After the James Webb Space Telescope unveiled the clearest view yet of the distant cosmos, there’s more to come.
Tuesday’s next wave of images will reveal details about a distant gas planet’s atmosphere, a “stellar nursery” where stars are forming, a “quintet” of galaxies locked in a dance of close encounters, and the gas cloud surrounding a dying star .
They will be released starting at 10:30 a.m. Eastern Time (1430 GMT) in an event streamed live from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, just outside of Washington.
Targets include the Carina Nebula, a stellar nursery famed for its towering pillars, which include “Mystic Mountain,” a three-light-year-tall cosmic pinnacle captured in an iconic Hubble image.
Webb has also performed spectroscopy — an analysis of light that reveals detailed information — on a gas giant planet called WASP-96 b, discovered in 2014.
WASP-96 b is nearly 1,150 light-years from Earth, about half the mass of Jupiter, and orbits its star in just 3.4 days.
On Monday, Webb unveiled the clearest picture yet of the early Universe, dating back 13 billion years, NASA said Monday.
The stunning image, released in a White House briefing by President Joe Biden, is crowded with thousands of galaxies and shows some of the faintest objects observed.
Known as Webb’s First Deep Field, it features the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 acting as a gravitational lens, directing light from more distant galaxies behind towards the observatory in a cosmic magnifying effect.
Launched in December 2021 from French Guiana on an Ariane 5 rocket, Webb orbits the Sun one million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth in a region of space known as the second Lagrange point referred to as.
Here it remains in a fixed position relative to the Earth and Sun, using minimal fuel for course corrections.
The total cost of the project is estimated at $10 billion, an engineering marvel, making it one of the most expensive science platforms ever built, comparable to the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
Webb’s primary mirror is over 6.5 meters wide and consists of 18 gold-coated mirror segments. As with a handheld camera, the structure must remain as stable as possible to get the best shots.
After the first images, astronomers around the world will be awarded time shares at the telescope, with projects being selected competitively through a process in which applicants and selectors do not know each other’s identities to minimize bias.
Thanks to an efficient launch, Webb has enough propellant to last 20 years, NASA estimates, as it works with the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes to answer fundamental questions about the cosmos.
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