Webb telescope makes discoveries that were previously impossible

Astronomers get their money’s worth.

Scientists have used the powerful $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope to peer into the deepest cosmos and capture images of star clusters in an extremely old galaxy for the first time. In the images below you see these star clusters, which are gravitationally bound groups of stars, as they existed just 460 million years after the creation of the universe. That means we’re looking through 97 percent of cosmic time.

This deep view of space was made possible by the double whammy of the Webb telescope’s unprecedented sensitivity—its six-meter-wide gold-plated mirrors detect extremely faint light sources—and a natural phenomenon called a “gravity lens.” In the foreground is a huge cluster of galaxies, each containing galaxies hundreds of billions of stars, millions of black holes and perhaps trillions of planets. The combined mass of these galaxies warps space, like a bowling ball sitting on a mattress. It creates a giant magnifying lens.

“Webb’s incredible sensitivity and angular resolution at near-infrared wavelengths, combined with gravitational lensing provided by the massive cluster of galaxies in the foreground, made this discovery possible,” said Larry Bradley, an astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute who developed the Webb telescope manages, in a rack.

“No other telescope could have made this discovery,” said Bradley, who led the new research published in the scientific journal Natureadded.

The image below shows this unprecedented cosmic image.

– Right: Almost every object in this image is an entire galaxy (apart from the six-pointed stars in the foreground). The white galaxies in the center form the massive galaxy cluster SPT-CL J0615−5746, which creates the gravitational lens.

– Left: Two lenticular, or magnified, galaxies. The galaxy at the bottom, called the “Cosmic Gems arc”, is shown with a number of separate star clusters. There are actually five, but gravitational lensing can sometimes, under the right viewing direction from our position in space, create mirror images of objects.

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Astronomers use Webb to learn about the formation of the earliest stars and galaxies, ultimately revealing more about our cosmic history in the Milky Way Galaxy. Furthermore, astronomers suspect that these first galaxies – and the massive star clusters within them that could eventually form even larger “globular clusters” – emitted intense radiation into the early universe, eventually breaking off dense clouds of gas that saturated space, causing much of it to break down . opaque. Ultimately, this ended the universe’s “Dark Ages.” Brilliant starlight was no longer hidden; light was finally unleashed, about 1 billion years after the universe began.

Mashable speed of light

“No other telescope could have made this discovery.”

Today, with the help of Webb, we can see these memorable objects from primordial space.

“The surprise and amazement was incredible when we opened the Webb images for the first time,” Angela Adamo, an astronomer at Stockholm University who also authored the study, marveled in a statement. “We saw a small chain of bright dots, mirrored from one side to the other – these cosmic gems are star clusters! Without Webb we would not have known we were looking at star clusters in such a young galaxy!”

The powerful capabilities of the Webb telescope

The Webb Telescope – a scientific collaboration between NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency – is designed to peer into the deepest cosmos and reveal new insights about the early universe. But it is also looking at intriguing planets in our Milky Way, along with the planets and moons in our solar system.

Here’s how Webb delivers unparalleled performance, and will likely continue to do so for decades to come:

– Giant mirror: Webb’s mirror, which captures light, is more than six meters wide. That is more than two and a half times larger than the mirror of the Hubble Space Telescope. By capturing more light, Webb can see more distant, ancient objects. As described above, the telescope peers at stars and galaxies that formed more than 13 billion years ago, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.

“We’re going to see the very first stars and galaxies ever formed,” Jean Creighton, an astronomer and director of the Manfred Olson Planetarium at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, told Mashable in 2021.

– Infrared display: Unlike Hubble, which largely observes light that is visible to us, Webb is primarily an infrared telescope, meaning it observes light in the infrared spectrum. This allows us to see much more of the universe. Infrared has longer wavelengths than visible light, allowing the light waves to slip through cosmic clouds more efficiently; light does not collide with and scatter by these closely packed particles as often. Ultimately, Webb’s infrared vision could penetrate places Hubble can’t reach.

“It lifts the veil,” Creighton said.

– Looking at distant exoplanets: The Webb telescope has specialized equipment called spectrographs that will revolutionize our understanding of these distant worlds. The instruments can decipher which molecules (such as water, carbon dioxide and methane) exist in the atmospheres of distant exoplanets – whether they are gas giants or smaller rocky worlds. Webb will look at exoplanets in the Milky Way galaxy. Who knows what we’ll find?

“We might learn things we never thought about,” Mercedes López-Morales, an exoplanet researcher and astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics-Harvard & Smithsonian, told Mashable in 2021.

Astronomers have already successfully found intriguing chemical reactions on a planet 700 light-years away, and as described above, the observatory has begun exploring one of the most anticipated places in the cosmos: the rocky Earth-sized planets of TRAPPIST -solar planet. system.