A group of galaxies that “dance”, a cradle of new stars and a nebula illuminated by a dying star. And then the chemical composition of the atmosphere of a planet more than a thousand light years away. After the preview at the White House, where US President Joe Biden unveiled one of the images taken by the James Webb space telescope, NASA shows the world the result of the other observations made with scientific instruments in full operation.
Innovation Almanac – April 24, 1990
The Hubble mission begins, the telescope that made us fall in love with Space
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The largest and most complex telescope ever built
The largest, most complex (and expensive, around ten billion dollars) space telescope ever built, took off on the day of Christmas 2021 from the European spaceport of Kourou, in French Guiana, at the head of an Ariane 5 rocket. After about a month of travel and a series of very delicate maneuvers to open the mirrors and the heat shield the size of a tennis court, its destination, point L2, one and a half million kilometers away, from where it looks at stars and galaxies, turning its back to the Sun and the Earth.
Space
The first color photo of the James Webb telescope unveiled by Biden: galaxies of the distant universe
by Matteo Marini
Thus isolated from sources of light and heat that could interfere with its activity, it can observe the Universe in the infrared. Over the past few months, engineers and scientists have run all the tests to make sure everything is working perfectly.
Now the scientific campaign has finally started which, it is the astronomers’ bet, will revolutionize our understanding of the Cosmos and its evolution. It will look to the borders of time and that dark age, after the Big Bang, when the first stars and the first protogalaxies were lit.
The veil illuminated by a dying star
The Southern Ring Nebula, or “Eight-Burst” Nebula, is a planetary nebula, an expanding cloud of gas surrounding a dying star. It is nearly half a light-year in diameter and about 2,000 light-years from Earth. Photographed by James Webb in the mid-infrared, it shows much finer detail than the photo taken by Hubble. The central star, not the brightest but the one that appears weaker, is a white dwarf, the remnant of a star that has reached the end of its life. Its light illuminates the gases expelled in the last stages of its existence.
It will help us to write the history of matter in its becoming, with the formation of heavy elements scattered by the explosions of the stars. Up to the molecules that make up everything around us. It will hunt for those chemical combinations that can perhaps tell us where life outside the Earth might be, by looking in the atmosphere of planets around other stars or nearby, in the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.