2) WE WILL GO BACK AS WE HAVE NEVER GO IN THE PAST OF THE UNIVERSE
The first Webb telescope photograph, shared by US President Joe Biden on July 11, was described by NASA officials and astronomers as one of the most in-depth images of the universe ever recorded. Presumably, this depth will increase as new images come out from NASA’s computers in the coming period. Thanks to a photograph of a distant star cluster called SMACS 0723, we realized that there are many other distant galaxies in the sky. The light coming from these galaxies and entering the image thanks to the gravitational field of the star cluster is more than 13 billion years old. Astronomers’ theories suggest that the earliest stars, farthest away, may have been different from the stars we see today. Namely, the first stars consisted of pure hydrogen and helium left over from the Big Bang and could grow many times larger than the Sun. These stars would soon collapse into the giant black holes found at the centers of many galaxies today.
3) WE CAN UNDERSTAND WHAT HAPPENS IN THE ATMOSPHERE OF FARTHER PLANETS
One of the images shared with the world on Tuesday was the spectrum of WASP-96b, a Jupiter-sized exoplanet. The sight of WASP-96b passing in front of its star, 1120 light-years away, didn’t get us too excited, but it caused astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which is the headquarters of the Webb telescope, gasp and applause. “I can’t even describe the excitement of sharing this with you,” Nestor Espinoza, an astronomer at the Institute, said in a statement. Actually, this planet is not a new discovery for scientists. It has been the subject of previous studies on earth, and was also photographed by Hubble. But there was also evidence of water vapor, mists, and some previously unseen clouds in images taken by the Webb telescope. This surprised scientists. It’s very unlikely that WASP-96b is home to any living creature, but using the same techniques it will be possible to detect whether smaller, rocky planets orbiting other stars are habitable places.
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