Astronomers have released images of stellar nurseries, a gas-giant exoplanet, a quintet of galaxies and an expanding cloud of gas around a dying star as the most powerful telescope yet continues to show off its prowess at probing the depths of the universe
It’s called the “Cosmic Cliffs” of the Carina Nebula, which is objectively a far better name than NGC 3324.
That image and four others released Tuesday are a testament to the newly unveiled astronomical prowess of the James Webb Space Telescope , the most powerful yet, 100 times more powerful than its predecessor and what experts believe is the key to unlocking the mysteries of the universe as never before.— a deep-field view of thousands of galaxies — was released Monday as NASA officials briefed U.S. President Joe Biden.
Less entrancing but just as informative to astronomers, the light spectrum from a gas-giant exoplanet WASP-96 b, 1,150 light-years from Earth, shows the presence of water vapour in its atmosphere. It is, in the words of René Doyon, the scientific director of JWST in Canada, “the beautiful bridge between science and art.”
Almost a year ago Rosolowsky submitted a proposal to use the Webb telescope to photograph the formation of stars in the spiral arms of a distant galaxy, NGC 7496. On Thursday, he’ll get his first batch of data from JWST observations, one of the very first researchers to do so. So much so, he said, that reddish arcs between the lock-stepped galaxies are areas of high rates of star formation.
Many of them are ghosts from the distant past of the universe, faint whispers from stars long dead and gone. But their remnant light allows us to catch glimpses of the universe in its earliest eras. Or water vapour, to be more precise. The Webb telescope analyzes the spectrum of the light from WASP-96 b’s star as it passes through the planet’s atmosphere, and that provides information about the composition of the atmosphere.
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