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This composite image of Arp 107, created with data from two of the James Webb Space Telescope\u2019s infrared instruments, reveals a wealth of information about the star formation taking place in these two galaxies and how they collided hundreds of millions of years ago.<\/p>\n

Credit:
\n NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n

More than 600 scientists will review the proposals and select the most promising ones for time on Webb. The largest share of proposals would involve observing \u201chigh-redshift\u201d galaxies among the first generation of galaxies that formed after the Big Bang. Galaxies this old and distant have their light stretched to longer wavelengths due to the expansion of the Universe. Research involving exoplanet atmospheres and stars and stellar populations were the second- and third-most popular science categories in this cycle.<\/p>\n

Webb is a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency. The observatory\u2019s 21.3-foot (6.5-meter) primary mirror and four infrared instruments, tuned to detect faint thermal energy coming from the cold blackness of space, make it a particularly useful general-purpose research platform. In this cycle, astronomers asked for time on Webb to look at targets within the Solar System, exoplanets in our stellar neighborhood, gas and dust suspended in the space between stars, supermassive black holes, and nearby galaxies.<\/p>\n

This is a remarkable range of scientific targets. Only the Hubble Space Telescope can match the breadth of Webb\u2019s scientific targets, but Webb\u2019s larger mirror allows it to observe objects 100 times fainter than Hubble can see.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

This image of the gas-giant exoplanet Epsilon Indi Ab was taken with the coronagraph on the James Webb Space Telescope\u2019s Mid-Infrared Instrument A star symbol marks the location of the host star Epsilon Indi A, whose light has been blocked by the coronagraph.<\/p>\n

Credit:
\n ESA\/Webb, NASA, CSA, STScI, E. Matthews (Max Planck Institute for Astronomy)<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n

In less than two-and-a-half years of science operations, Webb has only teased astronomers of its potential productivity. There is a high probability that Webb will see galaxies even older and more distant than the faint red beacon announced in May. There are thousands more known exoplanets for Webb to study, worlds of all sizes in our own Solar System, and unspeakable grandeur Webb will assuredly reveal in the years ahead.<\/p>\n

It seems astronomers have no shortage of ideas about where to look. Maybe one day, new super heavy-lift rockets or advancements in in-space assembly will make it possible to deploy space telescopes even more sensitive than Webb. Until then, we can be thankful that Webb is performing well and has a good shot of far outliving its original five-year design life. Let\u2019s continue enjoying the show.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From its halo-like orbit nearly a million miles from Earth, the James Webb Space Telescope is seeing farther than human eyes have ever seen. In May, astronomers announced that Webb detected the most distant galaxy found so far, a fuzzy blob of red light that we see as it existed just 290 million years after […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44631,"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":[1661,1560,190,557],"class_list":["post-44629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-astronomy","tag-james-webb-space-telescope","tag-nasa","tag-space-telescope"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44629"}],"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=44629"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44629\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44631"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}