Epoch-making images, info from galaxies beyond

Even as space researchers and enthusiasts are in awe over the breathtaking first images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), anticipation continues to be high about what to expect further from the world’s premier space science observatory. The images seen so far are not just spectacular but also contain a wealth of scientific insights and clues that researchers are eager to pursue. The JWST’s first image, released last Monday, delivered the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe so far, ‘Webb’s First Deep Field.

’ The white circles and ellipses are from the galaxy cluster in the foreground called SMACS 0723, as it appeared more than 4. 6bn years ago — roughly when the sun formed too. The reddish arcs are from light from ancient galaxies that has travelled more than 13bn years, bending around the foreground cluster, which acts as a gravitational lens.

As Nasa astrophysicist Jane Rigby observed, the image can teach us more about mysterious dark matter, which is thought to comprise 85% of matter in the universe — and is the main cause of the cosmic magnifying effect. The composite image, which required a 12. 5 hour exposure time, is considered a practice run.

Given longer exposure time, the JWST should break all-time distance records by gazing back to the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang, 13. 8bn years ago. The JWST captured the signature of water, along with previously undetected evidence of clouds and haze, in the atmosphere surrounding a hot, puffy gas giant planet called WASP-96 b that orbits a distant star like the sun.

The telescope achieved this by analysing starlight filtered through the planet’s atmosphere as it moves across the star, to the unfiltered starlight detected when the planet is beside the star — a technique called spectroscopy that no other instrument can do at the same detail. WASP-96 b is one of more than 5,000 confirmed exoplanets in the Milky Way. But what really excites astronomers is the prospect of pointing the JWST at smaller, rocky worlds, like our own Earth, to search for atmospheres and bodies of liquid water that could support life.

The JWST’s cameras captured a stellar graveyard, in the Southern Ring Nebula, revealing the dim, dying star at its centre in clear detail for the first time, and showing that it is cloaked in dust. Astronomers will use Webb to delve deeper into specifics about ‘planetary nebulae’ like these, which spew out clouds of gas and dust. These nebulae will eventually also lead to rebirth.

The gas and cloud ejection stops after some tens of thousands of years, and once the material is scattered in space, new stars can form. The JWST was also able to pierce through the clouds of dust and gas at the centre of the Stephan’s Quintet — a grouping of five galaxies located in the constellation Pegasus — to pierce through the clouds of dust and gas at the centre of the galaxy to glean new insights, such as the velocity and composition of outflows of gas near its supermassive black hole. Four of the galaxies are close together and locked in a “cosmic dance” of repeated close encounters.

By studying it, “you learn how the galaxies collide and merge,” said cosmologist John Mather, adding our own Milky Way was probably assembled out of 1,000 smaller galaxies. We can expect not just more impressively detailed images of space from the JWST in the future, but also information that could shed more light on how the first galaxies had formed. .