New James Webb Telescope images show tangled 'penguin and egg' galaxies

“The dance of galaxies was gravitationally pulling on thin regions of gas and dust in the Penguin Galaxy, causing them to collide in waves and form stars.” NASA said in a press release:“Look for these areas in two places: the fish-like 'beak' and the 'feathers' in its 'tail.'”

The Webb telescope has done everything astronomers hoped for, looking deeper into space and farther back in time than any telescope before it. And it has produced beautiful images. The universe as seen by Webb’s mirror and its suite of instruments is beautiful, dazzling, and breathtaking. These stunning images demonstrate the incredible resolution of Webb, NASA’s $10 billion successor to the still-operating Hubble Space Telescope.

But the main reason Webb exists is to do something Hubble can't do: look far away. In the infrared part of the spectrum, allowing Scientists are analyzing the highly red-shifted light emitted by galaxies when the universe was very young.

This came as a huge surprise. Astronomers had assumed that early galaxies were small and faint. But that's not what Webb saw.

Instead, there is a remarkable collection of large, bright galaxies, many of which contain supermassive black holes that emitted their light only about 300 million years after the Big Bang. (The best estimate for the age of the universe is 100 million years.) 13.8 billion years) The processes of star formation and galaxy assembly were faster, more efficient, or completely different than theorists had assumed.

This is how science is supposed to work: a new tool with a new way of looking at nature that puts hard data where previously there were only theories, computer models, and concepts.

“The biggest impact we’ve had so far has been understanding the first billion years. That was the telescope’s sales pitch, and I’m thrilled with how well we’ve delivered,” said Jane Rigby, Webb’s chief scientist. “The universe has cooperated with us.”

The unexpected number of large, bright galaxies in the early universe does not mean the Big Bang theory is wrong, Webb scientists add.

“We have this deluge of data, and we have all these interesting things we’re discovering, and we don’t fully understand why,” said NASA astrophysicist Amber Strawn. But this doesn’t represent the discovery of “new physics” or anything revolutionary. She said.

“The Big Bang theory is still the best theory we have about the universe.” Straughn said.

The Webb telescope also looked out into the nearby universe, including observations of the intriguing Trappist-1 planetary system, a cluster of rocky planets orbiting a red dwarf star. This planetary system is located about 41 light-years away, within our own galaxy, and close in the cosmic scheme of things.

An ongoing astrobiological question that Webb might answer is whether red dwarf stars are too stormy to allow nearby planets to retain their atmospheres and seem plausible as places where life could flourish.

“Until now, we haven’t found a rocky planet like ours with an atmosphere suitable for life,” planetary astronomer Heidi Hamill said in an email. “That would require a larger telescope.”

Could this telescope find the first hard evidence of alien life? Rigby says that seems unlikely.

“I personally don’t think Webb will find life. It’s not designed to do that,” Rigby said. “I think we can find potential life.” Suitable for habitation “Planetary.”

The telescope has collected a huge amount of data on exoplanets — worlds orbiting distant stars — but that data still needs to be pieced together into a coherent picture, said Garth Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was among the people who dreamed up the Webb telescope in the late 1980s.

“It's a bit like an alien walking around an Earthly zoo, looking at a wide variety of animals and then trying to piece together relationships and commonalities,” he said.

Webb blasted off into space on Christmas morning 2021 and spent six months getting back in shape as it orbited the sun nearly a million miles from Earth. The headline at the time was that the telescope had overcome 344 potential failures at one point, including deploying a tennis-court-sized sunshield needed for observations of cold temperatures in the infrared part of the spectrum.

One of the telescope's 18 hexagonal mirrors was hit hard by a small meteorite, but the impact was limited. Since then, NASA has tried to reduce the risk of such collisions by flying the telescope with the mirrors facing away from the direction of travel.

“We fly it in a way that doesn't put it in the rain,” Straughn said.

The telescope has also focused on worlds we know well in our solar system. Webb discovered that Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, long known to have a deep subsurface ocean, is sporadically leaking carbon dioxide. And the telescope has spotted a 6,000-mile-long plume of water emanating from Saturn’s moon Enceladus, which, like Europa, has a hidden ocean beneath its icy crust, Hummel said.

“The next 20 years will be even more exciting as we really push the capabilities of this amazing tool into the unknown and unexpected,” Hamill added.