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The international partnership behind the James Webb Space Telescope is basking in triumph after a week of releasing stunning images of our universe.
This week began with stunning images from the James Webb Space Telescope. They are, to date, the most vivid and clear images of the universe. Webb uses infrared technology to enhance colors using filters to create dazzling images that our naked eyes cannot see. What its predecessor, the Hubble telescope, took two days to capture for each color, the Webb telescope can do in two hours.
“We looked deeper than Hubble has gone throughout its life in this kind of project. We are getting closer and closer to seeing the first things that formed after the Big Bang. Now, in a few months, we’re going to go 10 times deeper, and then we can get even closer, so we have other things in the future,” says Marcia Rieke, with the Webb Telescope.
Webb took off from South America on Christmas Day, 2021. It sent test images en route to its final destination in space, but nothing compared to what we saw this week.
“This whole image is just the beginning. So what we’re looking at is a small, very small part of the sky. In that small patch in that image there are thousands of galaxies and each of them is home to tens or even hundreds of billions of stars,” says Ray Jayawardhana, professor of astronomy at Cornell University. And then there was this image of the Carina Nebula space.
“You’re looking at a region where some new stars have formed, and in the upper part of the image that looks like the blue sky, there are some very hot stars whose light is entering the clouds, in the orange part below… Webb is so capable of detecting distant galaxies that they appear to be included in every picture Webb takes.”
The Webb telescope also captured this spectrum of a planet outside our solar system and revealed the presence of water, despite the planet being too hot to support human life. The discovery and what lies ahead are surprising even the experts working at Webb.
“Here we are on this little rocky world orbiting a medium-sized star on the outskirts of a galaxy, and we’ve launched a telescope — an observatory — that’s able to look so far into the universe and so far back in time knowing us with some of the youngest galaxies in existence. So really, it’s a humbling feeling, but also really quite exciting and makes us proud to be able to come together – tens of thousands of people have worked for decades to get to this point – and I can say it’s been worth the wait ”, says Ray Jayawardhana.
The experts we interviewed share a common prediction: We’ve only scratched the surface of what Webb can teach us about our universe and our history with much more to come./VOA
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