![]() In the image of the exoplanet WASP-96b, water vapor was seen. Little rays of dying starlight were escaping from the clouds of dust, just as sun rays might pierce through clouds. One, of a dying star sending out waves of energy, revealed a second star nearby, which the dying star was orbiting. “Then you can get an instant estimate of how far away that galaxy is.”Įach of the five images had its own “Easter eggs,” as one of the astronomers who presented the images live on a NASA stream put it. “Now that we have the image, we go through the process of measuring, quantitatively, how bright every spot is with every filter that you measured with,” she said. They hold information about how the earliest galaxies were formed, and of what elements they consisted. This means that they are being seen as they were not too long after the Big Bang. Their light had been travelling the longest-sometimes for more than thirteen billion years. this is not the level of detail you’re used to being able to see.”Īfter her surprise subsided, she began to look at the galaxies that appeared the reddest. You know, if you start out in life as a ground-based astronomer . . . “I didn’t expect them to be so absolutely stunning. “I knew computationally that the diffraction was limited to a micron, that the full width at half maximum was whatever-I knew we’d have pretty pictures,” she said. Rieke was surprised by how moved she was by the beauty of the pictures. She said that the team started to term these incidental galaxies “photobombers.” “No matter where we’ve pointed J.W.S.T., even in the images taken during commissioning that would last a few tens of seconds, we kept getting these galaxies that we weren’t even looking for in the background,” Rieke said. The new image, which took less than a day to make, shows immensely more detail-and more galaxies. The Hubble telescope, which focussed on a similar patch of sky for two weeks, revealed thousands more galaxies than expected. The first one, called a deep-field image, is of a patch of sky that, from Earth, is about the equivalent of what would be occluded by a grain of sand-or a micrometeoroid-held out at arm’s length. Marcia Rieke had an opportunity to see the first images a few days before they were released, because she was asked to make a short presentation to help interpret them. “Now I feel like the young people who worked on this project-they have a bright future in astronomy,” Marcia said. There was always a possibility that the highly complex J.W.S.T. Marcia’s team looks at some of the shortest wavelengths that the telescope can perceive, while George’s team looks at some of the longest. scientist for another instrument, the MIRI. Rieke has served as the chief scientist for one of the telescope’s main instruments, the NIRCam her husband, George Rieke, has been the chief U.S. “I am beyond cloud nine,” the astrophysicist Marcia Rieke told me. The sharpness and clarity might make you think of Vermeer-what is being painted is light. ![]() The smudgy-pastel feel that previous telescopes delivered is not present. ![]() (Exoplanets are ones not in our solar system.) And they’re very, very pretty. These images carry news about the early universe, the birth and death of stars, the collision of galaxies, and the atmospheres of exoplanets. The level of detail has far surpassed expectations. On July 12th, the first five scientific images taken by the telescope were released to the public. But, of the three hundred and forty-four details that were once listed as things that could go wrong and destroy the whole mission, none has happened. Since its launch, arguably the roughest luck the James Webb Space Telescope has had is hitting a micrometeoroid the size of a grain of sand.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |