Today marks one year since the launch of the James Webb telescope. The stargazer made impressive images during his flight. Several discoveries were also made. NU.nl highlights six.
Wat is de James Webb-telescoop?
- De James Webb is gemaakt door de Verenigde Staten, Europa en Canada en werd vorig jaar op Eerste Kerstdag gelanceerd.
- De telescoop is de opvolger van ruimtetelescoop Hubble. De James Webb kan verder kijken en sneller beelden vastleggen.
- Eind januari kwam de telescoop aan op zo’n 1,5 miljoen kilometer van de aarde.
- Daar maakt de telescoop haarscherpe foto’s van het heelal. De telescoop is op zoek naar planeten waar misschien leven mogelijk is, verre sterrenstelsels en sporen van de oerknal.
The first images from the telescope were released in February. They were still blurry, after which the quality was improved. The first razor-sharp images came out in July.
Including an image of the Carina Nebula. It contains a kind of nursery of the universe, where new stars arise.
The James Webb Telescope photographed thousands of previously unknown stars in September. The celestial bodies were seen in the Tarantula Nebula, which is about 170,000 light-years from Earth.
Images include auroras, moons, and planet rings. NASA tweaked the images a bit to bring out the details better.
Even the “Pillars of Creation” have never been captured so sharply. This is a stellar nebula where many new stars are born.
The columns are world famous and are among the most photographed stellar nebulae. Astronomers can now compare images from the James Webb Telescope to all previous images.
In November, another beautiful image from the universe was released. The image shows a kind of hourglass of orange and blue substances being released by a newly formed star, which is located in the center.
The colored clouds are only visible in infrared light and have never been seen before. The James Webb Telescope has now made it possible with its infrared camera.
New discoveries have also been made with the telescope, such as chemical reactions in an exoplanet’s atmosphere. That planet is called WASP-39b and was discovered in 2011 thanks to the WASP project. This is a search program to find planets around other stars.
The exoplanet is a gas giant about the weight of Saturn and the size of Jupiter. Due to the short distance from its star, it is extremely hot on the planet. The temperature in the atmosphere exceeds 900 degrees.
The stargazer also captured the clouds in the atmosphere of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, for the first time. Computer models had already predicted that clouds could exist in the atmosphere of Saturn’s moon, but they had never been observed.
The largest cloud was over Titan’s north polar region, near Kraken Mare. This is the largest known sea of liquid methane on the lunar surface.
