On Tuesday morning, NASA will show the first pictures and data from the new James Webb Space Telescope. This will end about 30 years and 10 billion dollars of planning, building, testing and innovation, followed by 6 months of terror, suspense and anticipation.
The pictures are a tourist tour of the universe, painted in colors that no human eye has seen – the invisible infrared rays or thermal radiation. Infrared rays are blocked by the atmosphere and can therefore only be studied in space. Among other things, they can penetrate the dust clouds that surround the cosmic nurseries where stars are born, turning them into transparent bubbles that show the baby stars nesting inside.
The first image will be unveiled Monday at 5 p.m. by President Biden at the White House in an event broadcast on NASA television or the agency’s YouTube channel. NASA will then show other images at 10:30 a.m. ET on Tuesday in a live video stream. You can sign up here for a reminder in your personal digital calendar to catch a glimpse of them for the first time.
Only the tiniest fraction of the world’s astronomers have ever been able to see what Webb saw. But NASA officials who were given an early look at the new images were only able to gush during a press conference in late June.
Pamela Melroy, NASA’s deputy administrator and former astronaut, said she could barely contain herself.
Learn more about the James Webb Space Telescope
After traveling nearly a million miles to reach a location beyond the Moon, the James Webb Space Telescope will spend years observing the cosmos.
“What I saw moved me as a scientist, an engineer and a person,” she said.
Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science missions, compared seeing the pictures to a moment when, as a student analyzing data at 2 a.m., he realized he had discovered something about the universe that no one else knew. It was surprisingly emotional, he said, to see nature reveal its secrets.
Bill Nelson, NASA administrator, said, “We’re going to give humanity a new look at space” and praised the telescope as “a good example of what government can do.”
Webb is the largest space telescope ever launched. Its mission is to probe the earliest days of the universe, when galaxies and stars were just coalescing out of the mists of the Big Bang, reaching further back in time and space than the Hubble Space Telescope can. Just as Hubble has defined astronomy for the past 30 years, NASA expects that Webb will define astronomy for a new generation of astronomers who have been eagerly awaiting their own encounter with space.
“We all know that Webb will blow Hubble out of the water by going deeper and finding the earliest galaxies,” said Garth Illingworth, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who has used Hubble and other telescopes to search for distant primordial galaxies .
The telescope is the collaborative effort of about 20,000 engineers, astronomers, technicians and bureaucrats, according to Bill Ochs, the telescope’s project manager. It now orbits the sun at a point called L2, millions of miles from Earth, where the combined gravitational fields of the Moon, Earth, and Sun conspire to create a semi-stable resting place. Its mirror consists of 18 gold-coated beryllium hexagons and looks like a sunflower – if you could see it from here – floating on the blade of a giant shovel, which is the sunscreen that keeps the telescope cool and always points away from our own star.
The images, due to be revealed on Monday and Tuesday, were selected by a small team of astronomers and scientific experts to show off the new telescope’s capabilities and dazzle the public. The release of the images at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, on Tuesday will be followed by a science workshop and a rush of professional astronomers to their computers to begin collecting and analyzing their own data from scientific observations that began in June.
On Friday, NASA released a list of the five objects in the photos. Among them are old friends of astronomers, both amateurs and professionals, who can now see them in new infrared outfits.
There’s the Southern Ring Nebula, a shell of gas ejected from a dying star about 2,000 light-years away, and the Carina Nebula, a vast swirling expanse of gas and stars, including some of the most massive and potentially explosive star systems in the Milky Way.
Another familiar astronomical scene is the Stefan Quintet, a narrow cluster of galaxies, two of which are in the process of merging, about 290 million light-years away in the constellation Pegasus.
The team will also release a detailed spectrum of an exoplanet known as WASP-96b, a gas giant half the mass of Jupiter that orbits a star 1,150 light-years away every 3.4 days. It’s too hot and big for life, but such a spectrum is the kind of detail that can reveal what’s in this world’s atmosphere.
Last but not least is a patch of southern sky called SMACS 0723. This is a field frequently visited by Hubble and other telescopes and includes a huge cluster of galaxies whose gravitational field acts like a lens, magnifying and making light visible from galaxies beyond and further back in time.
Dr Zurbuchen said this image is the deepest look yet into our cosmic past, showing galaxies emerging from the mists of creation almost 14 billion years ago as sparks in the night. Later images, he added, would certainly look even further back.
“With this telescope, it’s really hard not to break records,” said Dr. Zurbuchen.
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