New Delhi: “A picture is worth a thousand worlds,” Google said on Tuesday (July 12, 2022) as it celebrated the deepest infrared photograph of the Universe ever taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope using a special Doodle. The US Space Agency on Tuesday released the first full-color, high-resolution images of the largest and most powerful observatory ever launched into space, looking further than ever to the beginning of the universe with greater clarity.
The first photos, which took weeks to render from the telescope’s raw data, were chosen by NASA to demonstrate the capabilities of the James Webb Space Telescope and anticipate upcoming science missions.
Are we alone in the Universe? how did we get here
The first images from the James Webb Space Telescope help us with this #UnfoldTheUniverse & answer the questions above
Today’s #GoogleDoodle celebrates the deepest infrared photo of the universe ever taken → https://t.co/pMopFK62KE pic.twitter.com/CIuvEiBT1z— Google Doodles (@GoogleDoodles) July 12, 2022
After nearly two decades of construction, the $9 billion infrared telescope was launched on December 25, 2021, and a month later reached its destination in solar orbit, nearly 1 million miles from Earth. With Webb fine-tuned after months of remote alignment of his mirrors and calibration of his instruments, scientists will embark on a competitively selected agenda to explore the evolution of galaxies, the life cycle of stars, atmospheres of distant exoplanets and moons of our outer solar system.
It’s time. #UnfoldTheUniverse with us and join the global observing party to see the first full-color images from the world’s most powerful space telescope, @NASAWebb. https://t.co/iLDER3c8k6 https://t.co/iLDER3c8k6 — NASA (@NASA) July 12, 2022
The crowning debut image, previewed by US President Biden on Monday but shown with greater fanfare on Tuesday, was a “deep field” photo of a distant galaxy cluster, SMACS 0723, which offers the most detailed look yet at the early Universe disclosed.
James Webb Space Telescope showing galaxies from SMACS 0723
The SMACS 0723 image below shows a 4.6 billion year old galaxy cluster whose combined mass acts as a ‘gravitational lens’, distorting space to greatly enhance light from more distant galaxies beyond. One of the older galaxies seen in the “background” of the photo — a composite of images from different wavelengths of light — is about 13.1 billion years old.
Highlighting the vastness of the universe, the thousands of galaxies appearing in the image of SMACS 0723 appear in a tiny patch of sky about the size of a grain of sand picked up by someone standing on Earth held at arm’s length.
At least one faint galaxy measured among the thousands in the image is nearly 95% as old as the Big Bang, the theoretical focal point that kickstarted the expansion of the known Universe about 13.8 billion years ago, NASA said.
Among the four other Webb objects that received their close-up images Tuesday were two huge clouds of gas and dust thrown into space by stellar explosions to form breeding grounds for new stars — the Carina Nebula and the Southern Ring Nebula, each thousands of light-years from Earth.
Image of the Carina Nebula by the James Webb Space Telescope
The new photos of the Carina Nebula reveal contours of its massive clouds that have never been seen before.
Image of the Southern Ring Nebula by the James Webb Space Telescope
The image of the Southern Ring Nebula below shows that the dying stellar object at its center was a closely orbiting binary pair.
James Webb Space Telescope image of Stephan’s quintet
The collection also included new images of another cluster of galaxies known as Stephan’s Quintet, first discovered in 1877, which includes several galaxies described by NASA as “locked in a cosmic dance of repeated close encounters.”
Aside from the images, NASA presented Webb’s first spectrographic analysis of a Jupiter-sized exoplanet more than 1,100 light-years away — revealing the molecular signatures of the filtered light streaming through its atmosphere, including the presence of water vapor. Scientists have raised the possibility of potentially discovering water on the surface of smaller, rockier Earth-like exoplanets in the future.
The James Webb Space Telescope is 100 times more sensitive than the Hubble Space Telescope
The James Webb Space Telescope, built to look at its objects primarily in the infrared spectrum, is about 100 times more sensitive than its 30-year-old predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, which works primarily with optical and ultraviolet wavelengths. The much larger light-gathering surface area of Webb’s primary mirror — an array of 18 hexagonal segments of gold-coated beryllium metal — allows it to observe objects further away, and therefore further back in time, than any other telescope. Its infrared optics allow Webb to detect a wider range of celestial objects and see through clouds of dust and gas that obscure light in the visible spectrum.
All of Webb’s five launch targets were already known to scientists, but NASA officials said Webb’s early images proved they were working as planned, better than expected, while literally capturing their subjects in a whole new light.
The Webb Telescope is an international collaboration led by NASA in partnership with European and Canadian space agencies.
(With agency contributions. Photo credit: NASA)
