The next great era of astronomy has begun. See the full set of Webb's first images: JWST
The next great era of astronomy truly began this morning. After nearly three decades of troubled development and $10 billion in spending, a pulse-pounding launch on Christmas Day in 2021 and a nail-biting half-year of delicate preparations in deep space, the James Webb Space Telescope has at last delivered a complete set of first full-color images.
Even before today’s official images were released, earlier pictures taken to guide Webb’s complex deep-space commissioning hinted at the observatory’s stunning capabilities. Simple snapshots of a star obtained by the telescope’s workhorse instrument, the Near Infrared Camera , also serendipitously included more than 1,000 “photobombing” background galaxies that would have been too faint to simply swim into view in any other observatory’s optics.
The subtle one is a spectrum—essentially just a squiggly series of peaks and valleys recording how various wavelengths of light shine through the upper atmosphere of WASP-96b, a scorched exoplanet with half the mass of Jupiter that orbits a star more than 1,000 light-years away once every 3.4 days. Such spectra are hardly images at all but can reveal an object’s bulk composition, says Knicole Coln, Webb’s deputy project scientist for exoplanet science at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
Contemplating the Cosmic Dawn The collective bulk of SMACS 0723’s clustered galaxies is so great that it warps the surrounding space, forming a bubblelike “gravitational lens” through which the fainter light of much more distant background galaxies—perhaps among the very first luminous objects in the cosmos—is warped and magnified into view.
To see this image—to be, if even for a moment, lost in its ineffable galaxy-studded depths—is to appreciate just how far we have come. Webb is so technically daunting that, in the words of Keith Parrish, the telescope’s observatory manager at Goddard, it “did not want to exist.” Yet it of course endured, surviving numerous near-death experiences on its decades-long path to the launchpad and then, against all odds, successfully running a gauntlet of make-or-break deployments beyond Earth.
And as most every astronomer will eagerly remind you, the telescope’s transformative mission has scarcely even begun. “It’s one thing to predict its power, but it’s another to see what Webb can produce almost without even trying,” Coln says. “These first images only scratch the surface of what Webb is capable of.”
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Biden unveils James Webb Space Telescope's ultradeep view of the universeMeghan is a senior writer at Space.com and has more than five years' experience as a science journalist based in New York City. She joined Space.com in July 2018, with previous writing published in outlets including Newsweek and Audubon. Meghan earned an MA in science journalism from New York University and a BA in classics from Georgetown University, and in her free time she enjoys reading and visiting museums. Follow her on Twitter at meghanbartels.
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