“The galactic ‘dance’ pulls gravity through the thin layers of gas and dust in the Penguin Galaxy, causing them to collide in waves and form stars.” NASA said in a news release:“Look for it in two places: the ‘beak’, which looks like a fish, and the ‘tail’, which looks like a feather.”
The Webb Telescope has done everything astronomers hoped, including peering deeper into the universe and further into the past than any telescope before it. And it has taken beautiful images. The universe seen by the Webb Telescope’s mirror and suite of instruments is beautiful, dazzling, and gorgeous. These sharp images demonstrate the incredible resolution of the Webb Telescope, NASA’s $10 billion successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, which is still in operation.
But the main reason Webb exists is to do something Hubble cannot: see far into the distance. In the infrared part of the spectrum Scientists analyze highly redshifted light that was emitted by galaxies when the universe was very young.
This came as a big surprise: astronomers had assumed that early galaxies would be small and faint, but that’s not what the Webb Telescope observed.
Instead, there are many large, bright galaxies, many of which contain supermassive black holes, that emitted light only about 300 million years after the Big Bang. (The most accurate estimate of the age of the universe is 13.8 billion yearsThe processes of star formation and galaxy assembly were faster, more efficient, or simply different than what theorists had assumed.
This is how science should work: new instruments with new ways of observing nature provide hard data where previously there were only theories, computer models, and concepts.
“The biggest impact we’ve had so far has been uncovering the first billion years. That was the selling point for the telescope, and we’re pleased that we’ve lived up to our expectations,” said Jane Rigby, a senior scientist at the Webb Institute. “The universe cooperated.”
Webb’s scientists are quick to add that even if there were an unexpected number of large, bright galaxies in the early universe, that doesn’t mean the Big Bang theory is wrong.
“We have a ton of data and interesting discoveries, but we don’t quite understand why,” said NASA astrophysicist Amber Strauchon, but this doesn’t mean it’s “new physics” or any particularly revolutionary discoveries. She said:
“The Big Bang is still the best theory of the universe.” Straughn said.
The Webb Space Telescope has also been looking into our local universe, including the intriguing TRAPPIST-1 planetary system, a cluster of rocky planets orbiting a red dwarf star. The system is located about 41 light-years from Earth, in our own galaxy, and is practically a neighbor in the cosmic scheme of things.
One ongoing astrobiology question that the Webb mission may help answer is whether red dwarfs are plausible places where life could thrive, because their storms are too powerful for nearby planets to retain their atmospheres.
“So far we have not found a rocky planet like ours that has an atmosphere capable of supporting life,” planetary astronomer Heidi Hamel said in an email. “We may need even larger telescopes.”
Could the telescope find the first conclusive evidence of extraterrestrial life? Rigby says it’s unlikely.
“I personally don’t think Webb will find life. Webb wasn’t built to find life,” Rigby said. “I think we have the potential to find life. Can live “planet”
Garth Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who co-invented the Webb Telescope in the late 1980s, said the telescope has collected a huge amount of data about exoplanets — planets orbiting distant stars — that still needs to be put together into a coherent picture, he added.
“It’s like being an alien walking around a zoo on Earth, looking at all the different animals and trying to figure out the relationships and commonalities between them,” he said.
The Webb telescope was launched into space on Christmas morning 2021 and spent six months getting serviced as it orbited the sun, about a million miles from Earth. The big news during that time was that the telescope overcame 344 potential single obstacles, including the deployment of a solar shield the size of a tennis court, needed for cryogenic observations in the infrared part of the spectrum.
One of the telescope’s 18 hexagonal mirrors was hit hard by a micrometeorite, but the impact was limited, and NASA has since tried to reduce the risk of such an impact by orienting the telescope’s mirrors in the opposite direction of motion.
“We’re flying it so that it doesn’t face the rain,” Straughn said.
Telescopes are also pointing at worlds within our solar system that we’re most familiar with. The Webb Telescope discovered that Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, long known to have a deep subsurface ocean, intermittently leaks carbon dioxide. The telescope also captured a 6,000-mile-long column of water spewing from Saturn’s moon Enceladus, which, like Europa, has a hidden ocean beneath an icy crust, Hamel said.
“The next 20 years are going to be even more exciting as we push the capabilities of this incredible tool into unknown and unexpected territories,” Hamel said.
