Drawing back the curtain on a photo gallery unlike any other, NASA will soon present the first color images from its James Webb Space Telescope, a revolutionary device designed to peer into the cosmos until the dawn of the universe.
Tuesday’s long-awaited reveal of photos and spectroscopic data from the newly activated observatory follows a six-month process of remotely installing various components, aligning mirrors and calibrating instruments.
With Webb now fine-tuned and fully focused, astronomers will embark on a competitively curated list of science projects that explore the evolution of galaxies, the life cycles of stars, the atmospheres of distant exoplanets and the moons of our outer solar system.
The first batch of photos, which took weeks to process from raw telescope data, is expected to offer a compelling glimpse of what Webb will capture on future science missions.
NASA on Friday published a list of five celestial objects chosen for the debut of Webb, built for the US space agency by aerospace giant Northrop Grumman Corp.
Among them are two nebulae — huge clouds of gas and dust thrown into space by stellar explosions that form nurseries for new stars — and two sets of galaxy clusters.
One, according to NASA, features foreground objects so massive they act as “gravitational lenses,” a visual distortion of space that greatly magnifies the light coming from behind them and exposes even fainter, farther, and farther objects. back in time. It remains to be seen how far and what appeared on camera.
NASA will also publish the first Webb spectrographic analysis of an exoplanet, revealing the molecular signatures of patterns of filtered light passing through its atmosphere. The exoplanet in this case, roughly half the mass of Jupiter, is more than 1,100 light-years away. A light year is the distance light travels in one year, 9.5 trillion kilometers.
‘It moved me as a scientist, as a human being’
The five initial Webb targets were already known to scientists. One, the group of galaxies 290 million light-years from Earth known as Stephan’s Quintet, was discovered in 1877.
But NASA directors promise that the Webb images capture their subjects in an entirely new light, literally.
“What I saw moved me as a scientist, as an engineer and as a human being,” NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy, who reviewed the images, told reporters during a June 29 news conference.
Klaus Pontoppidan, Webb project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore (Maryland), where mission control engineers operate the telescope, promised that the first pictures “will cause a long-awaited ‘wow’ for astronomers and the public”.
The $9 billion (R$47.3 billion) infrared telescope, the largest and most complex astronomical observatory ever sent into space, was launched on Christmas Day from French Guiana, off the northeast coast of South America.
A month later, the 6,350-kilogram instrument reached its gravitational parking spot in solar orbit, circling the sun in sync with Earth nearly 1.6 million km from the planet.
Webb, which sees its objects primarily in the infrared spectrum, is about a hundred times more sensitive than its 30-year-old predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, which orbits Earth at 547 km away and operates primarily in optical and ultraviolet wavelengths. .
The larger light-gathering surface of Webb’s primary mirror — a series of 18 hexagonal segments of gold-coated beryllium metal — allows it to observe objects at greater distances, hence further back in time, than Hubble or any other telescope.
Its infrared sensitivity allows it to detect light sources that would otherwise be hidden in the visible spectrum by dust and gas.
Taken together, these features are expected to transform astronomy, providing the first glimpse of “baby” galaxies dated to just 100 million years after the Big Bang, the theoretical flash point that triggered the expansion of the known universe, about 100 million years ago. 13.8 billion years.
Webb’s instruments also make it ideal for looking for signs of potentially vital atmospheres around dozens of newly documented planets orbiting distant stars and observing worlds much closer to Earth, such as Mars and Saturn’s icy moon Titan.
In addition to a series of studies already programmed for Webb, the telescope’s most revolutionary discoveries could be those that have not yet been predicted.
Such was the case with Hubble’s surprising discovery, through observations of distant supernovae, that the expansion of the universe is accelerating rather than decelerating, opening up a new field of astrophysics devoted to a mysterious phenomenon that scientists call dark energy. .
The Webb telescope is an international collaboration led by NASA in partnership with the European and Canadian space agencies.
