Sneak a peek at the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the early universe ever taken — all in a day’s work for the Webb telescope. (Literally! Webb was able to capture this image in less than one day, while similar deep field images from Hubble can take multiple weeks.)
The NIRCam view (at right) is Webb’s first image released as we begin to #UnfoldTheUniverse: nasa.gov/webbfirstimages/
Compare Webb’s Mid-Infrared (L) & Near-Infrared (R) views. Lens flares? Nope, the spikes you see are when light from bright objects like stars is bent by the edges of the telescope. They’re less prominent in mid-infrared.
If you held a grain of sand up to the sky at arm’s length, that tiny speck is the size of Webb’s view in this image. Imagine — galaxies galore within a grain, including light from galaxies that traveled billions of years to us! Why do some of the galaxies in this image appear bent? The combined mass of this galaxy cluster acts as a “gravitational lens,” bending light rays from more distant galaxies behind it, magnifying them.
More on diffraction spikes: webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/01G529MX46J7AFK61...
This image isn’t the farthest back we’ve ever observed. Non-infrared missions like COBE and WMAP saw the universe much closer to the Big Bang (about 380,000 years after), when there was only microwave background radiation, but no stars or galaxies yet. Webb sees a few 100 million years after the Big Bang.
The James Webb Space Telescope is an international collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. The Space Telescope Science Institute is the science and mission operations center for Webb.
Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI
Image description:
Side-by-side deep field images from the Webb telescope’s MIRI and NIRCam instruments. The MIRI image on the left is black, with bright glowing points of blue, yellow, red, orange, and green, which are galaxies and stars. The stars have stubby diffraction spikes radiating out, most prominently seen around a bright blue star just above and to the left of the center of the image. The right image from NIRCam also shows a black void of space. Against the black, stars and galaxies shine in oranges, yellows, whites and blues. Some of the galaxies are recognizably spirals, while some just look like colorful smudges of light. Near the center, where the gravitational lensing is occurring, some galaxies are doubled, forming a faint circle. In the center of the circle is a smear of white light. Sprinkled among the galaxies are stars, distinguishable by the diffraction spikes radiating out from them. The same bright blue star as seen in the MIRI image dominates the center of the NIRCam image.
Tags: jwst webb james space telescope firstImages recentbestof bestof topImages
Two stars both alike in dignity, in the fair Southern Ring planetary nebula where we lay our scene...
Here our “star-crossed lovers” are actually a dying star expelling gas and dust, in orbit with a younger star that is helping to change the shape of this nebula’s intricate rings by creating turbulence. The James Webb Space Telescope can see through the gas and dust in unprecedented detail.
On the left is an image from Webb’s NIRCam instrument, which saw this nebula in the near-infrared. On the right is the same nebula as seen by Webb’s MIRI instrument in the mid-infrared. The stars – and their layers of light – steal more attention in the NIRCam image, while glowing dust plays the lead in the MIRI image. In thousands of years, these delicate, gaseous layers will dissipate into surrounding space.
The Southern Ring nebula is called a planetary nebula. Despite “planet” in the name, which comes from how these objects first appeared to astronomers observing them hundreds of years ago, these are shells of dust and gas shed by dying Sun-like stars. The new details from Webb will transform our understanding of how stars evolve and influence their environments.
Read more about the new Webb observations of this object: nasa.gov/webbfirstimages/
Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI
Image description
The image is split down the middle, showing two views of the Southern Ring Nebula. Both feature black backgrounds speckled with tiny bright stars and distant galaxies. Both show the planetary nebula as a misshapen oval that is slightly angled from top left to bottom right and takes up the majority of each image. At left, the near-infrared image shows a bright white star at the center with long diffraction spikes. Large, transparent teal and orange ovals, which are shells ejected by the unseen central star, surround it. At right, the mid-infrared image shows two stars at the center very close to one another. The one at left is red, the smaller one at right is light blue. The blue star has tiny triangles around it. A large transparent red oval surrounds the central stars. From that extend shells in a mix of colors, which are red to the left and right and teal to the top and bottom. Overall, the oval shape of the planetary nebula appears slightly smaller than the one seen at left.
Tags: jwst webb james space telescope recentbestof topImages bestof firstImages NGC 3132 Southern Ring Nebula Eight-Burst Nebula
Two stars both alike in dignity, in the fair Southern Ring planetary nebula where we lay our scene...
Here our “star-crossed lovers” are actually a dying star expelling gas & dust, in orbit with a younger star that is helping to change the shape of this nebula’s intricate rings by creating turbulence. The James Webb Space Telescope can see through the gas and dust in unprecedented detail. In thousands of years, these delicate, gaseous layers will dissipate into surrounding space.
This image is from Webb’s NIRCam instrument, which saw this nebula in the near-infrared.
The Southern Ring nebula is called a planetary nebula. Despite “planet” in the name, which comes from how these objects first appeared to astronomers observing them hundreds of years ago, these are shells of dust and gas shed by dying Sun-like stars. The new details from Webb will transform our understanding of how stars evolve and influence their environments.
Read more about the new Webb observations of this object: nasa.gov/webbfirstimages/
Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI
Image description
A planetary nebula, seen by the Webb telescope’s NIRCam instrument, against the blackness of space, with points of starlight behind it. The nebula itself is shaped like an irregular oval, with lacy, reddish orange plumes of gas and dust. Further inside the circle, the gas and dust glows bright blue. A glowing white ring separates the red and blue gases. In the center of the rings are two stars, one glowing much brighter than the other, with diffraction spikes radiating out from it.
Tags: jwst webb james space telescope recentbestof topImages bestof firstImages NGC 3132 Southern Ring Nebula Eight-Burst Nebula
Galactic high five!
In the James Webb Space Telescope’s image of Stephan’s Quintet, we see 5 galaxies, 4 of which interact. (The left galaxy is actually much closer to us than the rest of the group!) These colliding galaxies are pulling and stretching each other in a gravitational dance. Webb will revolutionize our knowledge of star formation and gas interactions within: nasa.gov/webbfirstimages/
This mosaic, a composite of near and mid-infrared data, is Webb’s largest image to date, covering an area of the sky 1/5 of the Moon’s diameter (as seen from Earth). It contains more than 150 million pixels and is constructed from about 1,000 image files.
Image Description: 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. Four of the five appear to be touching. One is somewhat separated. In the image, the galaxies are large relative to the hundreds of much smaller (more distant) galaxies in the background. All five galaxies have bright white cores. Each has a slightly different size, shape, structure, and coloring. Scattered across the image, in front of the galaxies are number of foreground stars with diffraction spikes: bright white points, each with eight bright lines radiating out from the center.
Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI
Tags: jwst webb james space telescope recentbestif bestof topImages firstImages Stephan's Quintet HCG 92
Clouds are in the forecast for exoplanet WASP-96 b!
The James Webb Space Telescope spotted the unambiguous signature of water, indications of haze & evidence for clouds (once thought not to exist there). This is the most detailed exoplanet spectrum to date! More: nasa.gov/webbfirstimages/
A spectrum is created when light is split into a rainbow of colors. When Webb observes the light of a star, filtered through the atmosphere of its planet, its spectrographs split up the light into an infrared rainbow. By analyzing that light, scientists can look for the characteristic signatures of specific elements or molecules in the spectrum.
Located in the southern-sky constellation Phoenix, WASP-96 b is 1,150 light-years away. It’s a large, hot planet with a “puffy” atmosphere, orbiting very close to its Sun-like star. In fact, its temperature is greater than 1000 degrees F (537 degrees C) — significantly hotter than any planet in our own solar system!
Please note that the illustration in the background of the image is based on what we know of WASP-96b. Webb hasn't directly imaged the planet or its atmosphere. (Fun fact: space is big and planets are small — though Webb CAN image exoplanets directly, the images would just show a dot of light. Consider that though Pluto is in our own solar system, it is still so far that we didn’t know what it really looked like until New Horizons visited it.)
Image Description:
Graphic titled “Hot Gas Giant Exoplanet WASP-96 b Atmosphere Composition, NIRISS Single-Object Slitless Spectroscopy.” The graphic shows the transmission spectrum of the hot gas giant exoplanet WASP-96 b captured using Webb's NIRISS Single-Object Slitless Spectroscopy with an illustration of the planet and its star in the background. The data points are plotted on a graph of amount of light blocked in parts per million versus wavelength of light in microns. A curvy blue line represents a best-fit model. Four prominent peaks visible in the data and model are labeled “water, H2O.”
Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI
Tags: jwst webb james webb space telescope