July 12, 2022, 3:04 p.m. ET (NYTimes.com)
The James Webb Space Telescope just revealed our universe anew–the view is absolutely stunning
(Video contributed by Zoë Robinson, H.W., M. Article contributed by Michael Kelly, H.W.)
Scientists Marvel at NASA Webb Telescope’s New Views of the Cosmos
On Tuesday, NASA rolled out a series of unforgettable scenes of the cosmos captured by the largest space observatory ever built.
NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI- By Reuters
NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI- By Reuters
- By The Associated Press
NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI- By Reuters
The New York Times
What NASA has shared from the Webb telescope so far.
People who manage the telescope and its science attended a parallel event at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, to see the results of their hard work for the first time.Credit…Michael A. McCoy for The New York Times
On Tuesday morning, NASA rolled out a series of images that showed the capabilities of the James Webb Space Telescope, the largest and most powerful space observatory ever built.
In an event at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., officials and experts shared scenes the telescope recorded during its early work this spring, including an exploded star, a stellar nursery and an alien planet. At a parallel event in Baltimore at the Space Telescope Science Institute, employees who are managing the telescope and its science got to sit back and see the results of their hard work for the first time.
The four images revealed on Monday were:
- the Carina Nebula;
- a galactic cluster, Stephan’s Quintet;
- atmospheric readings of WASP-96b, a planet orbiting a distant star;
- the Southern Ring Nebula.
On Monday, President Biden and NASA revealed a “deep field” image of galaxies from a time much closer to the start of the universe.
At 12:30 p.m. Eastern time, NASA conducted a live Q. and A. with experts for members of the news media. During the broadcast, scientists discussed the numerous surprises they found so far in the data and images already released to the public, and highlighted some of the targets that will be studied in the future.
If you’d like to understand a little bit more about how the Webb telescope advances scientific research, check out this explainer.
July 12, 2022, 3:03 p.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 3:03 p.m. ET
Joshua SokolReporting from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore
I asked Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator of NASA for science missions, if anything was clouding an otherwise celebratory day. “The biggest concern on our minds is just the micrometeorite environment,” he said, alluding to a small space-rock that dinged the telescope’s mirror in May. One potential solution under consideration, he was, has been to fly the telescope “backwards” through space, so any incoming dust would strike the backside of the mirror, not the front. He also stressed that a successful image rollout hasn’t washed away the memories of the overbudget mission’s less glamorous moments. “People told me, ‘After you see the first images, you will forget,’” he said. “We will never forget. We learned those lessons.”
July 12, 2022, 2:45 p.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 2:45 p.m. ET
Gregory Robinson got the Webb to the launchpad, and off the ground.
Gregory L. Robinson, director of the James Webb Space Telescope Program.Credit…Shuran Huang for The New York Times
In 2018, the James Webb Space Telescope, the beleaguered project to build an instrument that could gaze back to the earliest stars in the universe, appeared to be going off the rails. Again.
This is when Gregory Robinson was asked to take over as program director of Webb.
At the time, Mr. Robinson was the deputy associate administrator for programs at NASA, making him responsible for assessing the performance of more than 100 science missions.
He said no. “I was enjoying my job at the time,” Mr. Robinson recalled.
Eventually, Mr. Robinson relented. In March 2018, he stepped into the task of getting the telescope back on track and into space.
“He twisted both of my arms to take over Webb,” Mr. Robinson said.
His path to that role seemed an unlikely one.
At NASA, Mr. Robinson, 62, is a rarity: a Black man among the agency’s top-level managers.
“Certainly people seeing me in this role is an inspiration,” he said, “and also it’s acknowledging they can be there, too.”
When Mr. Robinson took over as program director, Webb’s schedule efficiency — a measure of how the pace of work compared with what had been planned — was down at about 55 percent, said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science. That, in large part, was the result of avoidable human error.
Dr. Zurbuchen said the Webb team had been full of smart, skilled people, who had become wary of raising criticism. He credited Mr. Robinson with turning things around. Within a few months, the efficiency was up to 95 percent, with better communications and managers more willing to share potential bad news.
“You needed somebody who could get the trust of the team and what we needed to figure out was what was wrong with the team,” Dr. Zurbuchen said. “The speed at which he turned this thing around was just astounding.”Show more
July 12, 2022, 2:14 p.m. ET
Noah Pisner
Make your phone into a personal planetarium.
The New York Times Instagram Story about the James Webb space telescope.Credit…The New York Times
To understand the observation powers of the James Webb Space Telescope and how it will assist astronomers in their research, try these two augmented reality experiences in your own space with a smartphone logged into Instagram.
The first will show you where in space and time the Webb will look with a 3-D map of the observable universe. It plots some of the spacecraft’s early targets, including potentially Earthlike exoplanets and the earliest known galaxies. Try it here on Instagram.
The second augmented reality experience shows how the Webb will get a visual boost from the power of gravitational lensing.
Place a virtual black hole in your space and watch how it behaves like a magnifying glass on your surroundings. This same technique will help astronomers study the early universe. Try it here on Instagram.
July 12, 2022, 2:01 p.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 2:01 p.m. ET
Kenneth ChangReporting on space science and spaceflight
The news conference is wrapping up.
July 12, 2022, 1:39 p.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 1:39 p.m. ET
The lonely work of picking Webb’s first five images.
Security staff of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore watched the live feed of the Webb presentation on Tuesday.Credit…Michael A. McCoy for The New York Times
On Tuesday morning, a new view of the Carina Nebula was made public alongside other new observations from the James Webb Space Telescope. But it made an earlier debut on another Tuesday morning — this one in June, when a small team clutching coffee cups gathered for one of many morning meetings to receive, process and repackage for public consumption what humanity’s latest and greatest set of eyes could see — after the team members had first signed nondisclosure agreements to ensure no early leaks.
This group’s task was a mix of on-the-fly science, public communication and brand management: Blow everyone’s mind, show policymakers what all those appropriations had paid for, and assure the rest of the scientific world that yes, some of the universe’s most elusive secrets might at long last be within reach.
The new telescope’s still-functioning predecessor, Hubble, had underscored the stakes. Hubble’s first-look images made it obvious that its mirror was flawed. But after successful repairs, scientists working on Hubble went on to crank out jaw-dropping, proto-viral photos of galaxies and nebulae like the “Pillars of Creation,” inspiring countless careers in the sciences. (Mine included: Before becoming a science journalist, I spent two years as a data analyst for Hubble, which is also run out of the Space Telescope Science Institute.)
But James Webb is another beast altogether, so distinctive and advanced in its capabilities that even veteran astronomers had little idea what to expect of the images it would yield. Much of that is because the Webb operates in infrared wavelengths.
Simply showing off this stuff would demand a distinct color palette and style. NASA wanted to start pushing out the first images within six weeks of the telescope’s coming online. And while staring into the abyss of the cosmic sublime for weeks on end would have its perks, the cone of silence around the project could also prove lonely.
In early June, for example, Klaus Pontoppidan, the astronomer leading this early release team, was the first human to download the new telescope’s full “deep field” view.
“I was sitting there, staring at it for two hours, and then desperately, desperately wanting to share it with someone,” he said. “But I couldn’t.”
In 2016, a committee convened to start choosing Webb’s very first demo targets. Ultimately, this process nominated around 70 possible targets.
Once the telescope had begun operating this winter, they whittled this list down to regions of the sky it could point to within the six-week time limit — plus a few held in reserve, to tease out in the next few months.
And then, finally, finally, the earliest results started trickling in through the bottleneck of Dr. Pontppidan’s computer in early June. From there, the team digitally combined raw frames into deeper, more polished exposures and then passed them on to image processors for color rendering.
“I just felt overwhelmed,” said Joe Depasquale, the lead image processor on the project, describing what it had felt like to see one scene of another star-forming nebula to come together — something with a more Carvaggio-esque, light-and-shadow effect that wasn’t included in the initial batch of releases. “This is going to blow people’s minds,” he said. (Confirmed.)
Will anything land as hard as the Apollo shots? Or the Hubble pics, plastered on science classroom walls and aped by everyone from Terrence Malick to the “Thor” movies? We’ll see. But for now, at least, the tap is open, and the universe is pouring in.
Correction:
July 12, 2022
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of a Webb telescope image processor. He is Joe Depasquale, not Despaquale.
July 12, 2022, 1:35 p.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 1:35 p.m. ET
Kenneth ChangReporting on space science and spaceflight
The NASA spokeswoman said that the agency’s historians are looking further into the history of James Webb, the second administrator at NASA. He is credited for the success of the Apollo moon landings, but there have been questions raised about his involvement in actions against gays and lesbians at the State Department and at NASA during his career, along with emphatic calls to rename the telescope.
July 12, 2022, 1:29 p.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 1:29 p.m. ET
Michael RostonEditing space and astronomy news
Dr. Rigby on the Carina nebula: “That was always out there. The universe has been out there, we just had to build a telescope to go see what was there. I get a very similar feeling of maybe people in a broken world managing to do something right and to see some of the majesty that’s out there.”
July 12, 2022, 1:22 p.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 1:22 p.m. ET
Kenneth ChangReporting on space science and spaceflight
Knicole Colón, deputy project scientist for exoplanet science, talks about the Webb being able to measure what is in the atmosphere of distant planets and whether they will detect possible signs of life. “We’ll just have to wait for science to reveal the story,” she said.
July 12, 2022, 1:18 p.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 1:18 p.m. ET
Kenneth ChangReporting on space science and spaceflight
Dr. Straughn said, when describing looking at the Carina nebula and other images, “I think all of us are in some sense blown away.” René Doyon of the University of Montreal added that the image is like a work of art, and he doesn’t just look at it as a scientist.
July 12, 2022, 1:11 p.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 1:11 p.m. ET
Kenneth ChangReporting on space science and spaceflight
The recurring theme is that the Webb is working better than promised and that what the scientists are seeing is more amazing than they imagined.
July 12, 2022, 1:10 p.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 1:10 p.m. ET
Kenneth ChangReporting on space science and spaceflight
Dr. Rigby said the Webb has already taken pictures of Jupiter, testing if it can take pictures of something that is extremely bright, compared with much more distant images. Amber Straughn, a Webb deputy project scientist, added that the pictures of the solar system’s biggest planet “are beautiful!”
July 12, 2022, 1:05 p.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 1:05 p.m. ET
Kenneth ChangReporting on space science and spaceflight
The full release of data that the Webb took during the commissioning stage will be made publicly available on Thursday.
July 12, 2022, 1:04 p.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 1:04 p.m. ET
Mark A. Stein
Meet the Webb telescope’s camera maker.
Marcia J. Rieke, research group leader for the telescope’s near-infrared camera, or NIRCam.Credit…George Rieke
Marcia J. Rieke, 70, is the research group leader for the near-infrared camera, or NIRCam and a professor at the University of Arizona. She answered these questions for an interview published in March.
As principal investigator, you were responsible for designing and building the NIRCam, and now it’s your job to make sure it will work almost a million miles from Earth. How nerve-racking is that?
Being responsible for an instrument like NIRCam is like a repeated roller coaster ride. There’s the high point when you have the joy of seeing things work as you had hoped. There’s a low point, especially early on, when something breaks and the design needs to be modified. And then there’s waiting for the next ride, such as launch. Of course, the highest points will be when fantastic data are gathered, great papers are written about the discoveries and the younger people on the team get great jobs.
NIRCam has the potential to capture light emitted just after the Big Bang, nearly 14 billion years ago, that is only now reaching our galaxy. You have now seen some images. How did it feel?
We’ve gotten the first images and we’re super happy. The entire Webb team is ecstatic at how well the first steps of taking images and aligning the telescope are proceeding.
Do you think women bring a different set of perceptions to astronomy?
I have sensed over the years that different people come to conclusions by following different paths, and that is one reason it is good to have diversity.
What advice was most helpful in your career?
People need to do something they love doing. Find your passion and go for that.
Anything else?
In the scientific field right now, if you apply for time on a telescope or you write a proposal to get funding, the competition is really severe. I try to encourage young folks not to give up. Keep trying; you’ll get there.
July 12, 2022, 1:03 p.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 1:03 p.m. ET
Kenneth ChangReporting on space science and spaceflight
The more detailed program of scientific observations for the first year of Webb has already begun, managers of the telescope said.
July 12, 2022, 1:00 p.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 1:00 p.m. ET
Kenneth ChangReporting on space science and spaceflight
The scientists in the news conference are trying to capture how revolutionary the Webb images are. Jane Rigby, the Webb operations project scientist, said “Personally, I went and had an ugly cry,” when she saw some of the early data and realized just how well the telescope worked.
July 12, 2022, 12:49 p.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 12:49 p.m. ET
Kenneth ChangReporting on space science and spaceflight
During the news conference, Webb scientists acknowledged that the new telescope’s predecessor, the Hubble, has spotted more distant galaxies than what was spotted in the Webb “deep field” unveiled at the White House on Monday. But it’s still amazing for a first effort.
July 12, 2022, 12:29 p.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 12:29 p.m. ET
Michael RostonEditing space and astronomy news
NASA is hosting a live Q. and A. in a few minutes where members of the news media will ask questions of an assortment of experts. You can watch it in the video player embedded above.
July 12, 2022, 12:28 p.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 12:28 p.m. ET
It’s time for the hunt for life out there to really begin.
Megan Mansfield, an astronomer at the University of Arizona, is one of many scientists who will study seven planets that orbit a star called Trappist-1.Credit…Rebecca Noble for The New York Times
This month will mark a new chapter in the search for extraterrestrial life, when the most powerful space telescope yet built will start spying on planets that orbit other stars. Astronomers hope that the James Webb Space Telescope will reveal whether some of those planets harbor atmospheres that might support life.
Identifying an atmosphere in another solar system would be remarkable enough. But there is even a chance — albeit tiny — that one of these atmospheres will offer what is known as a biosignature: a signal of life itself.
“I think we will be able to find planets that we think are interesting — you know, good possibilities for life,” said Megan Mansfield, an astronomer at the University of Arizona. “But we won’t necessarily be able to just identify life immediately.”
The relatively small size of these exoplanets has made them extremely difficult to study, until now. The James Webb Space Telescope will change that, acting as a magnifying glass to let astronomers look more closely at these worlds.
The space telescope “is the first big space observatory to take the study of exoplanet atmospheres into account in its design,” Dr. Mansfield said.
A number of teams of astronomers are planning to look at the seven planets that orbit a star called Trappist-1. Earlier observations have suggested that three of the planets occupy the habitable zone.
It is possible that at the end of those efforts, Dr. Mansfield and her colleagues will discover an atmosphere around a Trappist-1 planet. But that result alone will not reveal the nature of the atmosphere. It might be rich in nitrogen and oxygen, like on Earth, or more akin to the toxic stew of carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid on Venus. Or it could be a mix that scientists have never seen before.
“We have no idea what these atmospheres are made of,” said Alexander Rathcke, an astronomer at the Technical University of Denmark. “We have ideas, simulations, and all this stuff, but we really have no idea. We have to go and look.”
July 12, 2022, 12:18 p.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 12:18 p.m. ET
Michael RostonEditing space and astronomy news
You really need to see the before and after for some of these images to understand how much the Webb advances astronomers’ abilities to peer into the early universe. The European Space Agency shared this example comparing Hubble and the Webb’s view of the “deep field” that debuted on Monday.
July 12, 2022, 12:08 p.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 12:08 p.m. ET
Joshua SokolReporting from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore
Outside the Space Telescope Science Institute, Ms. Mikulski toasts a crowd of scientists holding champagne flutes. “This is a 30-year, $30 billion overnight success,” she jokes. But it’s also a job worth doing and a job well done, she says. “I’m so proud of you, and your country is proud of you.”
July 12, 2022, 11:52 a.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 11:52 a.m. ET
How the Webb telescope sees into the universe’s origins.
NASA workers inspected the Webb telescope’s mirrors at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., in 2016.Credit…Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
The Webb space telescope was built with some of the most advanced scientific instruments ever sent beyond Earth’s orbit. Astronomers believe the spacecraft will help them understand more about black holes, how stars are born and die and what lies within the atmospheres of planets orbiting other stars; perhaps, it will even give us a glimpse of an era close to the Big Bang.
Why does seeing further help scientists see billion years into the past?
Remember the speed of light? A constant pace of more than 186,000 miles per second, or close to six trillion miles per year, through the vacuum of space.
That makes a light-year — the distance light travels in one year — a handy measuring stick for cosmic distances.
It also explains why looking out into the universe is looking into the past.
If a star is 10 light-years away, that means its light has taken 10 years to reach us: We are observing the star as it existed 10 years ago. (The light from the sun takes eight minutes to reach us on Earth.)
For the most distant objects that the Webb can detect, those particles of light have traveled some 13 billion light-years, traveling across space for 13 billion years. The light in the Webb “deep field” image released on Monday is a snapshot of a part of the universe when it was less than a billion years old.
What could learning more about the period closer to the Big Bang teach astronomers?
When did the first stars light up? When did the first galaxies coalesce out of clouds of gas? How different were the first stars and galaxies from the ones that fill the universe today?
No one really knows. It’s a missing chapter in the history of the universe. We know the universe started in an instant from the Big Bang. That explosion left a background hiss of microwave noise that was discovered in 1964, and it has been studied in detail in the decades since. The universe cooled down, matter began to clump and the first stars are thought to have formed about 100 million years after the Big Bang.
The early stars must have been different because the Big Bang created only hydrogen and helium with a smidgen of lithium and beryllium. None of the heavier elements — carbon, silicon, iron and the rest of the periodic table — existed. Some astrophysicists believe that many of the first stars, devoid of heavier elements, were huge, burned bright and died young in supernova explosions to disperse materials that could later form planets and, eventually, living creatures like us.
The Webb is the first telescope that might be able to spot and analyze those early stars.
Why do the Webb’s tools help advance this work?
The two main differences between Webb and Hubble are the size of their mirrors — bigger mirrors gather more light — and the wavelengths of light they observe. Hubble focused on visible and ultraviolet wavelengths, offering unparalleled new views of much of the universe.
But for the early universe, the infrared part of the spectrum becomes key. That is because of the Doppler effect. When a police car speeds by, the pitch of the siren is higher when the car is approaching and drops lower when it is speeding away. Essentially the same thing occurs with light. Objects speeding toward us appear bluer, and those moving away become redder because the receding motion stretches out of the wavelengths of the light particle. For the most distant objects, like the early stars and galaxies, much of the light has been shifted all the way to the infrared.
Infrared observations are essentially impossible from telescopes on Earth. The atmosphere blocks out those wavelengths.
Infrared observations can also be easily distorted by heat radiation. That is why Webb was placed a million miles from Earth and shaded by a huge sun shield. One of the instruments, the Mid-Infrared Instrument, or MIRI, has to be cooled to minus 447 degrees Fahrenheit to work properly.Show more
July 12, 2022, 11:46 a.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 11:46 a.m. ET
Joshua SokolReporting from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore
As the parallel presentation at the Space Telescope Science Institute wraps up, the audience here is getting a “treat” that won’t be public until this afternoon: a montage that pans and zooms through the new images as music from Brian May, the guitarist for “Queen,” plays.
July 12, 2022, 11:32 a.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 11:32 a.m. ET
Michael RostonEditing space and astronomy news
The main event is over. But starting in about an hour, we’ll have updates from NASA about the mission, perhaps with some hints about what we can expect from the James Webb Space Telescope in the year to come.
July 12, 2022, 11:32 a.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 11:32 a.m. ET
Joshua SokolReporting from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore
Dr. Amaya Moro-Martin ends her presentation on the Carina-scape by highlighting one weird, curving feature. “As always, there is room for the unexpected. We have no idea what this is.”
July 12, 2022, 11:28 a.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 11:28 a.m. ET
Dennis OverbyeReporting on astronomy and astrophysics
Mr. Nelson quotes the astronomer Carl Sagan during remarks on the Webb’s feats and what else it may find. “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting”
July 12, 2022, 11:25 a.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 11:25 a.m. ET
First look: Carina Nebula
The Carina nebula is a turbulent cloud of gas, dust about 7,600 light-years from here, a birthplace and graveyard for some of the Milky Way’s hottest and most massive stars.
The nebula is home to some of the most luminous and potentially explosive stars in the galaxy. Among them in particular is Eta Carinae, a double star system of which the stormy, primary member is as massive as 200 suns and is five million times the luminosity of the star that fills your daytime sky. Over the years, the primary star has emitted periodic eruptions as it has aged and quaked. At least 20 solar masses of gas and dust have been expelled into the nebula, which have obscured Eta Carinae itself, as well as the other denizens of the nebula.
Infrared radiation can penetrate dust, so astronomers hope to find out more about the stars being formed in the roiling nebula and about Eta Carinae itself, which seems to be on the road to exploding as a supernova one of these days or centuries.
“It took me awhile to figure out what to call out in this image,” said Amber Straughn, deputy project scientist for the telescope.
Dr. Straughn added that she could not help thinking about the sense of scale in the Webb’s image of the nebula, filled as it is with individual stars with planets of their own.
“We humans really are connected to the universe,” she said. “We’re made out of the same stuff in this landscape.”Show more
July 12, 2022, 11:25 a.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 11:25 a.m. ET
Joshua SokolReporting from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore
Dr. Amaya Moro-Martin’s first slide wastes no time displaying the new image of the Carina Nebula, causing the crowd to break into laughter, then applause. “It’s an immense honor to be your guide as we stroll through these cosmic cliffs,” she says.
July 12, 2022, 11:23 a.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 11:23 a.m. ET
Dennis OverbyeReporting on astronomy and astrophysics
John Mather, senior project scientist for the Webb, took the stage to discuss the struggle it took to get the telescope up and running. “I wasn’t worried, but maybe I should have been.”
July 12, 2022, 11:17 a.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 11:17 a.m. ET
Joshua SokolReporting from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore
One nice feature of being part of an audience of astronomers is you can use their oohs and aahs to vet what’s actually groundbreaking — in this case, the mid-infrared view of this galactic scene, which illuminates everything including tail-like strips of stars and dusty, glowing clouds, sparked a major reaction.
July 12, 2022, 11:13 a.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 11:13 a.m. ET
First look: Stephan’s Quintet
Stephan’s Quintet is a snippet of the night sky that looks unreal — five galaxies that appear to be almost touching each other. In 1877, Édouard Stephan, an astronomer at the Marseille Observatory in France, was first to spot the group, located in the constellation Pegasus.
The visual juxtaposition is, in part, an illusion. One of the galaxies, NGC 7320, is actually much closer to us, about 40 million light-years from Earth, but along the line of sight with the others. The other four galaxies, however, are all about 300 million light-years away, part of what astronomers call a compact group of galaxies.
“They’re locked in a close interaction, a sort of cosmic dance driven by the gravitational force,” said Giovanna Giardino, an astronomer at the European Space Agency.
The Webb image provides a clearer view at the tails and loops of gas and stars in the four distant galaxies as well as bright emissions of X-rays from diffuse hot gas. “It really shows the type of interaction that drives the evolution of galaxies,” Dr. Giardino said.
Astronomers are still working to understand how several galaxies can end up that close together.
Two of the galaxies are in the process of merging, and the infrared images show “gas and dust, which is being heated up in the collision between those galaxies,” said Mark McCaughrean, senior adviser for science and exploration for the European Space Agency. “And that’s a place where new stars are being born today.”
A variation of the image, showing the mid-infrared light without the shorter near-infrared wavelengths, showed mainly gas and dust. One of the galaxies includes a particularly bright spot, from material becoming superhot as it falls into a gargantuan black hole at the center of the galaxy. The luminosity of the gases is 40 billion times that of our sun.
“It’s really, really bright,” Dr. Giardino said.
July 12, 2022, 11:11 a.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 11:11 a.m. ET
Joshua SokolReporting from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore
It took combing almost 1,000 individual images and 150 megapixels to adequately capture a gaggle of five interacting galaxies called Stephan’s Quintet, says Dr. David Law. Zooming in, he shows the two galaxies on the lower right ripping stars and gas away from each other. “Even as galaxies are destroyed, Webb shows the birth of new stars.”
July 12, 2022, 11:00 a.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 11:00 a.m. ET
First look: Southern Ring Nebula
Webb’s view of the Southern Ring Nebula, imaged in mid-infrared wavelengths, adds new wrinkles to a cycle of death and rebirth linked to everything including mysterious carbon molecules that permeate interstellar space and the eventual fate of our own solar system.
The scene in this image began when a star shuddered and died, launching its own atmosphere into space like an expanding soap bubble. The only part of the star left behind was a scalding-hot core known as a white dwarf, in the center of the image.
Most stars in the universe, including our sun, will end their lives in nebulae like this one. That colorful gas cloud will eventually expand and fade away into the space between stars. But the Webb telescope’s infrared view shows light emitted by a set of complex carbon molecules that are born from the same process: polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs.
Those same carbon molecules drift through space, settling in clouds that then give birth to new stars, planets, asteroids — and whatever life might subsequently sprout. “Possibly, the formation of PAHs in these stars is a very important part of how life got started,” said Bruce Balick, an emeritus professor of astronomy at the University of Washington.
Compared with previous studies of the Southern Ring Nebula from the Hubble Space Telescope, the new image shows more of its outskirts: the first material that was launched from the star to spread away. It also reveals glowing grains of carbon, and a better view of a companion star huddled at the center of the nebula.
“I’m gobsmacked,” Dr. Balick said, after seeing the new image for the first time.
Just as Hubble did in the early 1990s when its first pictures started rolling in, Dr. Balick expects Webb will have its own transformative effect on our understanding of star-forming nebulae.
“We all realized we could just take most of the work that we had already done and rip it up and start over,” he said.
July 12, 2022, 10:58 a.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 10:58 a.m. ET
Joshua SokolReporting from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore
“I’m beyond stoked to be sharing this with you,” says Dr. Nestor Espinoza, describing the new spectrum of the gas giant exoplanet WASP-96b. The assembled astronomers gasped and applauded when he showed a graph of it passing in front of its star.
July 12, 2022, 10:51 a.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 10:51 a.m. ET
First look: The Exoplanet WASP-96b
Setting stunning space pictures aside, the bulk of the James Webb Space Telescope’s most profound scientific work — the where-do-we-come-from, are-we-alone stuff — will probably involve little squiggles on graphs of a planet orbiting a distant star.
Many astronomers want to sniff out which molecules swirl and waft through the atmosphere of planets around other stars. But they face at least two major hurdles. First, attempting such a measurement strains even the best contemporary technology. And second, many of the planets we have attempted to study so far seem to be blanketed in layers of clouds, which block our gaze.
Enter Webb’s glimpse of WASP-96b, a gas giant planet orbiting a sun-like star 1,120 light-years from Earth. Its mass is more than that of Saturn but only about half as much as Jupiter’s. Blissfully, for whatever reason, ground-based observations proved in 2018 that this particular planet has clear skies, a boon to astronomers hoping to peer in.
The new Webb measurements show evidence of water vapor, hazes and some previously unseen clouds, too.
“This is great to see,” said Jonathan Fortney, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He added that the traces of clouds where none were expected is a surprise. “I don’t know what to say!”
Seeing all this required careful timing. From our solar system’s perspective, WASP-96b sweeps across the surface of its star every three and half days, blotting out a small fraction of starlight during that transit passage. During that time, as the Webb watched, an even smaller number of light rays passed through the ring of atmosphere around the planet, providing the spectral fingerprints of floating molecules.
Over time, measurements like these should help us understand the birth of gas giant planets like WASP-96b — and our own Saturn and Jupiter, as well — during the formation of stars systems, clock climate patterns sweeping around them and, just maybe, for smaller worlds, enable searches for signs of life.
July 12, 2022, 10:47 a.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 10:47 a.m. ET
Michael RostonEditing space and astronomy news
Jane Rigby, the operations project scientist for Webb, said of the “deep field” image showed at the White House on Monday, “We took this image before breakfast,” to highlight how much more advanced the new telescope is than the Hubble Space Telescope that came before it.
July 12, 2022, 10:44 a.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 10:44 a.m. ET
Joshua SokolReporting from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore
Dr. Alaina Henry, a member of the team that worked on these early observations, is going into more detail on the “deep field” image. The team also took dozens of spectra from the individual galaxies swimming in the frame. Light from the most distant of these, she says, set out on the long road to us 13.1 billion years ago.
July 12, 2022, 10:41 a.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 10:41 a.m. ET
Michael RostonEditing space and astronomy news
NASA just gave a timeline of what we’re going to see. First, the “Deep Field” image that was published yesterday in the White House; then, the exoplanet WASP-96b. Next, “stellar death,” which could be the Carina Nebula or the Southern Ring Nebula; then, the Stephan’s Quintet galactic cluster; finally “stellar birth,” which will be the nebula we haven’t seen yet.
July 12, 2022, 10:22 a.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 10:22 a.m. ET
Michael RostonEditing space and astronomy news
The clock is counting down, and now it’s about 10 minutes until the slide show of the Webb’s early cosmic adventures. This would be a good time to get something hot or cold to drink, find a comfortable seat and get ready to take in the universe.
July 12, 2022, 10:21 a.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 10:21 a.m. ET
Dennis OverbyeReporting on astronomy and astrophysics
Gregory Robinson, director of the James Webb Space Telescope program, took the stage and talked about the first image President Biden revealed yesterday. He adds, “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”
July 12, 2022, 10:16 a.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 10:16 a.m. ET
Joshua SokolReporting from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore
Ken Sembach, director of the institute in charge of both the Hubble and James Webb telescopes, just teased what the assembled scientists are about to see in an introductory speech. “It will astonish you, it will delight you, it will move you. Most of all, it will make people think, which is a real engineering achievement.”
July 12, 2022, 10:15 a.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 10:15 a.m. ET
Dennis OverbyeReporting on astronomy and astrophysics
Politicians from Maryland, where the Goddard Space Flight Center is located, have come to speak. Representative Steny Hoyer, the Democratic majority leader said of Webb, “This gives new meaning to as far as the eye can see.”
July 12, 2022, 10:08 a.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 10:08 a.m. ET
Michael RostonEditing space and astronomy news
NASA is sharing messages from European and Canadian space officials. Webb is not only an American mission; it relied on a European rocket to get to space, and the spacecraft contains instruments built with European and Canadian engineers and scientists.
July 12, 2022, 10:05 a.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 10:05 a.m. ET
Dennis OverbyeReporting on astronomy and astrophysics
During Mr. Nelson’s pep talk, he said “We’re going to Mars!” to much applause, referring to NASA’s plans to first send astronauts back to the moon under the Artemis program, in preparation for future Martian missions.
July 12, 2022, 10:05 a.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 10:05 a.m. ET
Michael RostonEditing space and astronomy news
Bill Nelson, the former Florida senator who now leads NASA, described President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris as having excitement “like kids” when they saw the first images from the Webb telescope on Monday at the White House. He said the environment at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, where the images are being presented, was like “a pep rally.”
July 12, 2022, 10:01 a.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 10:01 a.m. ET
Joshua SokolReporting from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore
I’m at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, where scientists who will be running the James Webb Space Telescope have crammed themselves into an auditorium — and an overflow auditorium — to watch an internal presentation of the first images. An SUV carrying former Senator Barbara Mikulski, a major NASA backer, pulled up as I arrived. For many employees, the last six weeks were a sleepless sprint to get the new telescope’s instruments ready to take in the universe. Today, their job is to sit back and see the results.
July 12, 2022, 9:41 a.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 9:41 a.m. ET
The Webb telescope’s mirrors have already taken some hits.
ImageA detail of damage to one of the telescope’s mirrors, which was hit by a micrometeoroid.Credit…NASA
Unless you keep your brand-new car in the garage all of the time, scratches and dents are inevitable.
Still, the first blemish can be painful to see.
For a spacecraft like the James Webb Space Telescope, it was inevitable that pieces of cosmic dust would hit its mirrors. Still, it was an unwelcome surprise for NASA officials to find that one of the telescope’s mirrors had been damaged by a micrometeoroid strike in late May and that the hit was larger than had been expected.
The little wallop noticeably distorted the observations, and the science gathering had not even started yet.
But NASA officials said the distortion is barely noticeable, and the performance of Webb still exceeds all of its requirements. Engineers also tweaked the position of the damaged mirror to cancel out part of the distortion.
“It wasn’t really a surprise,” said Gregory Robinson, the program director for Webb.
Before the incident was reported, four smaller micrometeoroids had already hit the telescope.
When Webb passes near known meteor showers, the telescope will turn its mirrors away to minimize their chances of being harmed. But the hit in May was not part of a meteor shower, just bad luck. It did not change operations of the telescope or the schedule for releasing images this week.
And such strikes have their own scientific value: The gradual accumulation of damage will give scientists better knowledge about the distribution of dust where the space telescope orbits, a location a million miles from Earth.Show more
July 12, 2022, 9:15 a.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 9:15 a.m. ET
Who was James Webb, anyway?
ImageThe telescope is named for NASA Administrator James E. Webb.Credit…Scan by Mike Acs
In 2002, Sean O’Keefe, then the NASA administrator, announced that the agency’s next telescope would be named for James Webb, who led NASA during the 1960s, when it was gearing up to land people on the moon. He was a staunch champion of space science.
Some astronomers were disappointed that it would not be named for an astronomer, while others objected on more serious grounds, namely that Mr. Webb bore some responsibility for an event during the Truman administration known as the Lavender Scare that resulted in the purging of gay and lesbian employees from the State Department. At the time, Mr. Webb had been the under secretary of state.
That issue gained prominence a year ago when four astronomers — Lucianne Walkowicz of the JustSpace Alliance and Adler Planetarium in Chicago, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein of the University of New Hampshire, Brian Nord of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and the University of Chicago and Sarah Tuttle of the University of Washington — published an op-ed in Scientific American, “The James Webb Space Telescope Needs to Be Renamed.”
NASA said it would investigate the claims and publish a report. Subsequently, last September, Bill Nelson, the current NASA administrator and a former Florida senator, announced that he saw no need to change the name. No report was ever released, infuriating the critics.
In March after the telescope launched, Nature magazine reported on the basis of FOIA requests that NASA had taken the allegations seriously enough that Paul Hertz, then NASA’s director of astrophysics, had written outside astronomers asking if he should change the telescope’s name. The answer was no, but he did not talk to any L.G.B.T.Q. astronomers.
The magazine also reported records from the case of Clifford Norton. He had been fired from NASA in 1963 — during Mr. Webb’s tenure — for being gay, and the archival materials alluded to “a custom in the agency” of firing people for homosexual activity. Mr. Norton appealed and won a landmark case against such discrimination in 1969.
In November of 2021, NASA’s Astrophysics Advisory Committee asked the agency for fuller report.
Mr. O’Keefe, the former administrator, defended his choice in an email.
“Arguably, were it not for James Webb’s determination to fulfill the most audacious vision of his time, our capacity to explore today would be starkly different,” Mr. O’Keefe said.
But that was not enough for the critics. “If he’s not responsible for the bad stuff that happened while he was in charge, why is he responsible for the good stuff?” Dr. Prescod-Weinstein said. “It seems there’s a bit of double-think happening here, where people assign him responsibility for the things they like about his legacy and pretend that he’s only responsible for the things they like.”
“Our telescopes, if they are going to be named after people, should be named after people who inspire us to be our better selves,” Dr. Prescod-Weinstein added.
After the first images were revealed of the Webb telescope on Tuesday, a NASA spokeswoman said during a news conference that the agency’s historians are looking further into Mr. Webb’s history.
July 12, 2022, 8:48 a.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 8:48 a.m. ET
What Webb has shown us so far.
ImageAn image of star 2MASS J17554042+6551277 that was used to align Webb’s mirrors, released in March.Credit…NASA, via Associated Press
While Monday and Tuesday’s images will be the first significant, scientific pictures released by NASA, a handful of James Webb Space Telescope images have dribbled out so far, effectively a training montage as the new observatory worked up to full power.
Starting this winter, astronomers brought the telescope’s 18 separate mirror segments into alignment until they could create one crisp image of a star. The telescope even took something like a selfie of what the entire mirror looks like. By April, teams on the ground had proven the telescope’s various instruments could all see clear, focused views of the sky at much higher resolutions than its predecessors could.
ImageA test image taken over a period of eight days in May was hitherto the deepest image of the infrared sky.Credit…NASA, CSA, and FGS team
ImageAn early selfie to confirm that the telescope’s 18 primary mirror segments were collecting light from the same star in unison.Credit…STScI/NASA
While these and other engineering images were not taken to make pretty pictures or even to produce scientific data, outside astronomers still began salivating at the hints they gave about the Webb’s next-level capabilities.
Last week, NASA released another picture taken by the telescope’s fine guidance sensor, a camera meant just to lock on surrounding stars for reference and keep the spacecraft’s science instruments pointed at exactly the right place. But even that test view turned out to be littered with distant galaxies, in one of the deepest pictures of the cosmos ever taken.
“Guys, I don’t think we are prepared for next Tuesday,” Caitlin Casey, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin, posted on Twitter in response. “This is incredible.”
July 12, 2022, 8:44 a.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 8:44 a.m. ET
Dennis OverbyeReporting on astronomy and astrophysics
In the first Webb image released by President Biden and NASA yesterday, some of the distant galaxies are warped into curves. That’s because the gravitational force of a closer cluster of galaxies acts as a lens, letting us see the further objects, but still bending them.
July 12, 2022, 8:16 a.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 8:16 a.m. ET
The Webb telescope has been busy since it launched last December.
ImageThe Ariane 5 rocket carrying the James Webb Space Telescope launching from the European Spaceport in French Guiana on Christmas Day.Credit…Bill Ingalls/NASA, via Getty Images
Getting to space on Christmas Day last year was just the first step for the James Webb Space Telescope.
The European-built Ariane 5 rocket sent the space telescope on a trajectory toward what is known as the second Lagrange point, or L2, about a million miles from Earth. At L2, the gravitational pulls of the sun and the Earth keep Webb’s motion around the sun in synchronization with Earth’s.
Moments after Webb separated from the rocket, the telescope’s solar arrays unfolded, generating power for the spacecraft. Over the next month, other pieces also slid into place: the sun shield that keeps the instruments cold so that it can precisely capture faint infrared light, the 18 gold-plated hexagonal pieces of the mirror.
For the astronomers, engineers and officials watching on Earth, the deployment was a tense time. There were 344 single-point failures, meaning if any of the actions had not worked, the telescope would have ended as useless space junk. They all worked. NASA said it was most complex sequence ever for a single spacecraft deployment.
On Jan. 24, Webb arrived at L2.
During its journey, the telescope’s four scientific instruments were turned on. Over the next few months, the telescope’s operators painstakingly aligned the 18 mirrors, using a single star as the focusing target. In April, the Mid-Infrared Instrument, or MIRI, which requires the coldest temperatures, was cooled to minus 447 degrees Fahrenheit, and scientists could begin a final series of checks on it.
Once the instruments were ready, the science was ready to begin.
July 12, 2022, 7:30 a.m. ETJuly 12, 2022, 7:30 a.m. ET
Webb’s first image: A cosmic fishing hole for old-timey galaxies.
ImageThe Webb telescope’s image of the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 includes thousands of galaxies, including the faintest objects ever observed in infrared. The light from SMACS 0723 in this image is 4.6 billion years old.Credit…NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI
The first image from Webb was shown on Monday in an event at the White House by President Biden on Monday. And it was not just any pretty picture.
The image goes by the name of SMACS 0723. It is a patch of sky visible from the Southern Hemisphere on Earth and often visited by Hubble and other telescopes in search of the deep past. It includes a massive cluster of galaxies about 4 billion light-years from here that astronomers use as a kind of cosmic telescope. The cluster’s enormous gravitation field acts as a lens, warping and magnifying the light from galaxies behind it that would otherwise be too faint and faraway to see.
An earlier Hubble image of the region was taken by a team called RELICS, for Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey. They work at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which manages both Hubble and the Webb. Previous analyses of this visible light image have identified galaxies poking out of the fog of creation some 700 million years after the Big Bang. The universe is 13.8 billion years old.
The current record for the earliest and farthest galaxy yet seen is 420 million years after the Big Bang. It is held by a galaxy called GN-z11 that strutted its fury some 13.3 billion years ago.
Webb is expected to smash that record, again and again starting with this image of SMACS 0723. Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for space science, described this image as the deepest view yet into the past of our cosmos. Later images will surely look back even further, he added.
Adam Riess, a Nobel-Prize winning cosmologist at the Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University, said the new Webb image had detected objects a trillionth the brightness of the star Vega, a astronomical standard for the magnitude of a star. That corresponds to a magnitude of 30.5 in astronomical lingo. Astronomers also used the telescope’s instruments to take detailed spectral measurements from which the distance and other properties of these baby galaxies can be determined. He added in an email that in his opinion, “this can’t really be over hyped.”
Marcia Rieke of the University of Arizona agreed with him. She led the building of one of the cameras used to take the picture, known as NIRcam.
“This image will not hold the ‘deepest’ record for long but clearly shows the power of this telescope.” (Her husband, George Rieke, also an astronomer at Arizona, led the building of the other camera, known as MIRI.)
She also expressed amazement that the Webb instruments had taken only two hours to achieve what had taken Hubble days and days of observation.
Indeed, she said there is already a deeper image in the can, which she expects to be released later this week.
“This will be an incredibly exciting week,” said Garth Illingworth, a veteran galaxy hunter at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was present at the creation of the Webb project 33 years ago.
(Contributed by Michael Kelly, H.W.)