The James Webb Space Telescope opens a new era of space exploration | Canberra Weekly

The inaugural James Webb Space Telescope image has opened a new chapter of cosmic exploration, but astronomers say the observatory’s most important discoveries may be ones they haven’t yet imagined.

Distant colliding galaxies, gas-giant exoplanets, and dying star systems were the first celestial subjects to be captured by a billion-dollar observatory, putting their various infrared imaging capabilities on a colorful display and proving that the telescope works as designed.

Webb’s gallery of early photographs and spectrographic data, which astronomers liken to a mere “target practice” as they prepare telescopes for operational science, also showcases some of the areas of investigation planned for the future.

The competitively selected research agenda includes exploring the evolution of early galaxies, stellar life cycles, the search for habitable planets orbiting distant suns, and the composition of moons in our own outer solar system.

But Webb’s most revolutionary find, 100 times more sensitive than its 30-year-old predecessor, the still-operating Hubble Space Telescope, may be an accidental discovery or an answer to a question astronomers have yet to ask.

“Who knows what will come for JWST. But I’m sure we’ll have a lot of surprises,” René Doyon, principal investigator for one of Webb’s instruments, the Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph, said Tuesday at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, where the agency unveiled the observatory’s first full-color image. that.

With Webb open for business seven months after launching in December, astronomers are preparing “something out there that we never thought would exist at all,” said John Mather, a senior Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist at NASA who worked during the 1990s. and helped strengthen the ‘Big Bang’ theory of cosmology.

Mather and other scientists point to dark matter, an invisible and little-understood but theoretically influential cosmic scaffold, as a puzzle that Webb may have unlocked during his mission.

Hubble, too, opened up a new field of astrophysics devoted to another mysterious phenomenon, dark energy, as his observations of supernovae led to the unexpected discovery that the universe is expanding rapidly.

Overall, dark energy and dark matter are now estimated by scientists to make up 95 percent of the known universe. All the galaxies, planets, dust, gas, and other visible matter in the universe comprise only 5 percent.

“It was a big surprise,” Mather said of the early dark matter and discovery of dark energy.

Amber Straughn, deputy project scientist who worked with Webb, said: “It’s hard to imagine what we might learn with this one hundred times more powerful instrument that we don’t really know yet.”

Dark matter is already prominent in Webb’s first “deep field” image, a composite photo of the distant galaxy cluster, SMACS 0723, which offers the most detailed view to date of the early universe thanks to a magnifying effect called gravitational lensing.

The combined mass of galaxies and other invisible matter in the foreground of the image bends the surrounding space enough to amplify light coming from galaxies farther behind them, carrying the fainter visible objects further away, and thus further into the past.

At least one of the tiny specks of “photobomb” light at the edges of the image dates back 13.1 billion years, or nearly 95 percent of the journey to the Big Bang, the theoretical cosmic flashpoint that kept the universe moving 13.8 billion years. many years ago.

But because the calculated combined mass of all visible matter in the foreground is not sufficient on its own to produce the faint circular distortion seen in the image, the lensing effect is strong indirect evidence of the existence of dark matter.

“This is the most powerful tool we have, astrophysically, for conducting this type of lens experiment,” said Jane Rigby, Webb’s operations project scientist. “We can’t directly detect dark matter, but we see its effects… we can see its effects in action.”

“The universe is already out there, we just need to build a telescope to see what’s out there,” he added.

The new light also emerged unexpectedly from Webb’s first spectrographic analysis of an exoplanet in a distant solar system, in this case a Jupiter-sized gas giant dubbed WASP-96 b.

Measuring the wavelength of the light filtered through the exoplanet’s atmosphere as it orbits its own sun clearly reveals molecular signatures of water vapor in clouds and fog, a feature that surprised the scientists.

“There is a discovery in this data,” said Webb program scientist Eric Smith. “We made a discovery and we really haven’t even started trying.”

By Joey Roulette at GREENBELT

To view the first full color images and data from JWST, visit: webb.nasa.gov

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