James Webb Space Telescope

Astronomers around the world anxiously await their opportunity to pore over the data gathered by the James Webb Space Telescope.

People are going to use lots of different techniques to get as much science as they can out of the data." "And so they get priority, because we want the community to have as much data available, in particular by the time they get to propose again." "Those data will be released to the principal investigators of those programs in the next day or two, and some of them are public," he said. Making that data available to the public as the program continues will be key to unlocking new discoveries, he noted. The telescope contains four different instruments that can combine to collect data in 17 different modes. "The first year of science observations have already begun.

Yesterday's big reveal of pictures from the James Webb Space Telescope are not just dazzling; they also pack a lot of science.

A scientific graph is not nearly as striking as a cosmic photo, but in this case the graph has a story to tell. Webb has the capability not just to image the Southern Ring Nebula, but to analyze its chemistry, understanding more about how stars shed their matter as they die. Webb captured an image of this pair of elderly stars orbiting each other approximately 2,500 light years from Earth. As the stars enter the end of their lives, they give off gas and dust that form the nebulae, or clouds, that surround them. Clusters of young stars appear as bright sparkles in the image and thousands of more-distant galaxies are visible in the background. Webb captured the greatest image ever taken of Stephan’s Quintet, a cluster of five galaxies, first seen by astronomers in 1877. The formations that look like cliffs are vast peaks of dust and gas, some as tall as seven light years.

Hannah Docter-Loeb: How is JWST different from previous telescopes? It's about a hundred times more sensitive than the Hubble Space Telescope. It's got a much ...

The level of detail and the number of objects and just the clarity are really, really striking and very moving in a way. JWST took a couple of images of a piece of this nebula with different bands of infrared light, and looking at this picture is just really moving, because you can see these tendrils of dust and gas, and you can see the tiny pinpricks of new stars forming inside these clouds of gas. Hopefully, we’ll get to learn about the atmospheres of planets around other stars, maybe planets that are more like Earth. It’s possible that we’ll be able to see spectra of other planets, which could tell us something about the atmospheres of planets, maybe similar to Earth, orbiting other stars. I think that, if we take that seriously, then we need also to take this seriously, the concerns of people who are feeling excluded and disrespected by the decisions that NASA made around this project. The main thing you see when you look at that image is that it’s just full of galaxies. I’ve been trying to refer to it by the initials in recognition of the fact that the name itself is problematic. It bends around the object and that bending can magnify the images of objects behind whatever massive thing is doing the lensing. There’s been an effort within the community for a lot of people to refer to only by initials. It’s able to see the gas and dust in things like the cores of interacting galaxies. The thing that jumps out at you is that there are these streaks, these smudges in arcs, circling the central cluster. It’s able to see essentially some of the first galaxies that ever were formed in the cosmos because it can look back more than 13 billion years. This means that it can gather more light and see dimmer objects in the very, very distant universe.

James Webb was undersecretary of state during the Truman administration when the federal government systematically purged its ranks of LGBTQ employees.

The petition has been signed by more than 1,700 people, most of whom work in astronomy or “a related field.” It calls on NASA to instead “bestow this honor on someone whose legacy befits a telescope whose data will be used in discoveries that will inspire future generations of astronomers.” Webb ran NASA, then a fledgling space agency, from 1961 to 1968, playing a major role in the Apollo program. NASA has billed the mission as an “Apollo moment,” with the potential to answer probing questions at the frontier of space discovery, including about life on other planets.

In June, specialists gathered in Baltimore to select images from the James Webb Space Telescope to share with the public. Keeping the results to themselves ...

“I just felt overwhelmed,” said Joe Depasquale, the lead image processor on the project, describing what it had felt like to see one scene of another star-forming nebula come together — something with a more Caravaggio-esque, light-and-shadow effect that wasn’t included in the initial batch of releases. After half an hour of focus on the Carina nebula image, the participants in the early June meeting shifted their attentions to another observation that was also held back from Tuesday’s initial releases. They checked off boxes that vibed with the telescope’s scientific goals: a deeper-than-ever deep field, galaxies pulsing in the void like jellyfish, a star with an attendant exoplanet, star-forming regions like the Carina Nebula and more. Before coloring in the cosmos, though, astronomers had to come up with what to do right after the most powerful set of eyes ever produced had fluttered open for the first time. The Hubble color palette isn’t fussy about matching an exact wavelength that the telescope saw to the exact color it would appear as in human eyes. In parallel, image processors working with Hubble data adopted a color palette that soon came to dominate the wider world of deep cosmic photography. Engineers and image processors also adopted new conventions that have recurred in fictional and real-world depictions of the cosmos ever since. Even reaching this point had taken decades of planning, threatened cancellations, delays upon delays, a pandemic and a round of harrowing reverse origami that was needed to unfold the telescope in deep space without breaking it. Just days later, Time and Life magazines ran the photo alongside poetry, and when the U.S. Postal Service reprinted it on a stamp, it kept a matching quote: the first words of Genesis, which the astronauts had read back to listeners on Earth as they circled the moon. For six weeks, this group — a mix of astronomers, press officers and science communicators — raced to assemble an early highlight reel for the $10 billion space observatory, launched on Christmas Day last year. Much of that is because the Webb operates in infrared wavelengths. This is full of jets!” — at the crisp, hallucinatory grandeur of new stars sprouting from a nebula like seeds from a flower bed.

NASA on Tuesday released five images from the early work of the James Webb Space Telescope. The pictures highlighted the great potential of the telescope to ...

NASA officials said the distortion was barely noticeable and the performance of Webb still exceeds all of its requirements. For a spacecraft like the James Webb Space Telescope, it was inevitable that pieces of cosmic dust would hit its mirrors. But when astronomers who operate the Webb telescope at the Space Science Telescope Institute in Baltimore saw it, they gasped and applauded. Astronomers theorize that the most distant, earliest stars may be unlike the stars we see today. The light from those galaxies, magnified into visibility by the gravitational field of the cluster, originated more than 13 billion years ago. Some 13 projects have been deemed Early Release Science Programs, chosen to jump start the Webb era. Below are some of the things we have learned so far. NASA’s experience with the Hubble Space Telescope sending back blurry images showed that advanced scientific instruments sometimes did not work as intended. “And it works better than we thought.” The scientific research is already underway. There is a lot more universe out there to see than there was before the telescope launched, and there is so much more to explain. NASA on Tuesday released five images from the early work of the James Webb Space Telescope. The pictures highlighted the great potential of the telescope to plumb the secrets of deep space.