James Webb Space Telescope

There are more scenes of the cosmos coming on Tuesday morning from the largest space observatory ever built.

Adam Riess, a Nobel-Prize winning cosmologist at the Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University, said the new Webb image had detected objects a trillionth the brightness of the star Vega, a astronomical standard for the magnitude of a star. The cluster’s enormous gravitation field acts as a lens, warping and magnifying the light from galaxies behind it that would otherwise be too faint and faraway to see. Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for space science, described this image as the deepest view yet into the past of our cosmos. Webb is expected to smash that record, again and again starting with this image of SMACS 0723. In the first Webb image released by President Biden and NASA yesterday, some of the distant galaxies are warped into curves. Such a spectrum is the sort of detail that could reveal what is in that world’s atmosphere. For the astronomers, engineers and officials watching on Earth, the deployment was a tense time. It includes a massive cluster of galaxies about 4 billion light-years from here that astronomers use as a kind of cosmic telescope. Last week, NASA released another picture taken by the telescope’s fine guidance sensor, a camera meant just to lock on surrounding stars for reference and keep the spacecraft’s science instruments pointed at exactly the right place. In a brief event at the White House on Monday, President Biden and NASA introduced Webb’s first scientific image, which goes by the name of SMACS 0723. It is a patch of sky visible from the Southern Hemisphere on Earth and often visited by Hubble and other telescopes in search of the deep past. Starting in the late morning, the agency will reveal a series of images from the largest and most powerful space observatory ever launched.

Thanks to the telescope's deep and sharp infrared images, Earthlings are getting a more detailed look at distant galaxies than was ever possible.

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NASA revealed the first scientific images from the James Webb Space Telescope. The cosmic photos feature fresh looks at galaxies in the deep universe, ...

“We humans really are connected to the Universe. We’re made of the same stuff in this beautiful landscape.” Hundreds of new stars can be seen in this image that scientists hadn’t seen yet, as well as even more violent jets and bubbles caused by baby stars tearing away at the nearby gas and dust. This picture shows the cosmic cliffs of the nebula in stunning detail and color, revealing more detail about this area than ever before. “The gravity of the cluster is distorting and warping our view of what’s behind,” Jane Rigby, operations project scientist for JWST at NASA, said during the briefing. JWST was able to capture the spectrum — or the breakdown of light — filtered through the atmosphere of a planet outside of our Solar System, or an exoplanet. It’s so luminous, in fact, that the resulting glow is 40 billion times as bright as that of our Sun. They’re so massive that they warp space and time around them, creating a lensing effect that magnifies the galaxies in the background. By stripping away that light, we see a surprise shining bright in the center of the top galaxy. in the atmosphere of this specific exoplanet,” Knicole Colon, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said during a briefing today on the spectrum. Today’s images each showcase an exciting ability of the observatory — and they’re only a jumping-off point of what’s to come. NASA hailed the image as the deepest infrared image of the Universe ever taken. Yesterday, NASA announced that it had officially finished calibrating JWST’s various instruments and testing out all of its different operating modes, meaning the observatory and its tools have all been deemed ready to start collecting data.

Among the newly released images are breathtaking views of a distant galaxy group called Stephan's Quintet that was discovered in 1877.

Researchers have said that Webb could unlock mysteries from as far back as 100 million years after the Big Bang — observations that could help astronomers understand how the modern universe came to be. As such, the telescope is expected to provide first-of-its-kind infrared views of the universe, and capture some never-before-seen cosmic objects. Scientists have said the observatory, which will be able to see deeper into space and in greater detail than any telescope that has come before it, could revolutionize human understanding of the universe.

Two Northwestern University astrophysicists have gained coveted early access to the James Webb Space Telescope, beginning observations this summer.

If the team is able to confirm that the sources are stars, that would imply that planets, too, could form in stressed environments near galaxies’ central supermassive black holes. Throughout her career, Strom has used some of the world’s largest telescopes to address this question, leveraging their enormous technological power to observe “adolescent” galaxies in the very distant universe. With CECILIA, we have a chance to directly measure the chemistry of distant galaxies, using an incredibly powerful method that is only possible with JWST. CECILIA will be the cipher, similar to the Rosetta Stone, that enables astronomers to crack the code and accurately interpret the thousands of other spectra of distant galaxies that JWST will observe throughout its lifetime.” Named after Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, one of the first women to earn a Ph.D. in astronomy, the CECILIA Survey will observe the spectra (or amount of light across different wavelengths) from distant galaxies in order to decipher the galaxies’ chemical compositions. This project is led by Nadeen Sabha at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. Next year, Yusef-Zadeh also will lead a project using JWST to examine Sagittarius A*, our galaxy’s central supermassive black hole. “A key piece of evidence is what those galaxies are made of.