5 things learned from the Webb Telescope’s first images

5 things learned from the Webb Telescope’s first images

Subject: Science and Technology

Section: Space

Context: NASA released five images from the early work of the James Webb Space Telescope. The pictures highlighted the great potential of the telescope to plumb the secrets of deep space

What Webb Telescope’s find?

Astronomers hailed the image made by the Webb telescope as one of the deepest images yet taken of the cosmos

The image of a distant star cluster called SMACS 0723 revealed the presence of still more-distant galaxies spilled across the sky

The light from those galaxies, magnified into visibility by the gravitational field of the cluster, originated more than 13 billion years ago.

Earliest stars may be unlike the stars we see today. The first stars were composed of pure hydrogen and helium left over from the Big Bang.

They could grow far more massive than the sun  and then collapse quickly and violently into supermassive black holes of the kind that now populate the centers of most galaxies

The spectra for the Jupiter-size exoplanet WASP-96b was not the most impressive image.

WASP-96b is highly unlikely to be home to anything living, using the same techniques could reveal whether smaller, rocky worlds orbiting other stars are habitable.

The relatively small size of these exoplanets has made them extremely difficult to study, until now. The Webb telescope will let astronomers look more closely at these worlds

The space telescope “is the first big space observatory to take the study of exoplanet atmospheres into account in its design

The Webb presentation gave us gasp-inducing images of the Southern Ring Nebula, a sphere of gas and dust belched by a dying star, and Stephan’s Quintet, a grouping of galaxies millions of light-years away.

But the most striking image was of the Carina Nebula, a vast, swirling cloud of dust that is both a star nursery and home to some of the most luminous and explosive stars in the Milky Way

Concept:

What is Nebula?

• A nebula is a giant cloud of dust and gas in space. Some nebulae (more than one nebula) come from the gas and dust thrown out by the explosion of a dying star, such as a supernova. Other nebulae are regions where new stars are beginning to form.

James Webb Space Telescope (JWST):

• It has long been touted as the successor to the long-serving Hubble Space Telescope (HST)
  It is designed specifically for infrared astronomy, allowing it to spot these incredibly distant objects.
  JWST to peer deeper into the history of the universe and glean insights into the formation of star systems a mere 100 million to 250 million years after the Big Bang