“The ‘dance’ of stars penguins gravitationally tug at thin layers of gas and dust, which collide in waves to form stars” NASA said in a press release. “Look for those parts in two places: like a fish in its ‘beak’ and ‘feathers’ in its ‘tail’.
The Webb Telescope has done everything astronomers hoped for, especially seeing deeper into space than any previous telescope. And has produced beautiful films. The universe captured by Webb’s collection of glasses and tools is beautiful, dazzling, and dynamic. These graph images demonstrate the remarkable resolution of the Webb Telescope, NASA’s $10 billion successor to the still-operating Hubble Space Telescope.
But the primary reason the Web exists is to do something Hubble couldn’t: look far away Within the infrared region of the spectrum, activation Scientists studied the highly red-shifted light emitted by galaxies when the universe was very young.
This has come as a big surprise. Astronomers assumed that the earliest galaxies were small and faint. That’s not what Webb saw.
Instead there is a remarkable array of large, bright galaxies, many of which contain supermassive black holes that emitted their light 300 million years after the Big Bang. (A better estimate for the age of the universe 13.8 billion years.) The processes of star formation and galaxy coalescence are faster, more efficient, or different than theorists have assumed.
This is how science is supposed to work: A new tool for looking at nature puts hard data where previously there were only theories, computer models, and ideas.
“The biggest impact we’ve had so far is in understanding the first billion years. That was the elevator pitch to sell the telescope, and I’m happy with how well we delivered,” said Jane Rigby, Webb’s senior scientist. “The universe cooperated.”
An unexpected number of large, bright galaxies early in the universe doesn’t mean the Big Bang theory is wrong, Webb scientists hasten to add.
“We have this flood of data, we have all these interesting things, and we don’t understand why,” said NASA astrophysicist Amber Strack. But this does not mean the discovery of a “new physics” or anything revolutionary. she said.
“The Big Bang is still the best theory of the universe,” Strack said.
Webb also looked at the nearby universe, including observations of the enigmatic Trappist-1 planetary system, where a cluster of rocky planets orbits a red dwarf star. This planetary system is about 41 light-years away, within our own galaxy and almost next in the cosmological scheme.
One current astronomical question that Webb could answer is whether red dwarf stars are so stormy that they allow nearby planets to retain atmospheres and seem plausible as places where life could thrive.
“Until now, we have not found a viable atmosphere on a rocky planet like ours,” planetary astronomer Heidi Hammel said in an email. “That might require an even bigger telescope.”
Could this telescope find the first indisputable evidence of aliens? Rigby said that was unlikely.
“Personally I don’t think Webb is going to find a career. It wasn’t built to do that,” Rigby said. “I think we can figure out what’s possible livable planets.”
Astronomer Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz, one of the Web’s dreamers in the late 1980s, said the telescope has collected vast amounts of data about exoplanets — worlds orbiting distant stars. That data still needs to be combined into a coherent picture, he said.
“It’s like an alien walking through an earthly zoo, looking at a wide range of animals and then trying to glean relationships and commonalities,” he said.
Webb launched on Christmas morning 2021 and spent six months getting shipshape as it orbited the sun about a million miles from Earth. The big headline at the time was that the telescope overcame 344 potential single-point failures, including the use of a tennis-court-sized solar shield required for cold-temperature observations in the infrared part of the spectrum.
One of the telescope’s 18 hexagonal mirrors had a nasty impact from a micrometeoroid, but it had a limited impact. NASA tried to minimize the risk of such impacts by flying the telescope with the mirror facing away from the direction of travel.
“We fly it unexpectedly, unquote, into the rain,” Strack said.
The telescope also pointed to familiar worlds in our own solar system. Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, long known to have a deep terrestrial ocean, is aptly leaking carbon dioxide, Webb found. The telescope spotted a 6,000-mile flow of water from Saturn’s moon Enceladus, which, like Europa, has a hidden ocean beneath the ice, Hammel said.
“The next 20 years will be even more exciting as we really push the capabilities of this amazing tool into the unknown and the unexpected,” Hummel said.
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