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The James Webb Telescope Images Explained
Live Science
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yesterday
The most powerful telescope in history.
The James Webb Space Telescope's "jewel-filled" photos are stunning.
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Tech
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00:00
From the birthing places of baby stars, to a dying star's dramatic death rose, from
00:05
an image of five galaxies locked in an endless cosmic ballet, to a view of the cosmos that's
00:11
so deep it takes us back to the very beginnings of galaxies themselves.
00:16
The James Webb Space Telescope's first ever images are here, and they're absolutely mind-melting.
00:22
The five new full-colour photos, released by NASA this week as test images of the brand
00:32
new James Webb Space Telescope, show our universe in unprecedented, breathtaking detail.
00:39
NASA has said they're only the beginning.
00:42
The $10 billion telescope, designed as a replacement to the Hubble Space Telescope, is 100 times
00:48
more powerful than its predecessor, and able to take highly detailed snapshots of our universe
00:54
in a matter of days.
00:56
The telescope was launched into space on Christmas Day, and spent six months calibrating its instruments
01:02
and unfurling its 21-foot-wide gold-plated primary mirror.
01:08
Since coming online, the James Webb has been taking all kinds of test images in preparation
01:14
for its planned two decades of service studying our cosmos.
01:19
NASA has released five of those test images this week, all specially chosen to show how
01:24
the telescope can help astronomers discover more about our cosmos.
01:30
First on the list, is Stefan's Quintet, a group of five tightly bound galaxies, located
01:37
290 million light-years away.
01:40
Four of these galaxies are constantly circling around each other, locked in a cosmic dance
01:46
of repeated close encounters.
01:48
Scientists hope that by studying this dancing quintet, they could gain some insights into dark
01:55
matter, the mysterious substance believed to make up most of the universe's matter.
02:00
Next, is this image of the Carina Nebula, a dust and gas cloud 7600 light-years from Earth,
02:10
and one of the brightest and most active star-forming regions ever discovered.
02:15
It is home to many stars much larger than our sun, making it an attractive place to look for clues
02:21
into the beginnings of our solar system, as well as its dramatic finale.
02:26
On the subject of dying stars, the third image in NASA's teaser is the Southern Ring Nebula,
02:33
also known as the 8-burst for its figure 8 appearance. Positioned around 2000 light-years from Earth,
02:39
the nebula is an expanding cloud of gas and dust spewed out by the death throes of a red dwarf star.
02:47
As the nebula's dust particles are particularly rich in heavy elements such as carbon, these remnants
02:53
could one day go on to form new stars and planets, giving us a fascinating peek into the cosmic cycle
03:00
of death and rebirth. The fourth snapshot wasn't so much an image, but the first full colour spectrum
03:08
of WASP-96b, a giant mostly gaseous exoplanet that's half the mass of Jupiter and is located nearly 1150
03:18
light-years from Earth. First discovered in 2014, WASP-96b is so close to its sun that a single orbit
03:25
takes just 3.4 Earth days. By studying the way light is absorbed and re-emitted by this planet's atmosphere,
03:32
the Webb was able to detect water vapour. If scientists can spot molecules like methane or
03:38
carbon dioxide on other planets, they could use it as a way to hunt for life beyond our solar system.
03:45
And we've saved the best till last. This image, called the Webb's first deep field, shows a cluster
03:51
of galaxies with a combined gravity that is so strong they act as a gigantic magnifying lens,
03:57
warping and concentrating distant starlight in an effect called gravitational lensing.
04:03
This doesn't just enable us to see deeper into the universe, but because light travels at a fixed
04:08
speed allows us to detect older light emitted further back in the universe past, an optical time
04:14
machine through which we can glimpse the faintest glimmerings of starlight from the first ever galaxies.
04:20
Now, if none of this has melted your brain so far, every light source in this image that doesn't have
04:26
the characteristic diffraction spikes of a star is a galaxy, and each galaxy here contains billions of
04:31
stars and trillions of worlds. All of this is contained within an image that is just the tiniest slice of
04:37
sky, the equivalent of holding a sand grain up at arm's length. And for all the unprecedented and
04:44
staggering depth in this image, it took the James Webb just 12 and a half hours to capture it.
04:51
And these images are just the beginning. Now that the telescope is in operation, scientists from all
04:55
over the world will be using it to explore space like it has never been explored before. We don't
05:01
know yet what the James Webb Space Telescope will teach us, but one thing we do know for certain is
05:06
that our understanding of our universe is about to be changed forever.
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