NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has released its first full-resolution images in a preview of the science soon to come. The Five images, showing two sparkling nebulas, a group of doomed galaxies and the chemical composition of a giant exoplanet, are the culmination of decades of work by scientists and engineers – and they are just the beginning.
December 2021 launch, JWST beamed down its very first images in February, but those were part of the telescope testing process, and they didn’t yet demonstrate JWST’s full power. But these science images do.
The First image, released on 11 July and seen above, is the deepest image of the cosmos ever taken. JWST was designed to take such images to help us understand the first galaxies. The faint galaxies in this image include the most distant galaxy whose composition we have ever been able to measure.
“ the previous record-holder, the Hubble Extreme Deep Field, was two weeks of continuous work with Hubble,” said JWST scientist Jane Rigby during the image release event at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. “With Webb, we took that image before breakfast… We’re going to be doing discoveries like this every week.”
Cloud of dust and gas surrounding two stars is called the Southern Ring Nebula, or the Eight-Burst Nebula. Both of these images show the nebula in infrared, but the one on the right was taken using longer wavelengths than the one at left. Southern Ring Nebula is about 2000 light years away and nearly half a light year across. The bright cloud that makes up the ring came from the outer layers of one of the stars at the center of the nebula, which expanded when it reached the end of its lifetime and transformed from a sun-like star into a white dwarf. The image on the right has revealed the two stars in extraordinary detail, showing that the dimmer, redder star – the one that spawned this nebula – is surrounded by dust, whereas the brighter star may puff out its own nebula in the future.
Five galaxies, called Stephan’s Quintet, are about 290 million light years away in the direction of the constellation Pegasus. Four of the five are engaged in a deadly game of chicken, swooping past one another closer and closer until, someday in the distant cosmic future, they will most likely smash together and merge. We have seen them before – in fact, the group of four is the most thoroughly studied compact group of galaxies – but this image is far more detailed than any of the previous ones. It is a mosaic of almost 1000 pictures, making it JWST’s biggest image to date.
Detail allows us to see the area around a supermassive black hole, the brightest part of the top galaxy. “We cannot see the black hole itself, but we see the material sort of swirling around and being swallowed by this cosmic monster,” said JWST researcher Giovanna Giordano. This area is 40 billion times as bright as the sun, she said.
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