To mark the one-year anniversary of James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observations on Wednesday, July 12, 2023, NASA has released a shocking image that shows star birth in a way that it has never been seen before.
The brand new JWST image features the closest star-forming region to Earth, the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex. Though a small and comparatively peaceful stellar nursery, the powerful telescope’s visualization represents a chaotic close-up of the region positioned 390 light-years from Earth.
“The JWST’s image of Rho Ophiuchi allows us to witness a really transient period within the stellar lifecycle with recent clarity,” a JWST project scientist on the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, Klaus Pontoppidan said in a press release. “Our own Sun experienced a phase like this way back, and now we have now the technology to see the start of one other’s star’s story.”
Within the image, it is feasible to see jets bursting from a few of the 50 or so young stars within the stellar nursery impacting surrounding interstellar gas and causing molecular hydrogen to glow red. These occur because the young stars are ripping freed from their natal cocoons comprised of what stays of the gas and mud that formed them. This makes the intense jets almost such as a newborn baby stretching its arms for the very first time.
The makings of a protoplanetary disk of gas and mud from which planets will eventually form will also be seen in the shape of shadows around a few of the young blue stars. The darkest areas within the JWST image are regions through which protostars are still being born within the Rho Ophiuchi.
Though a lot of the stars within the region are of sizes just like or smaller than the sun, one rather more massive star than ours lurks within the lower half of the image. This massive blue star, S1, has cleared out a cave of dust within the glowing yellow material that surrounds it.
The image that shows stellar birth in whole recent light demonstrates that as incredible as the primary 12 months of the JWST has been, the beginning of the second 12 months of science from the telescope suggests we have not seen anything yet.
“In only one 12 months, the James Webb Space Telescope has transformed humanity’s view of the cosmos, peering into dust clouds and seeing the sunshine from faraway corners of the universe for the very first time,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a press release. “Every recent image is a brand new discovery, empowering scientists across the globe to ask and answer questions they once could never dream of.”
A 12 months of James Webb Space Telescope space science
The primary image from the JWST was released on July 11, 2022, when U.S. President Joe Biden revealed a deep field picture of hundreds of galaxies within the galactic cluster SMACS 0723, during a public event on the White House in Washington.
The next day, in a live broadcast from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, an additional three images were released to the general public. These included a shocking image of the orange-hued gaseous hills of the NGC 3324 star region within the Carina Nebula, the striking visualization of the five galaxies of Stephan’s Quintet, and an image of the Southern Ring Nebula, a halo of gas surrounding a star positioned 2,500 light-years away.
Also contained inside this primary data set released on July 12, 2022, were the JWST’s observations of the atmospheric composition of the new gas giant exoplanet WASP-96 b.
Not only did the pictures and data impress the general public, but even astronomers and scientists who had helped develop the JWST were shocked by the telescope’s precision and power, getting a taste of the form of contribution it could make to astronomy.
The primary 12 months of operation of the JWST has not upset on this front. The telescope is designed to view the universe in infrared, and this makes it particularly adept at observing early galaxies.
It’s because the sunshine that left these galaxies billions of years ago has lost energy because it travels billions of light-years to achieve energy, and this leads to light having its wavelength shifted toward the red end of the electromagnetic spectrum.
The method called “redshift” sees visible light shifted right down to infrared light, and the longer this light has traveled from probably the most distant and, thus, earliest galaxies, the more extreme this redshift has been.
The infrared view of the JWST has allowed the $10 billion space telescope to visualise probably the most distant and, thus earliest galaxies ever seen by humanity.
The 4 earliest galaxies, designated JADES-GS-z10–0, JADES-GS-z11–0, JADES-GS-z12–0, and JADES-GS-z13–0 (JADES stands for JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey), are seen by the JWST as they were when the 13.8 billion-year-old universe was just 300 to 500 million years old.
What has perhaps been much more surprising in the primary 12 months of science delivered by the JWST is how useful this powerful instrument designed to see deeper into the universe and thus further back in time than any telescope before it has been when imaging objects inside our cosmic backyard.
Within the solar system, the JWST has been capable of deliver stunning views of the gas giant Jupiter, the ice giant Uranus, and, most recently, the ringed planet Saturn.
“With a 12 months of science under our belts, we all know exactly how powerful this telescope is and have delivered a 12 months of spectacular data and discoveries,” JWST Senior Project Scientist Jane Rigby said. “We have chosen an ambitious set of observations for 12 months two — that builds on the whole lot we have learned to this point. The JWST’s science mission is just getting began — there’s so rather more to return.”