“A New Era of Discovery”: Now We Can See the Deepest Infrared View from Space

Scientists were impressed, excited, amazed, and every space enthusiast was stunned when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on Tuesday unveiled the clearest image from outer space ever seen. One scientist even shed tears. The five images come from the largest infrared telescope ever launched into space, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST, Webb for short). Webb has been orbiting the Sun since taking off from French Guiana on December 25, 2021, and the stunning full-color image is just the start of what to expect from the telescope in the next two decades.

The images open our eyes to a faintly dead star, called the Southern Ring Nebula, which stretches over a black background of space with glowing red and blue colors, with a shimmering star in the center, and to the Carina Nebula. —which looks very much like a rugged mountain range with a blue night sky with young stars shining all over the area.

“Webb will enable major advances in the study of objects at multiple scales—from exoplanet detail to the most distant galaxies. It will open a new window in the universe,” said Elizabeth Blanton, professor of astronomy at Boston University College of Arts & Sciences. Exoplanets are planets outside our solar system, often orbiting other stars.

The Stephan quintet (to the left) and the Southern Ring Nebula (to the right) both reveal never-before-seen details of clusters of galaxies and nebula objects, which are clouds of gas and dust ejected by dying stars.

Blanton studies galaxy clusters, as in the first image from Webb (below), shown at a special White House teaser the day before the main reveal; it is the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe from galaxy cluster SMACS 0723. A cluster of five galaxies, called Stephan’s Quintet, was also caught on camera—the final image made from nearly 1,000 separate files—and provides new insight into galaxy evolution in the universe. early universe.

“With its sensitivity and resolution, JWST will enable the discovery and study of groups of galaxies and individual galaxies so distant and so early in the universe that they have never been observed before,” said Blanton. He’s not the only BU astronomer excited about Webb’s results—a project that involved decades of planning and an international team of scientists. Catherine Espaillat, a CAS professor of astronomy and director of the Astrophysics Research Institute, will use the data from Webb to observe the protoplanetary disk.

“The protoplanetary disc is made up of the dust and gas that make up the planet, and we will use this spectrum to measure the gas composition and properties of the dust grains,” Espaillat said. His team expected high-resolution data in the medium-infrared wavelength, the kind of light that our own eyes cannot detect. Images of the Carina Nebula, a star-forming region, resonated with him the most because that’s what he studied – they revealed the finer details of the clouds he examined.

This image of the SMACS 0723 galaxy cluster, also called First Deep Field Webb, captures even the faintest objects, such as tiny dots of galaxies that are billions of years old. To put things in perspective, this slice of the vast universe covers a patch of sky roughly the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length, according to NASA.

“This discovery is a big deal because it ushers in a new era of astronomical discoveries,” he said. “JWST is expected to be operational for 20 years, so it will no doubt lead us down a new exploration path that we haven’t even thought about. JWST will help us answer questions about how planets formed and their potential to be habitable.”

Philip Muirhead, CAS professor of astronomy and associate director of the BU Perkins Telescope Observatory, studies exoplanets and low-mass stars such as brown dwarfs. Data from Webb could help him and his team analyze the atmospheres of distant planets for signs of life, such as water or oxygen.

“We are very pleased that the telescope is working,” Muirhead said.

To better understand the importance of Webb’s image, The Brink sat down with Muirhead to talk about how the telescope got such a good picture of the universe and how it would contribute to the search for life on other planets and our understanding of the universe as a whole.

This graph shows the detected presence of water in the atmosphere around the gas giant planet WASP-96 b, which orbits a sun-like star. In the next year, Webb will aim to find water around terrestrial planets to aid in the search for Earth-like planets.

This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.

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