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NASA Unveils James Webb Space Telescope’s First Full-Colour Images

NASA Unveils James Webb Space Telescope’s First Full-Colour Images

The Carina Nebula as imaged by the James Webb Space Telescope. Full caption at the end. Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production Team


  • NASA officials have unveiled the first full-colour images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the largest and most powerful orbital observatory ever launched.
  • The $9 billion infrared telescope is expected to revolutionise astronomy by allowing scientists to peer farther than before and with greater clarity into the cosmos, to the dawn of the known universe.
  • The introductory assortment of pictures had been a closely guarded secret until July 8, when the space agency posted a list of five celestial subjects chosen for its big reveal on July 12.
  • These are: the Carina Nebula, the Stephan’s Quintet galaxies, the Southern Ring Nebula, the exoplanet WASP-96b, and the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723.
  • At least one of the faint, older specks of light appearing in the “background” of the SMACS 0723 photo dates back to a time when the universe was only 800 million years old.

Greenbelt, Maryland: Following a presidential sneak peek of a galaxy-studded image from deep in the cosmos, NASA officials gathered on Tuesday to unveil more of their initial showcase from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the largest and most powerful orbital observatory ever launched.

The first batch of full-color, high-resolution pictures, which took weeks to render from raw telescope data, were selected by NASA to provide compelling early images from JWST’s major areas of inquiry and a preview of science missions ahead.

The $9 billion infrared telescope, built for NASA by aerospace giant Northrop Grumman Corp., is expected to revolutionise astronomy by allowing scientists to peer farther than before and with greater clarity into the cosmos, to the dawn of the known universe.

A partnership between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, the JWST was launched on Christmas Day 2021, and reached its destination in solar orbit nearly 1.6 million km from Earth a month later.

Once there, the telescope underwent a months-long process to unfurl all of its components, including a sun shield the size of a tennis court, and to align its mirrors and calibrate its instruments.

With JWST now finely tuned and fully focused, astronomers will embark on a competitively selected list of science projects exploring the evolution of galaxies, the life cycles of stars, the atmospheres of distant exoplanets and the moons of our outer solar system.

The introductory assortment of pictures had been a closely guarded secret until July 8, when the space agency posted a list of five celestial subjects chosen for its big reveal on July 12 at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

Whoops and hollers from a spritely James Webb “cheer team” welcomed some 300 scientists, telescope engineers, politicians and senior officials from NASA and its international partners into a packed and lively auditorium ahead of opening remarks.

“I didn’t know I was coming to a pep rally today,” NASA Administrator James Nelson said from the stage, enthusing that JWST’s “every image is a discovery.”

Presidential peek

US President Joe Biden got a jump on the unveiling with his own White House briefing on Monday to release the very first photo – an image of a galaxy cluster dubbed SMACS 0723 revealing the most detailed glimpse of the early universe recorded to date.

Among the four other JWST “targets” getting their closeups on Tuesday are two enormous clouds of gas and dust blasted into space by stellar explosions to form incubators for new stars – the Carina Nebula (above) and the Southern Ring Nebula, each thousands of light years away from Earth.

Two side-by-side images show observations of the Southern Ring Nebula in near-infrared light, at left, and mid-infrared light, at right, from the James Webb Space Telescope. Images released July 12, 2022. In the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) image, the white dwarf appears to the lower left of the bright, central star, partially hidden by a diffraction spike. The same star appears – but brighter, larger and redder – in the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) image. This white dwarf star is cloaked in thick layers of dust, which make it appear larger. Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production Team

The debut collection includes another galaxy cluster known as Stephan’s Quintet, which was first discovered in 1877 and encompasses several galaxies described by NASA as “locked in a cosmic dance of repeated close encounters.”

A group of five galaxies that appear close to each other in the sky: two in the middle, one toward the top, one to the upper left, and one toward the bottom are seen in a mosaic or composite of near and mid-infrared data from the James Webb Space Telescope. Image released July 12, 2022. Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production Team

NASA will also present JWST’s first spectrographic analysis of an exoplanet – one roughly half the mass of Jupiter that lies more than 1,100 light years away – revealing the molecular signatures of filtered light passing through its atmosphere.

Built to view its subjects chiefly in the infrared spectrum, JWST is about 100-times more sensitive than its 30-year-old predecessor, the Hubble space telescope, which operates mainly at optical and ultraviolet wavelengths.

The much larger light-collecting surface of JWST’s primary mirror – an array of 18 hexagonal segments of gold-coated beryllium metal – enables it to observe objects at greater distances, thus further back in time, than Hubble or any other telescope.

All five of JWST’s introductory targets were previously known to scientists, but NASA officials promise JWST’s imagery captures its subjects in an entirely new light, literally.

The SMACS 0723 image Biden released on Monday showed a 4.6 billion-year-old galaxy cluster whose combined mass acts as a “gravitational lens,” distorting space to greatly magnify the light coming from more distant galaxies behind it.

Two full-colour images from the James Webb Space Telescope, show composites made from images at mid-infrared (L) and near-infrared (R) and released July 12, 2022. Images: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production Team

At least one of the faint, older specks of light appearing in the “background” of the photo – a composite of images of different wavelengths of light – dates back more than 13 billion years, Nelson said.

That makes it just 800 million years younger than the Big Bang, the theoretical flashpoint that set the expansion of the known universe in motion some 13.8 billion years ago.

The bejeweled-like composite photo, according to NASA, offers the “most detailed view of the early universe” as well as the “deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant cosmos” yet taken.

The thousands of galaxies appearing in the image were captured in a tiny patch of the sky roughly the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone standing on Earth, Nelson said.

Caption for featured image: The ‘Cosmic Cliffs’ of the Carina Nebula seen in this image divided horizontally by an undulating line between a cloudscape forming a nebula along the bottom portion and a comparatively clear upper portion, with data from the James Webb Space Telescope, a revolutionary apparatus designed to peer through the cosmos to the dawn of the universe, released July 12, 2022. Speckled across both portions is a starfield, showing innumerable stars of many sizes. Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production Team.

(Reuters – writing and reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; additional reporting by Joey Roulette; editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan and Nick Zieminski)

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