At long last, eager astronomers—and the public—get to view snapshots of the universe provided by the JWST, the largest, most complex, and most expensive space telescope ever built.
, those trials are almost forgotten. “I don’t think any of us expected how well it went,” Zurbuchen says.
Not everything went according to plan. Some computer glitches required a few hours’ pause. The mirror has been dinged by a handful of micrometeorites—that was expected but one was larger than models predicted and operators are working to mitigate its impact. “There have been some issues,” Ochs says. “But when you have a good team, you can get through it.
Stephan’s Quintet is a compact group of four galaxies with another in the foreground. Filaments of glowing gas are signs of shock waves as the galaxies interact. One day the four will likely merge.The Southern Ring nebula is a glowing shell of ionized gas blown off by a giant star at the end of its life. A white dwarf at its center—the stellar cinder of the giant—emits ultraviolet light that causes the nebula to fluoresce.SMACS 0723 is a deep field containing thousands of galaxies.
Another one of the released pictures is of the well-known Stephan’s Quintet, a cluster of four interacting galaxies 290 million light-years away that sits behind a fifth galaxy in the foreground. Seen with Webb, it is possible to discern glowing gas and dust heated by two of the merging galaxies and areas of active star formation generated by that turmoil. “It is this sort of interaction that drives the evolution of galaxies,” says Giovanna Giardino of the European Space Agency.
Misty Bentz of Georgia State University will test a different NIRSpec capability: taking a spectroscopic “image” in which every pixel has its own separate spectrum. Her project involves staring for 9 hours at a single galaxy, the nearby NGC 4151—dubbed the Eye of Sauron because of the eerie glow of the supermassive black hole at its heart, which shines brightly as it heats up gas being drawn into its maw.
Among NASA’s offerings this week, the most tantalizing taste of what’s to come is the spectrum of an exoplanet. It’s from a giant planet known as WASP-96b orbiting close to a star 1150 light-years from Earth. During regular passes in front of its home star, some starlight is absorbed by gases in WASP-96b’s atmosphere, leaving telltale dips in the star’s spectrum.
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