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Astronomers and scientists from around the world have begun to react to the new images that NASA published, obtained through the James Webb Space Telescope.
One scientist even declared that this is “a new era in space exploration”. The photographs depict the wonder of the universe, from newborn stars to the most distant galaxies.
The presentation of the fruits of the labor of the space telescope that cost 10 billion dollars, James Webb, began on Monday at the White House. In the first photograph, a multitude of galaxies can be seen, found in a depth of the cosmos where humanity had never been able to glimpse before.
Michael Messina, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who contributed to the Webb Space Telescope project, says these are just the initial glimpses.
“The scenes were really very short. We hope that in the continuation of this mission we will get longer views, deeper pictures, discover things that are even further away”. he says.
The parts of the universe shown at the White House have been seen in the past by other telescopes. But the power of the Webb Space Telescope, its positioning far from Earth, and its use of the infrared spectrum, presented everything in a new light, which scientists say is not only science, but also art.
With the Webb Space Telescope, scientists hope to obtain light from the first stars and galaxies, which formed 13.7 billion years ago and only 100 million years after the creation of the universe.
The telescope will probe the atmospheres of other worlds for possible signs of life. Using infrared, the Webb telescope observed the chemical composition of a giant planet called WASP-96b, which is about the size of Saturn and is located 1,150 light-years away. The telescope revealed water vapor in the super-hot planet’s atmosphere and even the presence of clouds where previously astronomers thought they didn’t exist.
“With the James Webb Space Telescope, we can begin to determine the composition of the atmospheres for some of these exoplanets. We can now determine whether they resemble Earth, or Jupiter, or Venus.”says Jason Rabinovitch, assistant professor at Stevens Institute of Technology.
Scientists say that the use of infrared rays allows the Webb telescope to see through cosmic dust, even to the most distant corners of the universe.
“They are really, really amazing. What’s great about these images is that they show us what the Webb Telescope will be able to do.”says Catherine Pilachowski, a professor at Indiana University.
Some of the most stunning images from the oldest Hubble telescope have been those of the Carina Nebula, one of the brightest star-forming spaces in the sky, located about 7,600 light-years away. When scientists decided to point the new Webb Space Telescope in that direction, they were rewarded with a colorful panorama of bubbles and voids where stars were being born.
“These images represent a new era for space exploration. The Webb telescope’s large size, combined with its longer-wavelength infrared sensitivity, means it will be able to examine areas of the universe we’ve never seen before. It will also be able to probe nearby systems in ways we’ve never even dreamed of before,” says Danny Milisavljevic, assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Purdue University.
The James Webb Space Telescope, the world’s largest and most powerful, launched on a rocket in December from French Guinea in South America.
The telescope arrived in January at its designated observation site in space, about 1.6 million kilometers from Earth.
The telescope had to go through the lengthy process of aligning the mirrors, cooling the sensors enough to be operational, and calibrating the science instruments, all protected from the sun under a field-sized canopy. tennis./VOA
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