From our cosmic backyard in the Solar System to distant galaxies near the dawn of time, the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has delivered on its promise to reveal the Universe like never before in its first year of science operations. To celebrate the conclusion of a successful first year, a new Webb image of a small star-forming region in the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex has been published.
The new Webb image released today shows the closest star-forming region to us. Its proximity, 390 light-years away, allows for great detail, with no foreground stars in the intervening space.
The region shown contains about 50 young stars, all of them with a mass similar to that of the Sun or less. The darkest areas are the densest, where thick dust surrounds still-forming protostars. Huge red bipolar jets of molecular hydrogen dominate the image, appearing horizontally in the upper third and vertically to the right. These occur when a star first bursts through its natal envelope of cosmic dust, hurling a pair of opposing jets into space. In contrast, star S1 has carved a bright cavern of dust in the bottom half of the image. It is the only star in the image that is significantly more massive than the Sun.
Some stars in the image show shadows that indicate protoplanetary disks – potential future planetary systems in the making.
Since its first deep-field image, unveiled in July 2022, Webb has delivered on its promise to show us more of the Universe than ever before. However, Webb has revealed much more than distant galaxies in the early Universe.
In addition to the dazzling infrared images, what really excites scientists are Webb’s sharp spectra—the detailed information that can be collected from light by the telescope’s spectroscopic instruments. Webb’s spectra confirmed the distances to some of the most distant galaxies ever observed and discovered the oldest and most distant supermassive black holes. They identified the compositions of planet atmospheres (or lack thereof) in more detail than ever before, and narrowed down for the first time the types of atmospheres that might exist on rocky exoplanets. They also revealed the chemical composition of stellar nurseries and protoplanetary disks, detecting water, organic molecules containing carbon and much more. Webb’s observations have spawned hundreds of scientific articles that answer long-standing questions and raise new questions to address with Webb.
The breadth of Webb’s science is also visible in his observations of the most familiar region of space – the Solar System. Faint rings of gas giants loom out of the darkness, dotted with moons, while in the background Webb shows distant galaxies. By comparing detections of water and other molecules in our solar system with those found in the disks of other, much younger planetary systems, Webb is helping to build clues about our own origins – how Earth came to be the ideal place. for life as we know it.
One year later, Webb’s scientific mission is just beginning. The second year of observations has already been selected, with plans to develop an exciting first year that has exceeded expectations.
2023-07-16 07:50:26
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