It was a $10 billion gift to the world. A machine that shows us where we are in space.
James Webb Space Telescope launched just a year ago, Christmas day. It took 30 years to plan, design and build.
Many wondered whether the successor to the famous Hubble Space Telescope would actually live up to expectations.
We had to wait months to unpack and focus the magnificent 6.5m primary mirror and test and calibrate other systems.
But yes, that was all they said.US, European and Canadian space agencies throw parties in July Release the first color imageShown on this page are some of the photos that have since been published that you may have missed.
The first thing to remember about James Webb is that it is an infrared telescope. We see the sky with wavelengths of light beyond the range our eyes can discern.
Astronomers use a variety of cameras to explore regions of space, such as these giant gas and dust towers. The Pillar was Hubble’s favorite target. It would take years to travel at the speed of light to travel through this entire scene.
read more: Webb Telescope’s ghostly ‘pillars of creation’
carina nebula
They call this scene the Cosmic Cliff. It’s the edge of a giant gaseous cavity within another dusty star-forming nebula known as Carinae.
The cavity is sculpted by the intense ultraviolet radiation and wind from the hot young star that was just photographed.
The distance from one side of this image to the other is approximately 15 light years. One light year is approximately 9.46 trillion km (5.88 trillion miles).
cartwheel galaxy
This large galaxy on the right was discovered in the 1940s by the great Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky. Its complex cartwheel structure is the result of a head-on collision with another galaxy. Its diameter is about 145,000 light years.
planet neptune
Deep space isn’t the only thing James Webb sees. It will also explore objects in our own solar system. This gem is Neptune, his eighth planet from the Sun, and is seen in the rings. The small white dots surrounding it are the moon, as is the large “pointy star” above. That is Neptune’s largest moon, Triton. The spike is an artifact of the way James Webb’s mirror his system was built.
read more: Ring Neptune as seen by the James Webb Telescope
orion nebula
Orion is one of the best known regions of the sky. It is a star-forming region, or nebula, about 1,350 light-years from Earth. Here Webb depicts a feature called the Orion Bar, a wall of dense gas and dust.
dimorphos
In one of the big space stories of the year, NASA slammed a spacecraft into an asteroid called Dimorphus to see if it could deflect a 160m wide rock. This was a test of strategies to protect the Earth from threatening asteroids. James Webb was showered with his 1,000-tonne debris thrown up on impact.
read more: Asteroid Deflection Experiment Using Debris
WR-140
This was one of the most interesting Webb images of the year. “WR” refers to Wolf-Rayet. It’s a kind of star, a big star coming to the end of its life. Wolf-Rayets send huge gaseous winds into space. The image’s invisible companion compresses their winds to form dust. The dusty shell you see stretches out over 10 trillion kilometers, which is 70,000 times her distance between the Earth and the Sun.
read more: Mystery of Dusty Stars Solved by James Webb Telescope
phantom galaxy
Nicknamed the Phantom Galaxy, the M74 is known for its flashy spiral arms. Located about 32 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Pisces and lying almost face-on, Webb can see these arms and their structure perfectly. Telescopic detectors are particularly good at detecting all the fine filaments of gas and dust.
I can still hear Jonathan’s voice BBC World Service Discovery Program In it he discusses the Webb project with leading scientists and engineers.
If there’s one story worth reading about Webb’s science over the past year, it’s this one.
