aAfter decades of development and many trials and disappointments along the way, James Webb Telescope At last he has started giving what he came for. On July 12, NASA released the first scientific observations made by the suite of instruments aboard the mission, indicating that what we’ve been eagerly waiting for will happen. Beginning of a new era in astronomy,
After nail-biting launch On Christmas Day, a series of significant deployments followed to open the telescope and its sunshade. If any of these operations had failed, James Webb would have been an inexplicable disaster. But the program was executed perfectly, a process that ran more smoothly and successfully than any of us expected, let alone hope.
It is not just a testament to the skill of the engineers, technicians and scientists in the project. It also highlights the tremendous importance of the test program conducted on Earth to verify the processes and which sometimes reveal problems that need to be fixed before launch. While this has occasionally resulted in schedule slippage and cost overruns, it has ultimately produced a perfect telescope.
During July, the telescope went from its checkout and testing phase into operation, the marvelous observatory as it has long been planned. Those of us who have been involved in the journey and will be working on the data can hardly wait.
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The new “early release observations”, selected by an international committee of representatives from NASA, ESA (European Space Agency), CSA (Canadian Space Agency), and the Space Telescope Science Institute, part of a program designed to uncover a wide range of Huh. Will take out the telescope of science.
Seeing new images is so exciting – I wasn’t prepared for the level of crispness and fine detail that can be seen. It is a pleasure to finally get such high-quality data.
Stunning image unveiled by US President Joe Biden SMS 0723A Cluster of Thousands of Galaxies, was released on July 11. Giant foreground galaxy clusters magnify and distort the light of objects behind them, allowing us to look back in time at very faint objects.
The image shows the galaxy cluster as it appeared 4.6 billion years ago. But the more distant galaxies in the image (which appear stretched) are about 13 billion years old – and we already have more data about them than any other ancient galaxy.
Images like these will help us understand how the first stars and galaxies formed. Some of these may be among the most distant objects known since the beginning of the universe. The picture is a composite “color” image created from observations made at different wavelengths. It was captured by the telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam).
James Webb has also caught a glimpse of Stephen’s Quintet, a group of five galaxies merging into the Pegasus constellation about 290 million light-years away. The image also suggests that there is a supermassive black hole in the center, and stars are born. The data will tell us more about how galaxies evolve and the rate at which supermassive black holes grow.
next picture shows Carina Nebula, seen in the image below, is one of the largest and brightest nebulae (the dust and gas clouds from which stars are born). James Webb can probe deep inside the dust in infrared light, revealing the inside of stellar nurseries – which we have never seen before – to learn more about how stars are born.
The Carina Nebula is located approximately 7,600 light-years away in the southern constellation Carina. The image shows hundreds of completely new stars (each point of light is a star), and the jets and bubbles they form. We can also see details that we can’t explain yet.
Next up is the great image southern ring Or the “eight-explosion” nebula, a planetary nebula, which is an expanding cloud of gas around a dying star, or in this case two dying stars orbiting each other. Its diameter is about half a light year and it is located about 2,000 light years away from Earth.
The foamy orange shell in the image is molecular hydrogen (a gas that forms when two hydrogen atoms join together), while the blue center is an electrically charged gas. In the right-hand image, you can see two dying stars in the center, giving us the opportunity to study stellar death in unprecedented detail.
The new data is the result of months of painstaking measurement and testing to prepare the James Webb for use as a scientific instrument after deployment. The first step was to focus and align the images of each segment of the mirror. Each of the telescope’s scientific instruments – NIRCam, Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSPC) and mid-infrared instrument (MIRI) – also turned on and tested.
All of these instruments, which observe deep space at different wavelengths, had to be cooled with binoculars, otherwise they would radiate background heat that would interfere with sensitive observations of celestial objects. The last to be commissioned was MIRI, which operates at the lowest temperatures, just seven degrees above absolute zero, which took several months to achieve.
The size of a telescope – its aperture – is the key factor that decides the final quality of the images and the detail that can be observed. bigger is better. Large telescopes with apertures up to ten meters in diameter have been built on the ground.
However, the interfering effects of the atmosphere, which impede the light reaching the telescope, make the final resolution difficult to achieve. Furthermore, on Earth, background light from the night sky limits the sensitivity of binoculars, the weakest object we can see.
With its six-meter aperture, the James Webb is the largest telescope ever launched into space and from its vantage point one million miles from Earth, free of Earth’s atmosphere, we have the best, most detailed view of the universe. Looking forward to seeing you. ever seen. There is no doubt that it will revolutionize our understanding of the universe, as its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, once did.
Martin BarstowProfessor of Astrophysics and Space Sciences, University of Leicester
This article is republished from Conversation Under Creative Commons license. read the original article,
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