An impressive spectacle, thousands of light years away. NASA revealed this Tuesday all the first images of the most powerful space telescope ever designed, James Webb, photos that mark the beginning of its scientific operations, expected for years by astronomers around the world.
“Each image is a new discovery,” NASA chief Bill Nelson said at the opening from the Goddard Space Center near Washington, where throngs of officials and scientists from US and European space agencies had gathered for the launch. event.
Each offers “humanity a view of the Universe that we have never seen before.”
• A dying star
A first nebula, the South Ring Planetary Nebula, was discovered for the first time. It is a huge cloud of gas in whose center we can see a dying star captured by two instruments of the telescope.
“We can see his death very well, it is starting to explode and there is dust around”, explains Marie-Ange Sanguy on BFMTV.
The editor in chief of the magazine. space and exploration considers these to be “extremely sharp and precise images, with extraordinary detail”.
• A group of five galaxies
A compact grouping of galaxies, Stephan’s Quintet, was also captured by James Webb and revealed by NASA. An exceptional plane in which we can observe no less than five galaxies, four of which interact with each other.
“These attracting galaxies trigger the birth of stars,” explains Marie-Ange Sanguy.
• A nebula where stars form
The telescope also captured the Carina Nebula, located about 7,600 light-years away, illustrating star formation. It is home to many masses, several times the size of our Sun.
The snapshot shows hundreds of them that have never been seen before, but also background galaxies and structures that we still don’t know what they are.
• Analysis of the atmosphere of an exoplanet
The latest cosmic object whose observation was revealed this Tuesday is an exoplanet, that is, a planet in orbit around a star other than our Sun, one of James Webb’s main lines of research.
It was not actually photographed, but rather analyzed by spectroscopy, a technique used to determine the chemical composition of a distant object. In this case, WASP-96 b, a giant planet made mostly of gas.
James Webb was launched into space about six months ago and is 1.5 million kilometers from us. One of the main missions of the space telescope, a jewel of engineering valued at 10,000 million dollars and the most powerful ever designed, is precisely the exploration of the very young Universe. This first demo was intended to give an overview of its capabilities in this area.
Source: BFM TV
