In the images above and below, pretty much everything you see is a galaxy.
And this is just a tiny patch of sky viewed by the James Webb Space Telescope.
Whether a stunning spiral or more distant fuzzy point of light, every galaxy is full of intrigue. And each is “surely filled with billions and billions of planets,” tweeted astronomer Paul Byrne.
This scene comes from a celebrated part of the cosmos called the “Hubble Deep Field.” It’s where the legendary, school bus-sized Hubble telescope peered at a patch of sky just 1/13th the diameter of the moon as seen from Earth, showing the denizens of our planet an eye-opening cosmic vista. Now astronomers have turned the most powerful space telescope ever built, Webb, at the deep field. What they saw demonstrates the instrument’s unprecedented power and ability to capture bounties of cosmic insight.
It took Hubble over 11 days to capture its historic deep field, located in the constellation Ursa Major close to the handle of the Big Dipper, in such high resolution. “In 2022, Webb took only about 20 hours to observe that same field in high-resolution,” said NASA.
Scientists have a good reason for returning to this deeply investigated patch of space. They want to know how the first galaxies formed billions of years ago. “We don’t exactly know how galaxies became how they are today,” NASA explained. “With its sensitivity, Webb is helping astronomers hunt for the first galaxies and better understand star formation and other galactic properties in the early universe.”
To view these early galaxies, astronomers used the Webb telescope’s main imaging camera, the Near Infrared Camera, or NIRCam, which can detect some of the faintest light in the cosmos. The specialized instrument allows scientists to tease out where new stars are being created in these distant galaxies, specifically by seeing “hot, ionized gas.” Many newly formed stars release intense radiation that excites the abundant hydrogen atoms in surrounding clouds of gas, offering proof of star formation.
The detailed view of these distant cosmos, taken under a day of observation, are also just simply remarkable.
“I think that seeing how beautiful the images are and how high quality they ended up being was definitely a high point.”
“I think that seeing how beautiful the images are and how high quality they ended up being was definitely a high point,” Christina Williams, an astronomer at the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab, said in a statement. “We calculated that we would be able to do things like this, but it was different to see it and have the real data in practice.”
Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA / STScI / Christina Williams (NSF’s NOIRLab) / S. Tacchella (Cambridge) / Michael Maseda (UW-Madison) // IMAGE PROCESSING: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
The Webb telescope’s powerful abilities
The Webb telescope, a scientific collaboration between NASA, the ESA, and the Canadian Space Agency, is designed to peer into the deepest cosmos and reveal unprecedented insights about the early universe. But it’s also peering at intriguing planets in our galaxy, and even the planets in our solar system.
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Here’s how Webb is achieving unparalleled things, and likely will for decades:
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Giant mirror: Webb’s mirror, which captures light, is over 21 feet across. That’s over two and a half times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope’s mirror. Capturing more light allows Webb to see more distant, ancient objects. As described above, the telescope is peering at stars and galaxies that formed over 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 that ever formed,” Jean Creighton, an astronomer and the director of the Manfred Olson Planetarium at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, told Mashable in 2021.
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Infrared view: Unlike Hubble, which largely views light that’s visible to us, Webb is primarily an infrared telescope, meaning it views light in the infrared spectrum. This allows us to see far more of the universe. Infrared has longer wavelengths than visible light, so the light waves more efficiently slip through cosmic clouds; the light doesn’t as often collide with and get scattered by these densely packed particles. Ultimately, Webb’s infrared eyesight can penetrate places Hubble can’t.
“It lifts the veil,” said Creighton.
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Peering into distant exoplanets: The Webb telescope carries specialized equipment called spectrometers that will revolutionize our understanding of these far-off worlds. The instruments can decipher what molecules (such as water, carbon dioxide, and methane) exist in the atmospheres of distant exoplanets — be it 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.
Already, astronomers have successfully found intriguing chemical reactions on a planet 700 light-years away, and the observatory has started looking at one of the most anticipated places in the cosmos: the rocky, Earth-sized planets of the TRAPPIST solar system.
