THE James Space Telescope Webb spotted its first star, though not quite tonight, and even took a ‘selfie’ to capture the moment, announced the Nasa this Friday (11th).
These steps are part of a months-long process of aligning the observatory’s massive golden mirror that astronomers hope will help unravel the mysteries of the early universe.
The first photograph uploaded from the cosmos is more than impressive. There are 18 diffuse white dots on a black background, all showing the same target: HD84406, a lone, bright star in the constellation Ursa Major.
The star, however, represents a big step. The 18 points were captured by the main mirror in 18 individual segments, and the image is now the basis for aligning and focusing these hexagonal pieces.
The light bounced off segments of Webb’s secondary mirror, a rounded object located at the end of long arms, and then onto an instrument on the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam), the telescope’s main imaging device.
“The entire Webb team is ecstatic at how well the first steps for image capture and telescope alignment are going,” Marcia Rieke, NIRCam principal investigator and professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona, said in a statement.
“We are very happy to see that the light is captured by NIRCam.”
The image capture process began on February 2, when Webb pointed to different positions around the predicted location of the star.
And while Webb’s initial search covered an area of the sky equivalent in size to the full moon, the points are all located near the center, meaning the observatory is already relatively well positioned for its final alignment.
To help with the process, the team also took a selfie with a special lens on the NIRCam instead of an external camera.
Previously, NASA had reported that taking a selfie was not possible, which made this news a special satisfaction for space fans.
“I think the reaction was more or less ‘wow,'” Lee Feinberg, director of the Webb Optical Telescope Element, told reporters during a phone conversation, explaining that the team wasn’t sure it was possible to get such an image using just light. of stars.
The $10 billion observatory launched into space from French Guiana on December 25 and is now in an Earth-aligned orbit around the Sun, about 1.5 million kilometers from our planet, in a region of space called the second Lagrangian point.
Webb will begin its science mission this summer, which includes using its high-resolution instruments to go back 13.5 billion years to the first generation of galaxies that formed after the Big Bang.
The visible and ultraviolet light emitted by the first luminous objects was stretched across the expanding Universe, arriving today in the form of infrared, which Webb is equipped to detect with unprecedented clarity.
Its mission also includes a study of distant planets, known as exoplanets, to determine their origin, evolution and habitability.
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