James Webb Space Telescope News

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The Horsehead Nebula is famously known for…looking like a horse’s head. But there is more to this cloud of dust and gas than meets the eye. Webb captured the top of the "horse's mane," giving us the sharpest infrared images of the region to date: go.nasa.gov/4deZDLI

The ultraviolet radiation from young massive stars is what influences the chemistry within the nebula - this region is considered one of the best for studying how radiation from stars interacts with interstellar matter. 

This portion of the Horsehead Nebula is about 0.8 light years across. In the near-infrared, young stars peep through the ethereal blueish clouds, and distant galaxies sprinkle the background.

 

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Until Webb, it was a challenge to observe star clusters in the dense central area of our Milky Way — which bulges out, full of old stars and dust! Here’s Webb’s view of NGC 6440.

Orbiting within the Galactic bulge, 28,000 light years away, NGC 6440 is a globular cluster. Globular clusters are full of older stars (hundreds of thousands to millions of them!) tightly bound together by gravity.

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An international team of astronomers has announced the detection of two of the earliest and most distant galaxies known. The light of both of them comes from just 300 million years after the Big Bang and it was possible to observe them only thanks to the power of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

The galaxies are located in a region near the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, the famous observations by the Hubble Space Telescope showing some of the most distant galaxies known at the time. JWST's larger mirrors and infrared capabilities allowed astronomers to see even farther into the universe.

“These galaxies join a small but growing population of galaxies from the first half billion years of cosmic history where we can really probe the stellar populations and the distinctive patterns of chemical elements within them,” Dr Francesco D’Eugenio of the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at the University of Cambridge, one of the team behind the discovery, said in a statement.

 

Read more about it here. 

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Webb’s new red, white and blue image features a star-to-be: a protostar. Only about 100,000 years old, this relatively young object is hidden in the “neck” of the hourglass-shaped cloud of gas and dust.

 

Webb has captured a stellar phenomenon for the first time.

See how those bright red, clumpy streaks in the top left are all slanted in the same direction to the same degree? They show aligned protostellar outflows, or jets of gas from newborn stars.

“Astronomers have long assumed that as clouds collapse to form stars, the stars will tend to spin in the same direction,” said principal investigator Klaus Pontoppidan of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “However, this has not been seen so directly before. These aligned, elongated structures are a historical record of the fundamental way that stars are born.”

Previously, the objects appeared as blobs or were invisible in optical wavelengths. Webb’s sensitive infrared vision was able to pierce through the thick dust, resolving the stars and their outflows.

This area is part of the Serpens Nebula. Located 1,300 light-years from Earth, it’s only 1-2 million years old — very young in cosmic terms! It’s home to a dense cluster of newly forming stars (about 100,000 years old), seen at the center of this image. Learn more: go.nasa.gov/45wUmvE

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Webb is cracking open the Crab Nebula to help scientists figure out what is inside. 

The Crab is the remnant of what was once a massive star, but it’s highly unusual in composition, making scientists think its star might not have been typical either. Webb also mapped light emitted from the dust in the Crab Nebula in high resolution for the first time. Unlike other supernova remnants, which have dust concentrated at their centers, the Crab Nebula’s dust is found in the outer shell’s dense filaments.

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These glittering “gems,” or glowing orange dots, are actually four images of the same thing — an extremely bright galactic core known as a quasar. The quasar appears like an arc with four bright spots because of an intriguing effect called gravitational lensing. 

The gravity of a massive foreground object, in this case a galaxy, is so powerful that it has warped time and space around it. Light followed that bend and took various paths, magnifying and creating multiple copies of the quasar behind the galaxy.

Gravitational lensing is a great way for scientists to study very distant objects that might be too faint or far. Combining this natural “magnifying glass” with Webb’s mid-infrared capabilities, scientists can learn more about the quasar's central black hole. Webb's observations will also probe the nature of dark matter, an invisible form of matter that accounts for most of the universe's mass.

Read more: esawebb.org/images/potm2406a/

 

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Astronomers have announced new evidence on a bit of a controversial topic in the field: the number of bright galaxies that existed in the early universe, specifically within the first 600 million years following the Big Bang. Hubble had shown that the number was higher than expected but ground observations disagreed with this assessment. Now, new JWST observations suggest that the Hubble analysis was right.

The galaxies were selected from the largest Hubble Brightest of Reionizing Galaxies (BoRG) pure-parallel survey. They came from 200 different lines of sight to ensure the sample was universal rather than just from a lucky spot. Their distance was based on their colors, which JWST calculates by measuring the spectrum of light of these galaxies, confirming that over 50 percent of the BoRG were indeed from the distant universe.

“The highlight of what I find in this recent study is that we're truly having this many bright galaxies, and this is important to see how reionization happens,” Dr Sofía Rojas Ruiz of UCLA, who presented this work at the 32nd General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union that took place in South Africa this week, told IFLScience.

Reionization is a not completely understood early epoch of the universe. Once the cosmos cooled down enough, about 400,000 years after the Big Bang, hydrogen atoms were able to hold on to their electrons. They were no longer ionized as they had been since the first proton popped into existence.

 

Read more here.

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Webb has snapped a shot of the coldest, most Jupiter-like exoplanet to be imaged so far. 

The planet, called Epsilon Indi Ab, lies about 12 light-years away from Earth. To make the discovery, Webb blocked out starlight (shown by the star symbol) with a mask called a coronagraph.

Previously, directly imaged exoplanets were often the youngest, hottest worlds. As planets cool, they become significantly fainter and more difficult to image. Most of their emission is in mid-infrared light. Luckily, Webb is ideally suited to conduct mid-infrared imaging.

With an estimated temperature of 35 degrees F (2 degrees C), Epsilon Indi Ab is just a bit warmer than the gas giants in our own solar system. With its unique properties, this intriguing world is giving astronomers a rare opportunity to study a true solar system analog.

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This composite image features a region of star formation known as the Pillars of Creation. Here, tall columns of grey gas and dust emerge from the bottom edge of the image, stretching toward our upper right. Backed by dark orange and pink mist, the cloudy grey columns are surrounded by dozens of soft, glowing, dots in whites, reds, blues, yellows, and purples. These dots are young stars emitting X-ray and infrared light. Churning with turbulent gas and dust, the columns lean to our right with small offshoots pointing in the same direction. The misty glow, colorful stars, and lifelike grey dust formations combine to create an image of yearning cloud creatures at dusk, reaching for something just out of frame.

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Arp 142, two interacting galaxies, observed in near- and mid-infrared light. At left is NGC 2937, nicknamed the Egg. Its center is the brighter and whiter. There are six diffraction spikes atop its gauzy blue layers. At right is NGC 2936, nicknamed the Penguin. Its beak-like region points toward and above the Egg. Where the eye would be is a small, opaque yellow spiral. The Penguin’s distorted arms form the bird’s beak, back, and tail. The tail is wide and layered, like a beta fish’s tail. A semi-transparent blue hue traces the Penguin and extends from the galaxy, creating an upside-down U over top of both galaxies. At top right is another galaxy seen from the side, pointing roughly at a 45-degree angle. It is largely light blue. Its length appears approximately as long as the Egg’s height. One foreground star with large, bright blue diffraction spikes appears over top of the galaxy and another near it. The entire black background is filled with tiny, extremely distant galaxies.

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Pictured is the Orion Nebula, a giant cloud where stars are forming. Still located in the Milky Way galaxy, this region is a little bit farther from our home planet at about 1,500 light-years away. If you look just below the middle of the three stars that make up the “belt” in the constellation of Orion, you may be able to see this nebula through a small telescope. With Chandra and Webb, however, we get to see so much more. Chandra reveals young stars that glow brightly in X-rays, colored in red, green, and blue, while Webb shows the gas and dust in darker red that will help build the next generation of stars here.

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Our universe is absolutely amazing.