The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has found definitive evidence for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a gas giant planet orbiting a Sun-like star 700 light-years away. The result provides important insights into the composition and formation of the planet, and is indicative of Webb’s ability to also detect and measure carbon dioxide in the thinner atmospheres of smaller rocky planets.
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The Cartwheel Galaxy, a rare ring galaxy once shrouded in dust and mystery, has been unveiled by the imaging capabilities of the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. The galaxy, which formed as a result of a collision between a large spiral galaxy and another smaller galaxy, not only retained a lot of its spiral character, but has also experienced massive changes throughout its structure. Webb’s high-precision instruments resolved individual stars and star-forming regions within the Cartwheel, and revealed the behaviour of the black hole within its galactic centre. These new details provide a renewed understanding of a galaxy in the midst of a slow transformation.
The dawn of a new era in astronomy has begun as the world gets its first look at the full capabilities of the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. The telescope’s first full-colour images and spectroscopic data, which uncover a spectacular collection of cosmic features that have remained elusive until now, were released today.
The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope reveals emerging stellar nurseries and individual stars in the Carina Nebula that were previously obscured. The new images showcase how Webb’s cameras can peer through cosmic dust, shedding new light on how stars form. Objects in earliest, rapid phases of star formation are difficult to capture, but Webb’s extreme sensitivity, spatial resolution, and imaging capability can chronicle these elusive events.
In this enormous new image, the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope reveals never-before-seen details of galaxy group “Stephan’s Quintet”. Close proximity of the system gives astronomers a ringside seat to galactic mergers and interactions. Webb’s new image also shows in rare detail how interacting galaxies trigger star formation in each other and how gas in galaxies is being disturbed and the outflows driven by a black hole in Stephan’s Quintet in a level of detail never seen before. Tight galaxy groups like this may have been more common in the early Universe when superheated, infalling material may have fueled very energetic black holes.
The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has revealed details of the Southern Ring planetary nebula that were previously hidden from astronomers. Planetary nebulae are the shells of gas and dust ejected from dying stars. Webb’s powerful infrared view brings this nebula’s second star into full view, along with exceptional structures created as the stars shape the gas and dust around them. New details like these, from the late stages of a star’s life, will help us better understand how stars evolve and transform their environments. These images also reveal a cache of distant galaxies in the background. Most of the multi-coloured points of light seen here are galaxies — not stars.
Webb’s enormous mirror and precise instruments joined forces to capture the most detailed measurements of starlight filtering through the atmosphere of a planet outside our solar system to date. The spectrum of light – which contains information about the makeup of a planetary atmosphere 1,150 light-years away – reveals the distinct signature of water. The strength of the signal that Webb detected hints at the significant role the telescope will play in the search for potentially habitable planets in the coming years. Webb’s powerful new view also shows evidence of haze and clouds that previous studies of this planet did not detect.
The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has delivered the deepest, sharpest infrared image of the distant universe so far. Webb’s image is approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length – and reveals thousands of galaxies in a tiny sliver of vast Universe. This sharp near-infrared view has brought out faint structures in extremely distant galaxies, for an unprecedented look at galaxies billions of years in the past. For the first time, Webb has also detailed chemical makeup of galaxies in the very early Universe.
The months-long process of preparing the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope for science is now complete. All of the seventeen ways or ‘modes’ to operate Webb’s scientific instruments have now been checked out, which means that Webb has completed its commissioning activities and is ready to begin full scientific operations.
With help from a cryocooler, Webb's Mid-Infrared Instrument has dropped down to just a few degrees above the lowest temperature matter can reach and is ready for calibration.
Today, at 20:00 CET, the James Webb Space Telescope fired its onboard thrusters for nearly five minutes (297 seconds) to complete the final post launch course correction to Webb’s trajectory. This mid-course correction burn inserted Webb toward its final orbit around the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, or L2, nearly 1.5 million kilometres away from Earth.
Today the James Webb Space Telescope team successfully fully deployed its iconic 6.4-metre, gold-coated primary mirror, completing the final stage of all major spacecraft deployments to prepare for science operations.
After a successful launch of the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope on 25 December, and completion of two mid-course correction manoeuvres, the Webb team has analysed its initial trajectory and determined the observatory should have enough propellant to allow support of science operations in orbit for significantly more than a 10-year lifetime (the minimum baseline for the mission is five years).
The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope lifted off on an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana, at 13:20 CET on 25 December on its exciting mission to unlock the secrets of the Universe.
