NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope images after revealing the first color image of the White House

Greenbelt, Maryland – After a presidential reveal on Monday, NASA unveiled more exciting images of “first light” from James Webb Space Telescope On Tuesday, showcasing interacting galaxies, the death throes of a slowly dying star and a stellar nursery where huge young suns are born and glowing light carves out huge clouds of gas and dust.

Braced by fans chanting “JWST, JWST,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, senior agency managers and a throng of enthusiastic Webb engineers and scientists look at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, where the new images were released, one at a time. .

“In the words of Carl Sagan famously,” Nelson said, “somewhere there is an incredible thing waiting to be known.” “I believe these words have come true.”

Initially the spectrum of starlight passed through the atmosphere of an exoplanet 1,150 light-years from Earth, providing the chemical fingerprint of the elements in the planet’s atmosphere.

The ability to dissect the atmospheres of exoplanets offers hope that one day astronomers will be able to discover the effects of biological activity on planets in distant solar systems. With more powerful instruments on some future telescopes, it may even be possible to detect byproducts of industrial activity.

Nobody promises such achievements from Webb, but the ability to analyze the atmospheres of exoplanets using the world’s most powerful infrared telescope is a major step in this direction.

“Every image is a new discovery, and every image will give humanity a view of the universe that we have not seen before,” Nelson said.

Next was a stunning view of the Southern Ring Nebula, a half-light-year-wide cloud of expanding gas and debris thrown out by a central star approaching the end of its life as its core ran out of nuclear fuel.

Once again, additional details were evident when compared to shots of the same nebula by Hubble Space Telescope.

Then came a charming photo of Stephen Quint, a well-known group of five galaxies in the constellation of Pegasus 290 million light-years from Earth that was discovered in 1877, the first close group of galaxies to be discovered.

Four of the five galaxies are spiral galaxies interacting gravitationally in a slow-moving train wreck of some kind in the process of merging to eventually become one massive elliptical galaxy.

Galaxy mergers are common throughout the history of the universe, and studying the details of such collisions is one of Webb’s main goals. Based on the image revealed Tuesday, the telescope brings a powerful new instrument to the astronomical workbench.

Finally, Webb’s team has revealed a mind-boggling scene showing part of the Carina Nebula, a vast star-forming region in the southern constellation Carina about 7,600 light-years from Earth, four times the size of the most famous Orion Nebula.

Visible with the naked eye from the Southern Hemisphere, the Carina Nebula is home to the Milky Way’s most famous stars as well as the binary system Eta Carinae, which includes a massive Sun that is predicted to explode in a supernova explosion in the near future.

The part of the nebula that appeared on Tuesday is teeming with young, massive stars as well as the remnants of supernova explosions that indicate the catastrophic death of stars much larger than the sun. Once again, an extraordinary amount of detail emerges.

Images unveiled Tuesday after an initial release Monday at the White House when President Biden unveiled a razor-sharp “deep field“Look at a group of distant galaxies with many arcs of light, and the distorted scenes of background galaxies amplified by the cluster’s combined gravity.

Looking back in space and time more than ever, Biden said, within a few hundred million years from the moment the universe exploded into existence 13.8 billion years ago, the image represents a “new window into the history of our universe.” .

Taken together, the images are clear evidence, if necessary, that Webb is finally ready to begin scientific operations six months after its publication. Christmas Day launch And years of technical problems, management errors and billions in cost overruns.

In the weeks and months since launch, scientists and engineers have deployed and precisely aligned the 18 segments that make up the 21.3-foot-wide Webb Mirror, opening a giant solar barrier to help cool the optics to a few degrees from absolute zero and carefully examining and calibrating the observatory’s four instruments.

“I am very happy and very satisfied,” said John Mather, Nobel Prize winner and chief scientist at the Webb Project. “This was very difficult, and it took a long time. It’s just impossible to say how hard it was. We took a lot of risk by saying we were going to do it, which is almost impossible. But we did it.”

Unlike the iconic Hubble, which mostly observes light in the visible part of the spectrum, Webb has been optimized to study longer wavelength infrared radiation, allowing it to capture light from the dawn of a universe that expanded due to the expansion of space itself over the past 13.8 billion years.

One of Webb’s primary goals is to capture light from the first generation of stars and galaxies in the process of forming in the aftermath of the Big Bang.

But the $10 billion telescope will also be used to tackle other outstanding questions, mapping the evolution of galaxies through time, how they grow and merge in catastrophic collisions, the life cycles of stars from birth to death by a supernova and the nature of exoplanets that are as common as grains of sand across a galaxy. Milky Way.

The images released on Tuesday, along with the previous deep field, display those general themes, convincingly demonstrating that Webb, the most expensive science probe ever created, is up to the task.

William Harwood

Bill Harwood has covered the US space program full-time since 1984, first as Cape Canaveral bureau chief for United Press International and now as a consultant for CBS News. He’s covered 129 Space Shuttle missions, every interplanetary flight since Voyager 2’s flyby of Neptune and dozens of commercial and military launches. Located at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Harwood is a devoted amateur astronomer and co-author of “Comm Check: The Final Flight of Shuttle Columbia.”