The first images from the James Webb Space Telescope are not only breathtaking – they contain a wealth of scientific knowledge and leads that researchers are keen to follow up.
Here are some of the things scientists hope to learn now.
– Into the deep –
Webb’s first image, released Monday, yielded the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant Universe to date, “Webb’s First Deep Field.”
The white circles and ellipses are from the foreground galaxy cluster called SMACS 0723, as it appeared more than 4.6 billion years ago, around the time our Sun formed.
The reddish arcs are from light from ancient galaxies that has traveled more than 13 billion years and bent around the foreground cluster, which acts as a gravitational lens.
NASA astrophysicist Amber Straughn said she was struck by “the amazing detail you can see in some of these galaxies.”
“They just jump out! There’s so much more detail, it’s like seeing in high definition.”
Also, added NASA astrophysicist Jane Rigby, the image can teach us more about the mysterious dark matter, which is thought to make up 85 percent of the matter in the universe – and is the main cause of the cosmic magnification effect.
The composite image, which required an exposure time of 12.5 hours, is considered a practice run. Using a longer exposure, Webb would break all distance records by looking back to the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago.
– The hunt for habitable planets –
Webb captured the signature of water along with previously undiscovered evidence of clouds and haze in the atmosphere surrounding a hot, bloated gas giant planet called WASP-96 b, which orbits a distant star like our sun.
The telescope achieved this by analyzing starlight filtered by the planet’s atmosphere as it moved across the star, down to the unfiltered starlight detected when the planet was adjacent to the star — a technique called Spectroscopy that no other instrument can perform in the same detail.
WASP-96 b is one of more than 5,000 confirmed exoplanets in the Milky Way. But what’s really exciting to astronomers is the prospect of pointing Webb to smaller, rocky worlds like our own Earth, looking for atmospheres and bodies of liquid water that might support life.
– Death of a Star –
Webb’s cameras captured a stellar graveyard in the Southern Ring Nebula, revealing for the first time the faint, dying star at its center in clear detail and showing that it is shrouded in dust.
Astronomers will use Webb to delve deeper into the ins and outs of “planetary nebulae” like this one, spewing out clouds of gas and dust.
These mists will also eventually lead to rebirth.
Gas and cloud ejection stops after a few tens of thousands of years, and once the material is scattered in space, new stars can form.
– A Cosmic Dance –
Stephen’s Quintet, a grouping of five galaxies, is located in the constellation Pegasus.
Webb was able to penetrate through the dust and gas clouds at the galaxy’s center to reveal new insights, such as: B. the velocity and composition of gas outflows near its supermassive black hole.
Four of the galaxies are close together and locked in a “cosmic dance” of repeated close encounters.
By studying them, “you learn how the galaxies collide and merge,” said cosmologist John Mather, adding that our own Milky Way is likely composed of 1,000 smaller galaxies.
A better understanding of the black hole will also give us better insights into Sagittarius A*, the dust-shrouded black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
– Star Kindergarten –
Perhaps the most beautiful image is that of the “Cosmic Cliffs” from the Carina Nebula, a stellar nursery.
Here, for the first time, Webb has revealed previously unseen regions of star formation, which will tell us more about why stars of a given mass form and what determines the number that form in a given region.
They may look like mountains, but the tallest of the craggy peaks are seven light-years tall, and the yellow structures are made of giant hydrocarbon molecules, Webb project scientist Klaus Pontoppidan said.
In addition to the material for stars, nebula material could also be our origin.
“In this way, the universe may be transporting carbon, the carbon that makes us up, to planets that could be habitable for life,” he said.
– The Great Unknown –
Perhaps most exciting is the journey into the unknown, Straughn said.
Hubble played a key role in discovering that dark energy is causing the universe to expand at ever-increasing rates, “so it’s hard to imagine what we could learn with this 100 times more powerful instrument.”
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