NASA launched the James Webb Space Telescope into space last year, after many years of waiting. The first images from the telescope, which started its mission to show us the unexplored sides of space, came recently. The first color photograph taken by the space telescope was shared by NASA at an event with the participation of US President Joe Biden.
After this event held on Tuesday and the images that the whole world is eagerly waiting for, it is considered that more images will come from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which is called the super powerful optical instrument. The first five images are considered a great achievement and the culmination of a 26-year process to enable humanity to look into space in even greater detail. Let’s take a look at what these five images want to tell us about the universe.
Signs of water and clouds appear on exoplanet
More than 5,000 confirmed exoplanets or planets orbiting a star other than the sun are known to exist in the Milky Way alone. The existence of so many exoplanets “Are we not alone in the universe?” raises the question. The exoplanet WASP-96 b in the image shared by JWST is 1,150 light-years away. This exoplanet, a gas giant with a mass less than twice that of Jupiter but 1.2 times larger in diameter, is considered a “fluffy planet” in NASA’s terms.
The fluffy planet, which has a short orbital period around its star and is not polluted by the light of nearby objects, has become a prime target for JWST’s optical power. However, this image is a snapshot of transmission diversity, not an exoplanet’s atmosphere. According to the images shared by JWST, there are signs of water signs and even the presence of clouds on the exoplanet.
Stars leave shells of gas and dust as they age
JWST also studied a planetary nebula, officially called NGC 3132, or the “South Ring Nebula.” At the end of this review, he also gave clues about what stars leave behind after they die. About 2,500 light-years away, this nebula has also been imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope before, but NASA has announced that this updated image from JWST offers more details about the elegant structures surrounding the binary star system.
Of the two stars in the image, a fainter, dying star and a younger, brighter star are in the lower left. The images also indicate a period in what NASA calls “shells” surrounding stars, where each faint, dying star (the white dwarf in the lower left in the right image) lost some of its mass. In other words, as stars age and lose their power, they release shells of gas and dust into the universe.
Stephan’s Quintet’s cosmic dance revealed more clearly
First observed by the French astronomer Édouard Stephan in 1877, the Stephan Quintet shows the strange interplay of five galaxies in greater detail than ever before. This latest image shared by JWST was the clearest and largest image to date.
In this somewhat misleading image, the far left galaxy is actually in the foreground, about 40 million light-years from us. The four galaxy systems so far are about 290 million light-years away from us. These four galaxies are clustered so close together that they actually interact with each other. One of the most striking aspects of the image is that even a supermassive black hole, roughly 24 million times the mass of the sun, located at the center of the uppermost galaxy, was clearly visible.
JWST also provided a better study of the Carina Nebula
The Carina Nebula, a region of the Milky Way about 7,600 light-years away, has been imaged more clearly thanks to JWST. Hundreds of new stars have been observed forming in the nebula. Thanks to the JWST, it became clear that the formation of stars is not a serene event, but one characterized by highly unstable processes that can in some ways be productive as well as destructive.
The flowing amber landscape at the bottom of the image presents a large, chaotic star-forming region of the nebula. This region is so large that NASA calls it the “Cosmic Cliffs,” and the highest points in this amber band are about seven light-years high.
The data from JWST is expected to give scientists more insight into the star formation process and help determine why certain numbers of stars form in certain regions and how it results in the mass of the stars.
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