WASHINGTON: The James Webb Space Telescope has more to reveal after revealing the most distinct view of the far-off cosmos to date.
Tuesday’s images will shed light on a distant gas planet’s atmosphere, a “stellar nursery” where stars are created, a “quintet” of galaxies engaged in a dance of close encounters, and the gaseous halo surrounding a dying star.
In a live broadcast from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center outside of Washington, they will be released beginning at 10:30 am Eastern Time (1430 GMT).
Targets include the stellar nursery known as the Carina Nebula, which is noted for its soaring pillars, including “Mystic Mountain,” a three-light-year-tall cosmic pinnacle that was immortalised in a famous Hubble image.
Additionally, Webb has performed spectroscopy on the gas giant planet WASP-96 b, which was found in 2014. Spectroscopy is an analysis of light that provides detailed information.
WASP-96 b is about half the mass of Jupiter and travels in just 3.4 days around its star despite being nearly 1,150 light-years from Earth.
According to NASA, Webb on Monday unveiled the most precise image of the early universe, dating back 13 billion years.
President Joe Biden revealed the stunning image during a White House briefing. It is filled with thousands of galaxies and some of the faintest objects ever seen.
Webb’s First Deep Field is an image of the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 that acts as a gravitational lens to bend light from farther away galaxies towards the observatory in an effect known as cosmic magnification.
In a region of space known as the second Lagrange point, Webb, which was launched in December 2021 from French Guiana on an Ariane 5 rocket, is orbiting the Sun at a distance of one million miles (1.6 million kilometres) from Earth.
Here, it maintains a fixed position in relation to the Earth and Sun and uses little fuel to correct its course.
The project’s estimated $10 billion total cost makes it one of the most expensive scientific platforms ever built, on par with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. It is a marvel of engineering.
In a region of space known as the second Lagrange point, Webb, which was launched in December 2021 from French Guiana on an Ariane 5 rocket, is orbiting the Sun at a distance of one million miles (1.6 million kilometres) from Earth.
Here, it maintains a fixed position in relation to the Earth and Sun and uses little fuel to correct its course.
The project’s estimated $10 billion total cost makes it one of the most expensive scientific platforms ever built, on par with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. It is a marvel of engineering.
