- Stunning New JWST Anniversary Image Shows Baby Stars Sparking to Life ScienceAlert
- James Webb Space Telescope prompts scientists to rethink understanding of the universe PBS NewsHour
- Webb Space Telescope’s Anniversary Image Captures Year of Cosmic Wonder The New York Times
- Video: See the stunning new NASA image captured by the James Webb Telescope that shows star birthplace CNN
- James Webb Anniversary: Reflecting on One Year Since the Release of its First Photo and Tracking its Remarkable Journey – Videos from The Weather Channel The Weather Channel
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Tag Archives: JWST
JWST Has Found Life’s Elemental Building Blocks in The Depths of Darkest Space : ScienceAlert
JWST’s unparalleled ability to peer into the shrouded hearts of distant clouds has revealed the elements of biochemistry in the coldest and darkest place we’ve seen them yet.
In a molecular cloud called Chamaeleon I, located over 500 light-years from Earth, data from the telescope has revealed the presence of frozen carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur – elements vital to the formation of atmospheres and molecules such as amino acids, collectively known as CHONS.
“These elements are important components of prebiotic molecules such as simple amino acids – and thus ingredients of life, so to speak,” says astronomer Maria Drozdovskaya of the University of Bern in Germany.
In addition, an international team of researchers led by astronomer Melissa McClure of Leiden University in the Netherlands has also identified frozen forms of more complex molecules, such as water, methane, ammonia, carbonyl sulfide, and the organic molecule methanol.
Cold, dense clumps in molecular clouds are where stars and their planets are born. Scientists believe that CHONS and other molecules were present in the molecular cloud that birthed the Sun, some of which were later delivered to Earth via icy comet and asteroid impacts.
Although the elements and molecules detected in Chamaeleon I are quietly floating about right now, one day, they could be caught up in planet formation, delivering the ingredients necessary for the emergence of life to new baby planets.
“Our identification of complex organic molecules, like methanol and potentially ethanol, also suggests that the many star and planet systems developing in this particular cloud will inherit molecules in a fairly advanced chemical state,” explains astronomer Will Rocha of Leiden Observatory.
“This could mean that the presence of prebiotic molecules in planetary systems is a common result of star formation rather than a unique feature of our own Solar System.”
Chamaeleon I is cold and dense, a dark conglomeration of dust and ice that constitutes one of the nearest active star-forming regions to Earth. A census of its composition, therefore, can tell us quite a bit about the ingredients that go into star and planet formation and contribute to an understanding of how these ingredients are incorporated into newly forming worlds.
JWST, with its powerful infrared-detection capabilities, is able to see through dense dust with more clarity and detail than any telescope that has come before. That’s because infrared wavelengths of light don’t scatter off dust particles the way shorter wavelengths do, which means instruments like JWST can effectively see through dust better than optical instruments like Hubble’s.
To determine the chemical composition of the dust in Chamaeleon I, scientists rely on absorption signatures. Starlight traveling through the cloud can be absorbed by elements and molecules therein. Different chemicals absorb different wavelengths. When a spectrum of the light that emerges is collected, these absorbed wavelengths are darker. Scientists can then analyze these absorption lines to determine which elements are present.
JWST peered deeper into Chamaeleon I for a census of its composition than we’ve ever seen before. It found silicate dust grains, the aforementioned CHONS and other molecules, and ices colder than any measured before in space, at around -263 degrees Celsius (-441 degrees Fahrenheit).
And they found that, for the density of the cloud, the amount of CHONS was lower than expected, including only around 1 percent of the expected sulfur. This suggests that the rest of the materials may be locked up in places that can’t be measured – inside rocks and other minerals, for instance.
Without more information, it’s difficult to gauge at this point, so more information is what the team intends to get. They hope to obtain more observations that will help them map out the evolution of these ices, from coating the dusty grains of a molecular cloud to their incorporation into comets and perhaps even to seeding planets.
“This is just the first in a series of spectral snapshots that we will obtain to see how the ices evolve from their initial synthesis to the comet-forming regions of protoplanetary discs,” McClure says.
“This will tell us which mixture of ices – and therefore which elements – can eventually be delivered to the surfaces of terrestrial exoplanets or incorporated into the atmospheres of giant gas or ice planets.”
The research has been published in Nature Astronomy.
And you can download wallpaper-sized versions of JWST’s image of Chamaeleon I here.
After JWST, what’s the next big thing for astronomers?
What takes over 20,000 engineers and hundreds of scientists to build? A space telescope — specifically, the James Webb Space Telescope.
Thankfully, the effort was well worthwhile, with a plethora of incredible results from NASA’s newest observatory in its first six months of science operations. But what comes next? John Mather, a Nobel-winning astronomer and a leading force behind the James Webb Space Telescope (Webb or JWST), shared his visions of what all those engineers and scientists may tackle next on Thursday (Jan. 12), the final day of the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society held in Seattle and virtually.
Mather’s involvement in astronomy traces back to before even the Hubble Space Telescope‘s launch in 1990, when the first ideas for the Next Generation Space Telescope (which later became JWST) were thrown around in the 1980s. To make a dream like JWST come true required decades of innovation by countless scientists and engineers, including inventing “new flavors of detectors” for the telescope to make the observations they hoped for.
Related: James Webb Space Telescope’s best images of all time (gallery)
And the next big astronomical goals will require similar dedication and creativity, Mather said. JWST “is a demonstration that we can do hard things,” he said in his speech at the convention. “And we’re going to continue to do hard things.”
Some goals are closer than others, and there are so many out there swirling in the minds of astronomers. “I cannot possibly tell you all the wonderful things that are coming, so I’ll tell you the ones that interest me the most,” Mather said.
There are a number of exciting new observatories coming online in the coming months and years, including the European mission Euclid and NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope that will both search for clues in the long-standing mysteries of dark matter and dark energy. The Vera Rubin Observatory, a giant project currently under construction in the high deserts of Chile, will survey the whole sky looking for small changes, known as transients. Astronomers think the observatory will spot millions of points of interest each night — so many that it’ll be a challenge to sift through them all. “Maybe that ChatGPT thing will help,” Mather joked.
Looking a bit further down the road, the next hugely ambitious project is the so-called “Habitable Worlds Observatory” — the mega-successor to Hubble and JWST, recommended by an important committee known as the Astro2020 Decadal Survey.
Mather said that he thinks this project is well within reach, and could even be easier to complete than JWST, which notoriously struggled to meet budgets and deadlines. Because rocket technology is continually improving — and getting cheaper — he suggested it may even be possible to assemble the Habitable Worlds Observatory and other next-generation telescopes in space instead of on the ground.
And it’s not all about space telescopes. Mather said he’s looking forward to seeing how giant telescopes around 98 feet (30 meters) in diameter revolutionize astronomy here on the ground, too.
And he’s dreaming even bigger than the official NASA plans: Maybe someday these ground-based behemoths will even work in tandem with space observatories in what Mather calls “hybrid space-ground” setups. For example, one key technique of ground-based astronomers relies on little contraptions called coronagraphs that block out stars and reveal faint nearby planets. Perhaps someday, Mather posited, we could fly a giant starshade in orbit and match it up with the telescope on the ground.
Where such ambitions might take us isn’t clear, but to date, every time our technology has improved, we’ve learned leaps and bounds about the universe — often finding something completely unknown. Mather ended his talk by rhetorically asking what we’ll see with all this new technology. “I don’t know,” he said, “but a whole lot more details and a whole lot further away than you can now.”
Follow the author at @briles_34 on Twitter. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
JWST Just Confirmed Its First Exoplanet, And It’s The Size of Earth : ScienceAlert
Since its launch in December 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been breaking records.
Now the instrument has spotted its first planet around a star other than our own, and with an estimated diameter equaling around 99 percent of Earth’s it looks somewhat familiar.
Observations from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) hinted that the planet was there, but now the high-resolution imagery offered by the Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) on board the JWST has confirmed it.
Despite the size similarity, the planet is thought to be much hotter than our own home world, circling a red dwarf star close enough to complete an orbit in just two days.
“There is no question that the planet is there,” says astronomer Jacob Lustig-Yaeger, from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland. “Webb’s pristine data validated it.”
This newly found object sits 41 light-years away in the constellation Octans, and has been given the designation LHS 475 b. As with other exoplanets, it was spotted by looking at the shadow created as it passes in front of its star.
What makes the JWST special is that it can look at transmission spectra; the assortment of light wavelengths being filtered around the planet that can reveal qualities of its atmosphere.
For now, we don’t have enough data to tell us what kind of atmosphere LHS 475 b has, if it has one at all. Astronomers are so far confident it lacks a thick, methane-rich atmosphere, like the one enveloping Saturn’s moon Titan.
“The telescope is so sensitive and the data is so precise that we could have easily detected several different molecules, but we don’t see much yet,” says astrophysicist Ortiz Ceballos, from the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts.
But they can’t rule out a shallow atmosphere consisting of pure carbon dioxide.
The extra precision offered by the JWST means that researchers can look for stars and planets that are much smaller. Ordinarily, telescopes are looking for exoplanets larger than Jupiter, some 11 times wider than Earth.
Information is also gathered at a speedy pace: it took just two transits (or passes in front of its star) for the JWST to identify LHS 475 b and some of its characteristics. Further readings should tell us more about what we’re dealing with here.
We’re also seeing the JWST produce some absolutely stunning imagery from deep space, thanks to the sensitivity of its on-board instruments – and it’s only been going for a little over a year. There’s plenty more to come.
“These first observational results from an Earth-size, rocky planet open the door to many future possibilities for studying rocky planet atmospheres with Webb,” says Mark Clampin, the Astrophysics Division director at the NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC.
“Webb is bringing us closer and closer to a new understanding of Earth-like worlds outside our Solar System, and the mission is only just getting started.”
The findings were presented at a gathering of the American Astronomical Society on Wednesday, January 11, 2023.
These Stunning Images Captured By NASA’s James Webb Telescope Is A Treat For Space Lovers
Webb produced this detailed image of the Cartwheel and two smaller companion galaxies in August 2022
Described as the world’s most powerful telescope, NASA’s James Web telescope has captured some stunning images of our universe this year, leaving space lovers mesmerized. The next-generation observatory, priced at $10 billion was launched atop the Ariane 5 rocket from the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana on December 25, 2021. Named after a former NASA director, Webb follows in the footsteps of the legendary Hubble but offers glimpses of the universe that were inaccessible to us before. Webb is about 100 times more powerful than Hubble.
On its first anniversary, here are 5 incredible images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in 2022 that have revolutionized space imagery.
Deepest Infrared Image Of Early Universe
In its first picture taken in July 2022, Webb revealed the “deepest and sharpest infrared image of the early universe” ever taken, going back 13 billion years. The stunning shot, which was revealed in a White House briefing by President Joe Biden, showed thousands of galaxies overflowing and featured the faintest objects ever observed, colorized from infrared to blue, orange, and white tones. The image showed the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 as it appeared 4.6 billion years ago, with many more galaxies in front of and behind the cluster.
Carina Nebula
The same month, the telescope revealed emerging stellar nurseries and individual stars in the Carina Nebula that were previously obscured. Called the Cosmic Cliffs, Webb’s seemingly three-dimensional picture looks like craggy mountains on a moonlit evening. In reality, it is the edge of the giant, gaseous cavity within NGC 3324, and the tallest “peaks” in this image are about 7 light-years high.
Neptune’s Rings
In September 2022, the telescope captured the clearest view of Neptune’s rings after over 30 years. In 1989, NASA’s Voyager 2 became the first spacecraft to capture the image of Neptune. According to NASA, Webb did not just capture the clearest view of this distant planet’s rings since the Voyager 2 spacecraft flew by it in 1989, but its cameras also revealed the ice giant in a whole new light. The Webb also captured seven of Neptune’s 14 known moons.
The Cartwheel Galaxy
In August 2022, Webb’s powerful infrared gaze produced this detailed image of the Cartwheel and two smaller companion galaxies against a backdrop of many other galaxies. The image offered a fresh perspective on the evolution of the galaxy over the course of billions of years, according to a release from NASA. The Cartwheel Galaxy, located about 500 million light-years away in the Sculptor constellation, is a rare sight. Its appearance, much like that of the wheel of a wagon, is the result of an intense event – a high-speed collision between a large spiral galaxy and a smaller galaxy not visible in this image.
The Pillars of Creation
In October 2022, a lush and highly detailed landscape- the iconic “Pillars of Creation” was caught by James Webb Telescope. The twinkling of thousands of stars illuminates the telescope’s first shot of the gigantic gold, copper, and brown columns standing in the midst of the cosmos. The “Pillars of Creation” are located 6,500 light years from Earth, in the Eagle Nebula of our Milky Way galaxy.
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Stunning JWST Photo Tranforms a Distant Galaxy Into a Sparkling Christmas Ornament : ScienceAlert
The James Webb Space Telescope just gave a spiral galaxy 230 million light-years away a new sparkling glamor shot perfect enough for the Christmas tree.
While the galaxy has the rather un-glamorous name of NGC 7469, it’s been a fascinating subject to study.
JWST has peered into NGC 7469 as part of a survey to understand star formation, the growth of supermassive black holes, and the way galaxies gravitationally interact and merge across the vast gulfs of space and time.
NGC 7469 is also pretty special. It has elegant, beautiful spiral arms that we can see along their full extent, thanks to a quirk of orientation: The flat of the galactic plane is facing us almost directly, giving us a stunning view of the galaxy’s structure.
The galaxy also has a very bright center, especially when it comes to infrared radiation.
This is because the supermassive black hole around which the entire galaxy orbits is active: It’s surrounded by material that’s falling, or accreting, onto the black hole, a process that generates a great deal of light as gravity and friction heat the material causing it to glow.
At a distance of about 1,500 light-years from NGC 7469’s galactic center is another bright ring featuring furious star formation activity, known as starburst. Because we can see the galaxy so clearly, scientists can study it to better understand the link between a starburst ring and an active galactic nucleus.
Like the galactic nucleus, starburst rings glow brightly in infrared, the wavelength range in which JWST views the Universe in such spectacular detail. Its observations of galaxies like NGC 7469 are expected to yield unprecedented insight into these processes and how they are linked.
Scientists have already found new clusters of star formation and direct evidence that dust is being destroyed very close to the galactic nucleus – showing that the activity is affecting the galaxy around it.
They also found that highly ionized, diffuse atomic gas is blowing out from the galactic center at around 6.4 million kilometers (4 million miles) per hour. Shocks from this wind, a recent paper currently in preprint found, are not influencing the starburst ring.
Another galaxy is just off to the bottom left corner of JWST’s image. That’s IC 5283, and it’s locked in a gravitational dance with NGC 7469. Collectively, the two galaxies are known as Arp 298. You can see enhanced regions of bright red on the edge of NGC 7469 closest to IC 5283; that’s likely because the larger galaxy is slurping nourishing star-forming gas from its smaller companion.
The starburst and possibly even the galactic nucleus activity in NGC 7469 are thought to be the result of the interaction between the two galaxies.
The large six-pointed feature that dominates the image is JWST’s diffraction spikes, an artifact generated by the physical structure of the telescope. So it’s not actually real … but it sure looks pretty.
You can download wallpaper-sized versions of the new image from the ESA JWST website.
JWST Has Spotted Never-Before-Seen Star Birth in The Carina Nebula, And It’s Glorious : ScienceAlert
The powerful James Webb Space Telescope is a mighty technological tool. Astrophysicists first conceived it over 20 years ago, and after many twists and turns, it was launched on December 25, 2021. Now it’s in a halo orbit at the Sun-Earth L2 point, where it will hopefully continue operating for 20 years.
It’s only been a few months since its first images were released, and it’s already making progress in answering some of the Universe’s most compelling questions.
In a newly-released image, the JWST peered deep inside massive clouds of gas and dust to watch young stars come to life in their stellar cocoons.
One of the JWST’s first images was of the ‘Cosmic Cliffs’. The Cosmic Cliffs are the edge of an active star-forming region in NGC 3324, a star cluster near the Carina Nebula.
The image shows the intense ultraviolet energy from hot young stars that shape the region, carving out cavernous gaps and leaving towers of gas that resist the radiation.
We all marveled at that image back in July, but scientists have dug into it to learn more about the region and the star-forming activity happening there. The Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS) published a paper presenting the results of their work.
It’s titled “Deep diving off the ‘Cosmic Cliffs’: previously hidden outflows in NGC 3324 revealed by JWST.” The lead author is astronomer Megan Reiter of Rice University in Houston, Texas.
The researchers examined the Webb image more closely and found over two dozen outflows from hot young stars that weren’t previously seen. There is everything from “small fountains to burbling behemoths”, according to a press release announcing the results. Some of the outflows extend several light-years from their star.
“What Webb gives us is a snapshot in time to see just how much star formation is going on in what may be a more typical corner of the universe that we haven’t been able to see before,” said Reiter.
The JWST’s powerful infrared capabilities fueled this study. It can focus on molecular hydrogen, the main ingredient in stars. It’s an excellent tracer for star-forming activity because as young stars grow, they take in the hydrogen and eject some of it in jets and polar outflows. It’s called stellar feedback, and these jets carve out caverns in the clouds of gas and dust in the image.
Young, still-forming protostars are obscured from view by the dense molecular clouds that spawn them. But the JWST has the power to see inside these clouds. Scrutinizing young stars inside the clouds is one of the telescope’s four main science objectives.
“Webb will be able to see right through and into massive clouds of dust that are opaque to visible-light observatories like Hubble, where stars and planetary systems are being born,” a NASA website explained long before the telescope was completed and launched.
Now we’re seeing all of those words come true.
“Jets like these are signposts for the most exciting part of the star formation process. We only see them during a brief window of time when the protostar is actively accreting,” explained co-author Nathan Smith of the University of Arizona in Tucson.
The more astronomers learn about young stars forming elsewhere, the more they learn about how our own Sun formed and how our Solar System came to be. The JWST is expanding and deepening our understanding of the complex mechanisms behind their formation.
“It opens the door for what’s going to be possible in terms of looking at these populations of newborn stars in fairly typical environments of the Universe that have been invisible up until the James Webb Space Telescope,” added Reiter.
“Now we know where to look next to explore what variables are important for the formation of Sun-like stars.”
The outflow jets in the earliest stages of star formation are challenging to observe because they happen inside a thick cloak of gas and only last for a brief period. The jets can flow for only a few thousand years, maybe ten thousand. Using the JWST’s powerful filters, astronomers examined some of the jets and outflows the original Cosmic Cliffs image hinted at.
“In the image first released in July, you see hints of this activity, but these jets are only visible when you embark on that deep dive – dissecting data from each of the different filters and analyzing each area alone,” shared team member Jon Morse of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
“It’s like finding buried treasure.”
Understanding how young stars form is one of the primary quests in astrophysics today. The collective light from the first stars helped drive the reionization of the early Universe. Before the Epoch of Reionization, a dense fog of primordial gas obscured the Universe. During Reionization, light from young stars helped clear the haze from the Universe and allowed light to travel.
But astrophysicists don’t know how these first stars formed, and addressing that question is one of the JWST’s main science objectives. The JWST can see highly red-shifted objects from the Universe’s early days, but it can’t make out individual stars.
That’s why these newly-released images are essential. Astrophysicists can’t study the formation of the very first stars, but they can watch young stars forming today and work their way towards a more solid understanding of the Epoch of Reionization.
This isn’t the first time astronomers have studied the young stars forming in this region. The Hubble looked at it 16 years ago.
And while the Hubble can’t discern as much detail as the James Webb, it revealed enough for the study authors to compare how the jets and outflows have changed in the intervening years.
The measurements show the speed and direction in which the jets move, necessary details for understanding young stars.
These are Early Release Images (ERO) and are just the beginning of the JWST and its study of stellar formation.
“Future observations will allow quantitative analysis of the excitation, mass-loss rates, and velocities of these new flows,” the authors write.
“As a relatively modest region of massive star formation, NGC 3324 offers a preview of what star formation studies with JWST may provide.”
Future observations will be more thorough and detailed. They’ll help shed even more light on one of the hottest topics in astronomy: how young stars drive planetary formation.
Feedback mechanisms mark young stars. They’re still growing, and as they accrete gas from the clouds they’re embedded in, they emit some of it back into their surroundings with their jets. The gas outflows help shape their protoplanetary disks and the formation of planets like ours.
A better understanding of these outflows leads to a better understanding of planets and, by complex extension, the likelihood of life appearing elsewhere.
Our Solar System likely formed in a cluster similar to the one in this study. Astronomers aren’t certain yet, but by uncovering the details in NGC 3324, they may shed some light on our origins.
We live in the Universe’s “Stelliferous Era,” according to the book “The Five Ages of the Universe.” In this era, matter is arranged primarily into stars, galaxies, and galaxy clusters. Stars produce most of the energy in the Universe and will for a long time. Since stars provide the energy for life, the Stelliferous Era might easily be called the Life Era.
The JWST can gather ancient light from the first stars and galaxies and peer deep inside stellar cocoons to show us how stars are born. The results are fascinating scientific understandings, but along with answering our scientific questions, the JWST does something else. It gives context to humanity’s existence in the Universe’s Life Era.
The Sun is no different than other stars. The same forces drove its birth and evolution, and the Sun would’ve emitted the same outflows and polar jets as the young stars in this image. Those feedback mechanisms would’ve shaped the protoplanetary disk that the Earth formed in.
So every time we see images of young stars elsewhere, we learn something about our origins. We’re fortunate to have the James Webb Space Telescope to show us these vivid, sweeping vistas of star birth. The gorgeous, exquisite detail transports the mind alongside the eye. We can sit and wonder if around each one, life, or even another civilization, might come into being.
This article was originally published by Universe Today. Read the original article.
How JWST revolutionized astronomy in 2022
The crowd in the auditorium began murmuring, then gasping, as Emma Curtis-Lake put her slides up on the screen. “Amazing!” someone blurted out.
Curtis-Lake, an astronomer at the University of Hertfordshire, UK, was showing off some of the first results on distant galaxies from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). It was not the last time astronomers started chattering in excitement this week as they gazed at the telescope’s initial discoveries, at a symposium held at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland.
In just its first few months of science operations, JWST has delivered stunning insights on heavenly bodies ranging from planets in the Solar System to stars elsewhere in the cosmos. These discoveries have sharpened researchers’ eagerness to take more advantage of the observatory’s capabilities. Scientists are now crafting new proposals for what the telescope should do in its second year, even as they scramble for funding and debate whether the telescope’s data should be fully open-access.
White-knuckle launch
JWST launched on 25 December 2021 as the most expensive, most delayed and most complicated space observatory ever built. Astronomers held their breath as the US$10-billion machine went through a complex six-month engineering deployment in deep space, during which hundreds of potential failures could have seriously damaged it.
But it works — and spectacularly so. “I feel really lucky to be alive as a scientist to work with this amazing telescope,” says Laura Kreidberg, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany.
JWST spots some of the most distant galaxies ever seen
First out of the floodgate, in July, came a rush of preprints on the early evolution of galaxies. The expansion of the Universe has stretched distant galaxies’ light to infrared, the wavelengths that JWST captures. That allows the telescope to observe faraway galaxies — including several so distant that they appear as they did just 350 million to 400 million years after the Big Bang, which happened 13.8 billion years ago.
Many early galaxies spotted by JWST are brighter, more diverse and better formed than astronomers had anticipated. “It seems like the early Universe was a very profound galaxy-maker,” says Steven Finkelstein, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin.
Some of these initial findings are being revised as data calibrations improve, and many of the early claims about distant galaxies await confirmation by spectroscopic studies of the galaxies’ light. But astronomers including Curtis-Lake announced on 9 December that they have already nailed spectroscopic confirmation of two galaxies that are farther away than any ever previously confirmed.
’Mindblowing’ detail
In closer regions of the cosmos, JWST is yielding results on star formation and evolution, thanks to its sharp resolution and infrared vision. “Compared to what we can see with Hubble, the amount of details that you see in the Universe, it’s completely mind-blowing,” says Lamiya Mowla, an astronomer at the University of Toronto in Canada. Thanks to telescope’s keen vision, she and her colleagues were able to spot bright ‘sparkles’ around a galaxy that they dubbed the Sparkler; the sparkles turned out to be some of the oldest star clusters ever discovered. Other studies have unveiled details such as the hearts of galaxies where monster black holes lurk.
Another burst of JWST discoveries comes from studies of exoplanet atmospheres, which the telescope can scrutinize in unprecedented detail.
JWST reveals first evidence of an exoplanet’s surprising chemistry
For instance, when scientists saw the first JWST data from the exoplanet WASP-39b, signals from a range of compounds, such as water, leapt right out. “Just looking at it was like, all the answers were in front of us,” says Mercedes López-Morales, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Now scientists are keenly anticipating data about other planets including the seven Earth-sized worlds that orbit the star TRAPPIST-1. Early results on two of the TRAPPIST-1 planets, reported at the symposium, suggest that JWST is more than capable of finding atmospheres there, though the observations will take more time to analyse.
JWST has even made its first planet discovery: a rocky Earth-sized planet that orbits a nearby cool star, Kevin Stevenson at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, told the meeting.
The telescope has also proved its worth for studying objects in Earth’s celestial neighbourhood. At the symposium, astronomer Geronimo Villanueva at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, showed new images of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Scientists knew that Enceladus has a buried ocean whose water sometimes squirts out of fractures in its icy crust, but JWST revealed that the water plume envelops the entire moon and well beyond. Separately, engineers have also figured out a way to get JWST to track rapidly moving objects, such as Solar System planets, much better than expected. That led to new studies such as observations of the DART spacecraft’s deliberate crash into an asteroid in September, says Naomi Rowe-Gurney, an astronomer also at Goddard.
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Yet all these discoveries are but a taste of what JWST could ultimately do to change astronomy. “It’s premature to really have a full picture of its ultimate impact,” says Klaus Pontoppidan, JWST project scientist at STScI. Researchers have just begun to recognize JWST’s powers, such as its ability to probe details in the spectra of light from astronomical objects.
Applications are now open for astronomers to pitch their ideas for observations during JWST’s second year of operations, which starts in July. The next round could result in more ambitious or creative proposals to use the telescope now that astronomers know what it is capable of, Pontoppidan says.
Amid all the good news, there are still glitches. Primary among them is a lack of funding to support scientists working on JWST data, says López-Morales. “We can do the science, we have the skills, we are developing the tools, we are going to make groundbreaking discoveries but on a very thin budget,” she says. “Which is not ideal right now.”
Available to all?
López-Morales chairs a committee that represents astronomers who use JWST, and their to-do list is long. It includes surveying scientists about whether all of the telescope’s data should be freely available as soon as it is collected — a move that many say would disadvantage early-career scientists and those at smaller institutions who do not have the resources to pounce on and analyse JWST data right away. Telescope operators are also working on a way to get its data to flow more efficiently to Earth through communication dishes, and to fly it in a physical orientation that reduces the risk of micro-meteoroids smashing into and damaging its primary mirror.
But overall the telescope is opening up completely new realms of astronomy, says Rowe-Gurney: “It’s the thing that’s going to answer all the questions that my PhD was trying to find.”
JWST Breaks Record For Most Distant Galaxy Ever Detected : ScienceAlert
Light that has traveled for over 13.4 billion years to reach our neighborhood of space has been confirmed as originating from the earliest, most distant galaxy detected yet.
That places the most distant of these four very young objects at the very dawn of the Universe, just a short time after the Big Bang – a time period when the Universe was still foggy and bleary and the first rays of light were penetrating the darkness.
So detailed are the JWST’s long spectroscopic observations that researchers can not only measure the distance the light of these galaxies has traveled, they can also infer some of the galaxies’ properties.
“For the first time, we have discovered galaxies only 350 million years after the Big Bang, and we can be absolutely confident of their fantastic distances,” says astronomer Brant Robertson from the University of California Santa Cruz.
“To find these early galaxies in such stunningly beautiful images is a special experience.”
To be able to peer earlier into the Universe than we’ve ever seen before was one of the biggest hopes pinned on the JWST. Our understanding of the first billion years after the Big Bang is extremely limited, and finding earlier and earlier objects can help shed light on this crucial time of formation.
We have models that describe how events unfolded. We believe that, before the first stars were born, the Universe was filled with opaque matter; any light scattered off free electrons and was unable to stream freely.
These particles gradually combined to form neutral hydrogen; when the stars started to form, they ionized the hydrogen, and light shone. This process was complete by about 1 billion years after the Universe popped into being.
The light from these objects is very faint, having traveled from so very far away. And, due to the expansion of the Universe, it’s been significantly stretched into the longer, redder end of the spectrum, a phenomenon known as redshifting.
The JWST is the most powerful telescope ever launched into space, and it specializes in infrared and near-infrared light – designed for detecting this redshifted light, to the best of our ability.
To obtain a confident redshift, the light needs to be broken down into its constituent wavelengths, a technique known as spectroscopy. A team of researchers broke down the light from the JWST’s NIRCam into nine wavelength ranges, focusing on four galaxies with high redshifts, two of which were first identified by Hubble.
The new JWST data confirms that these two galaxies are indeed among the most distant ever detected – and the two others are even farther away.
“It was crucial to prove that these galaxies do, indeed, inhabit the early Universe. It’s very possible for closer galaxies to masquerade as very distant galaxies,” says astronomer Emma Curtis-Lake of the University of Hertfordshire in the UK.
“Seeing the spectrum revealed as we hoped, confirming these galaxies as being at the true edge of our view, some further away than Hubble could see! It is a tremendously exciting achievement for the mission.”
The two Hubble galaxies have redshifts of 10.38 and 11.58. The JWST’s new discoveries have redshifts of 12.63 and 13.20 – the latter of which is equivalent to about 13.5 billion light-years.
Other candidates at higher redshifts are currently under investigation, but are yet to be confirmed. Given that JWST hasn’t even been operational for six months yet, it probably won’t be too long before the record is broken.
But there’s plenty to be getting on with in the meantime. The observations that gave us these distant galaxies as part of the the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) collected a total of 28 hours’ worth of data from a region of space in and around the famous Hubble Ultra Deep Field.
This light will be able to tell us a lot about the conditions in the early Universe, and how the first stars and galaxies formed.
“With these measurements, we can know the intrinsic brightness of the galaxies and figure out how many stars they have,” Robertson says.
“Now we can start to really pick apart how galaxies are put together over time.”
The researchers will be presenting their findings at the STScI’s First Science Results from JWST conference. The two preprint papers can be read here and here.
Artemis 1 moon mission squeezing communications with JWST
Two major NASA missions that have launched in the past year are revealing a communications weakness in space.
NASA communicates with all of its distant spacecraft — from the Orion capsule to the James Webb Space Telescope (Webb or JWST) to Voyager 1 — through the Deep Space Network, a collection of 14 antennas located at three sites in California, Spain and Australia. But the network is busy, and ensuring that every mission beyond Earth orbit has the communications time it needs can be tricky, an issue that the Artemis 1 mission has exacerbated.
“We were told over the summer that when the Artemis space mission launched, the Deep Space Network was going to be basically fully taken by Artemis because they needed to keep track of the spaceship,” Mercedes López-Morales, an astrophysicist at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the chair of the JWST Users Committee, told a meeting of the U.S. National Academies of Sciences’ Board on Physics and Astronomy on Wednesday (Nov. 30).
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The time came on Nov. 16, when NASA launched Artemis 1. A test flight to kick off the agency’s return to the moon, the 25-day mission sent an uncrewed Orion capsule to lunar orbit and is scheduled to splash down Earth on Dec. 11.
While Orion is in flight and beyond low Earth orbit, it’s in near-constant contact with the Deep Space Network — a major drain that has put the James Webb Space Telescope and other missions in the backseat. NASA has known Artemis would strain the Deep Space Network; the agency arranged upgrades to some antennas and added two new ones in January 2021 and March 2022 in preparation.
But communications time is still scarce. “It could be up to 80 hours — that’s about three and a half days — of no contact with JWST at all,” López-Morales said she was told before Artemis 1’s launch.
JWST scientists usually send commands to the $10 billion observatory about once a week, she told the board, so infrequent communications doesn’t affect the observatory getting its instructions. But for astronomers to actually enjoy Webb’s power, the telescope needs to be able to beam home its data — and do so before its computer fills up.
“The big issue is that you cannot download data for that long,” López-Morales said.
For Artemis 1, she said, the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland, which operates both JWST and the Hubble Space Telescope, rejiggered JWST’s observing schedule. Scientists prioritized shorter observations, which create smaller batches of data, to reduce the chances of the telescope’s computer filling up before the Deep Space Network can accept the next batch of data.
But because NASA plans additional Artemis launches — and these with humans aboard — in 2024 and beyond, scientists want a different solution to the communications logjam.
“We are desperately asking NASA to come up with a plan to somehow have more access to antennas,” López-Morales said.
Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her on Twitter @meghanbartels. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.