Nebulae, stars and galaxies: the five images of the James Webb telescope
Steph Deschamps / July 13, 2022
A breathtaking spectacle, thousands of light years away. Nasa revealed this Tuesday all the first images of the most powerful space telescope ever designed, James Webb, pictures marking the beginning of its scientific operations, awaited for years by astronomers around the world.
Each image is a new discovery, said the head of NASA Bill Nelson, from the Goddard Space Center, near Washington, where a crowd of officials from U.S. and European space agencies and scientists were gathered for the event.
A first nebula, the planetary nebula of the southern ring, was first unveiled. It is a huge cloud of gas in the center of which we can observe a dying star captured by two instruments of the telescope.
The editor of Space and Exploration magazine believes that these are extremely sharp and precise images with extraordinary detail.
A compact grouping of galaxies, the Stephan's Quintet, was also captured by James Webb and unveiled by Nasa. An exceptional picture in which we can observe no less than five galaxies, four of which are interacting with each other.
The telescope also captured the Carina Nebula, located about 7600 light-years away, which illustrates the formation of stars. It hosts many massive stars, several times the size of our Sun.
The picture shows hundreds that have never been seen before, but also galaxies in the background, and structures that we don't even know what they are yet.
The latest cosmic object revealed Tuesday is an exoplanet, a planet orbiting a star other than our Sun, one of James Webb's main research focuses.
It has not been photographed, but analyzed by spectroscopy, a technique used to determine the chemical composition of a distant object. In this case, WASP-96 b, a giant planet composed mainly of gas.
James Webb was launched into space about six months ago, and is now 1.5 million miles away. One of the primary missions of the space telescope, a $10 billion engineering jewel and the most powerful ever designed, is to explore the fledgling universe. This first demonstration was intended to give a glimpse of its capabilities in this area.