(ORDO NEWS) — The James Webb Space Telescope has illuminated 2022 with dazzling images of the early universe after the Big Bang, heralding a new era of astronomy and untold discoveries about the cosmos in the coming years.
The most powerful observatory sent into space replaced the Hubble Telescope, which is still in operation, and began transmitting its first space images in July.
“Basically, Webb is behaving better than expected in almost every area,” said Massimo Stiavelli, head of the Webb mission office at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
Scientists are already saying that the James Webb telescope, which now orbits the sun at a distance of 1.6 million kilometers from Earth, should last 20 years, twice its guaranteed lifetime.
“The instruments are more efficient, the optics are sharper and more stable. We have more fuel and we use less,” Stiavelli said.
Stability is vital to image clarity.
“Our requirements were similar to those of Hubble in terms of pointing accuracy. And in the end, we were 7 times better,” added the head of the mission office.
Public interest in the discoveries is fueled by the coloration of the telescope’s images.
Light from the most distant galaxies has been expanded from the visible spectrum, visible to the naked eye, to infrared, which Webb can observe with unprecedented resolution.
This allows the telescope to detect the faintest glimpses of the distant universe with unprecedented resolution, see through the veil of dust that obscures the appearance of stars in the nebula, and analyze the atmosphere of exoplanets that orbit stars outside the solar system.
“The first year [of observations] is a way to test the instrument on small rocky planets in the habitable zone that could potentially be similar to Earth,” said Lisa Kaltenegger of Cornell University. “And the tests are great. They are impressive.”
Webb launched aboard an Ariane 5 rocket in late 2021, ending a 30-year project by NASA.
It took 10,000 people and $10 billion to send a 6.2 ton observatory into space.
On the way to the final orbit, Webb deployed a five-layer, tennis-court-sized sunshield, followed by a 6.5-meter primary mirror consisting of 18 gold-plated hexagonal segments.
After calibrating to less than one millionth of a meter, the 18 petals began to collect light from pulsating stars.
On July 12 last year, the first images highlighted Webb’s capabilities revealing thousands of galaxies, some of which date back to near the birth of the universe, and a stellar nursery in the Carina Nebula.
Jupiter has been captured in incredible detail that will help to understand how the giant gas planet works.
The blue, orange and gray tones of the images of the “Pillars of Creation” – giant columns of dust in which stars are born – turned out to be mesmerizing.
Scientists saw the discovery as a way to rethink their models of star formation.
Researchers using the new observatory have discovered the most distant galaxies ever observed, one of which existed just 350 million years after the Big Bang, about 13.8 billion years ago.
Galaxies appear with extreme brightness and began to form 100 million years earlier than theories predicted.
“In the distant universe, we have an excess of galaxies compared to the models,” said David Elbaz, scientific director of astrophysics at the French Commission for Alternative Energy and Atomic Energy.
Another surprise was that where Hubble actually observed irregular galaxies, the precision of the Webb telescope creates magnificent spiral galaxies similar to ours.
This led to speculation about a potential universal model that could be one of the keys to star formation.
Webb also discovered many leading clusters of millions of stars that could be a potential missing link between the first stars and the first galaxies.
In the field of exoplanets, Webb focused on the distant gas giant WASP-96 b, discovered in 2014. WASP-96 b is nearly 1,150 light-years from Earth, about half the mass of Jupiter, and completes an orbit around the star in just 3.4 days.
Webb provided the first confirmation that carbon dioxide is present in Wasp 39-b’s atmosphere.
In the words of Stiavelli: “Some important things have either not yet been observed or have not yet been discovered.”
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