Daily Space: It's Webb Telescope day! NASA releases the first batch of gorgeous images

by Mark Sumner

Daily Kos Staff Emeritus

Tuesday, Jul. 12, 2022 Tuesday, Jul. 12, 2022 at 8:20:43am PDT

This side-by-side comparison shows observations of the Southern Ring Nebula in near-infrared light, at left, and mid-infrared light, at right, from NASA’s Webb Telescope...This scene was created by a white dwarf star – the remains of a star like our Sun after it shed its outer layers and stopped burning fuel though nuclear fusion. Those outer layers now form the ejected shells all along this view...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. ..The brighter star in both images hasn’t yet shed its layers. It closely orbits the dimmer white dwarf, helping to distribute what it’s ejected...Over thousands of years and before it became a white dwarf, the star periodically ejected mass – the visible shells of material. As if on repeat, it contracted, heated up – and then, unable to push out more material, pulsated. Stellar material was sent in all directions – like a rotating sprinkler – and provided the ingredients for this asymmetrical landscape...Today, the white dwarf is heating up the gas in the inner regions – which appear blue at left and red at right. Both stars are lighting up the outer regions, shown in orange and blue, respectively...The images look very different because NIRCam and MIRI collect different wavelengths of light. NIRCam observes near-infrared light, which is closer to the visible wavelengths our eyes detect. MIRI goes farther into the infrared, picking up mid-infrared wavelengths. The second star more clearly appears in the MIRI image, because this instrument can see the gleaming dust around it, bringing it more clearly into view...The stars – and their layers of light – steal more attention in the NIRCam image, while dust pl — Side-by-side comparison of the Southern Ring Nebula in near-infrared light (left) and mid-infrared light (right).

The James Webb Space Telescope was more than a decade in construction. When it finally launched back on Christmas Day, the massive and complex structure faced what NASA called “344 points of failure” on its way to its new home at Lagrange Point 2 (L2), roughly 1,500,000 kilometers (930,000 miles) from Earth.

Day by day, week by week, the telescope didn’t just pass those points of potential failure, it passed with flying colors. Even before the telescope was fully deployed, engineers at NASA, the Canadian Space Agency, and European Space Agency were talking about how the instruments were actually exceeding what were already very high expectations.

For astronomers—and for everyone interested in the universe we live in—waiting for the first official images from Webb has been like waiting to open a present that has been out there traveling since Christmas. Today is that day. Come and see what NASAnta brought you.

President Joe Biden released the first Webb image on Monday evening, showing a deep field image studded with galaxies.

“Webb’s First Deep Field,” galaxy cluster SMACS 0723.

One thing you might notice is that some of the galaxies above seem to be stretched out. Some even show up twice. That’s because the image is being distorted, not by any issue with Webb’s instruments, but by the gravity of the many galaxies lying between Earth and these incredibly distant objects.

Join in and watch as NASA, the European Space Agency, the Canadian Space Agency, and all the people behind this project gift the world with not just knowledge, but heart-stopping beauty.

YouTube Video

Tuesday, Jul 12, 2022 · 3:33:48 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner

For anyone who remembers the Hubble Telescope image of “the pillars of creation” in the Eagle Nebula (which, hey, we talked about just this weekend on Daily Space), this is yet another of the “star nurseries” where stellar systems like our own get started.

The “Cosmic Cliffs” are part of the Carina Nebula (NGC 3324). In visible light telescopes, most of the detail here is completely lost, but Webb’s infrared instruments let it peer through the gas and dust to see the young stars illuminating the nebula.

Tuesday, Jul 12, 2022 · 3:34:51 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner

All of the images seen here have just a fraction of the detail revealed by the full-sized, uncompressed originals. All of which are available here.

Tuesday, Jul 12, 2022 · 3:44:21 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner

Webb reveals details of atmosphere around exoplanet WASP-96 b

Compared to some of the other images released today, this chart may seem kind of … blah. But in a lot of ways this is the most exciting thing released today by the Webb team.

This is Webb’s instruments looking at an exoplanet orbiting a star 1,150 light years away, and telling us about the atmosphere of that individual planet. WASP 96-b is a gas giant, slightly larger (though less massive) than Jupiter. It orbits close to its star, making it much hotter than any of the planets in our own system.

On June 21, Webb turned both its Near-Infrared Imager and spectrograph on the WASP-96 system for 6.4 hours, watching as the planet transited across the face of the star. From that data it produced a curve that shows the components of the planet’s atmosphere. That atmosphere turns out to include water … well, steam, considering how beyond-boiling hot this place is.

But this is just a sampler of many planetary observations to come.

Tuesday, Jul 12, 2022 · 3:52:11 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner

To give some idea of how much detail is in the full sized images, here’s another look at just a small portion of the Southern Ring Nebula, featured in the image at the top of the article.