Caught in the Webb!

Nearly 7-and-a-half months after its Christmas Day Launch, the James Webb Space Telescope has sent in its first captures. Check them out here!

Image: Representational image of James Webb Space Telescope (Credits: Kevin Gill from Nashua, NH, United States, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

After nearly twenty years of development and more than half a year past its launch, NASA has finally released the first images captured by James Webb Telescope. The full-color images were released along with spectrographic data for these images, with President of the United States, Joe Biden, himself releasing the first image to the media.

Get a look at the images below.

Image: Webb’s First Deep Field — The image shows SMACS 0723, a galaxy cluster in the Southern Constellation of Volans located at roughly 5.12 billion light-years. The galaxies seem to be spherically stretched due to an effect called Gravitational Lensing. Captured using the telescope’s Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam), the image is a composite of various images totaling 12.5 hours. In contrast to a standard photograph that captures the light of visible wavelength, this image was captured by using the lesser energetic waves belonging to the Infrared region.NASA describes it as the rough equivalent of holding a grain of sand at arm’s length. (Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI)

Image: Cosmic Cliffs — The image shows a star-forming region in the Carina Nebula, NGC 3324. First cataloged by James Dunlop in 1826, the region lies in the constellation of Carina at a distance of about 7600 light-years. Usually, the images would be obscured by cosmic dust. JWST overcomes this problem by using infrared imaging (using the telescope’s NIRCam and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI)). (Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI)

Image: Southern Ring Nebula — Situated at a distance of roughly 2000 light years in the Southern constellation of Vela, this Planetary Nebula is mainly formed by two binary stars rotating about each-other. Catalogued as NGC 3132, the image shows the clouds of dust and gas illuminated by light from the surrounding stars. You can also witness a ‘cosmological photobomb’ in this image as a galaxy makes it way into the middle left region of the images (red streak in the left image, blue streak in the right one). (Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI)

Image: The intensity of light as a plot of wavelength for the atmosphere of exoplanet WASP 96b over a period of 6.4 hours. Captured using the telescope’s Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS), the fine fluctuations in this data provide evidence for the presence of water in the exoplanet’s atmosphere. The exoplanet is a gas giant revolving very close to a Sun-like star, WASP 96, and completing a revolution every 3½ days. The exoplanet is situated at a distance of about 1120 light-years away from the Earth in the Phoenix constellation. (Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI)

Image: Stephan’s Quintet — The five galaxies shown here are NGC 7320 (leftmost), NGC 7317, NGC 7318A, NGC 7318B, and NGC 7319. Captured using MIRI and NIRCam, the image is the telescope’s largest to date including over 150 million pixels and 1000 separate file images. The closest, NGC 7320, is located at roughly 40 million light-years from us, the others about 290 million light-years away. The quintet is located in the constellation Pegasus. NGC 7319 (topmost) harbors an active supermassive black hole. (Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI)

References

1. https://www.nasa.gov/webbfirstimages
2. https://www.businessinsider.in/science/news/nasas-james-webb-space-telescope-captured-a-side-view-of-a-galaxy-that-photobombed-a-planetary-nebula/articleshow/92838649.cms